Yiddish

• 1. A Rhyme From Worms

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  The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a short rhyme tucked into a prayer book for the High Holy Days from the medieval city of Worms. It dates to 1272. The rhyme wishes a good day to whoever carries the book into the synagogue. Everything around it on the page is Hebrew. The rhyme itself is more or less Middle High German, the speech of medieval Germany, written in Hebrew letters. Two Hebrew words sit inside it, one for the prayer book and one for the synagogue. This is Yiddish, a West Germanic language long spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It fused German with Hebrew and Aramaic. Most of its varieties also took in Slavic words, and its vocabulary carries traces of Romance languages. How does a language come together from so many sources? Why did reformers, nationalists and governments each try to bend its fate? And who speaks it today, now that the great crowds who once did are gone?

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• 2. Disputed Origins

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  By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe, and its heartland came to be called Ashkenaz. That heartland centered on Mainz in the Rhineland and on Worms and Speyer in the Palatinate. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi, who died in 1105, Ashkenaz meant Germany, and Ashkenazi meant a Jew settling there. Next door lived the Sephardi Jews, who ranged into southern France.

  Nothing is known for certain about the first language of these communities. One theory points to Aramaic, spoken by Jews in Roman-era Judea and in Mesopotamia. Trade with the large non-Jewish Syrian merchant population of the Roman provinces would have reinforced it. Greek is another clue. Many Jews in Rome and Southern Italy seem to have spoken it, and names such as Kalonymos and the Yiddish Todres still reflect that. Hebrew, by contrast, was a holy language kept for ritual and spiritual life, not everyday talk.

  The established view is that Jews, as elsewhere, learned the local speech and then reshaped it. Here, speakers of Zarphatic, a Judeo-French language, and other Judeo-Romance languages began learning Middle High German. The Ashkenazi community grew from those groups. Max Weinreich pictured Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian, literate in Hebrew or Aramaic, traveling through Southern Europe to the Rhine Valley. They settled in Lotharingia, a region spanning parts of Germany and France that Yiddish later called Loter. There they met Jews who spoke High German and other German dialects. Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum refined the model in the mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, the resulting Old Yiddish later split into Western and Eastern Yiddish.

  Bavaria offers a rival cradle. Some theorists argue that the fusion happened on a Bavarian dialect base. The Rhineland and Bavaria need not conflict, since parallel developments in both regions could have seeded the Western and Eastern dialects. Dovid Katz proposes instead that Yiddish emerged from contact between High German speakers and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. An article in The Forward predicted that a future standard theory will probably draw on Weinreich and his challengers alike.

  In 1991, Paul Wexler proposed something far bolder. He suggested that Eastern Yiddish was not Germanic at all, but a proposed West Slavic language he called Judeo-Sorbian, reshaped by High German. Historical linguists have met the idea with strong criticism and little support. Eastern Yiddish, the branch at the center of Wexler's claim, is far more common today, while Ethnologue classes Western Yiddish as endangered.

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• 3. Mother and Holy Tongues

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  Speakers have long used an affectionate name for Yiddish, mame-loshn, the mother tongue. They set it against loshn koydesh, the holy tongue of Hebrew and Aramaic. The earliest surviving references, from the 12th century, use other names. One is loshn-ashknaz. Another is taytsh, a variant of tiutsch, the contemporary name for Middle High German. The word Yiddish is short for Yidish-Taitsh, meaning Jewish German, and it became the most frequent label in the literature only in the 18th century. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the language was more often called Jewish, especially among non-Jews.

  In the 14th and 15th centuries, Yiddish songs and poems began to appear, along with macaronic pieces that mixed Hebrew and German. Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf collected them in the late 15th century. Jewish writers were also making their own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic of this kind is the Dukus Horant, preserved in the Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. That 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896. It also holds narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.

  The printing press of the 16th century made books cheaper, and some popular titles survive. Elia Levita composed his Bovo-Bukh around 1507-08, and it was printed several times starting in 1541 under the title Bovo d'Antona. Levita is the earliest named Yiddish author. Vidvilt, also called Kinig Artus Hof, retold the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Grafenberg. In 1557, Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei published a paraphrase of the Book of Job.

  Women of the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew, but they read and wrote Yiddish. A literature grew up with women as its main audience. It included secular works such as the Bovo-Bukh, and religious writing made for women, such as the Tseno Ureno and the Tkhines. Glückel of Hameln, one of the best-known early women authors, wrote memoirs that are still in print.

  The divided readership even shaped type. Printers used a semicursive face called vaybertaytsh, meaning women's taytsh, exclusively for Yiddish. Square Hebrew letters were reserved for Hebrew and Aramaic, and that habit lasted in general printing until the early 19th century. A further semicursive face, Rashi script, is still used for rabbinical commentary when Hebrew and Yiddish share a page. It is named for Rashi, whose commentary is usually printed in it, and it is also the usual face when Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.

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• 4. Contempt and Pride

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  Heinrich Graetz, a Prussian-Jewish historian of the 19th century, described the language of Polish Jews as "a ridiculous jargon, a mixture of German, Polish, and Talmudical elements." He added that it was "an unpleasant stammering, rendered still more repulsive by forced attempts at wit." His scorn was typical of its moment.

  It grew out of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which took hold from the late 18th century. A Maskil, one who took part in the movement, wrote about and promoted acclimatization to the outside world. Jewish children began attending secular schools where the language taught was German, not Yiddish. Western Yiddish was sometimes labeled Mauscheldeutsch, or "Moses German," and was seen as a corrupt dialect. Between assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew, it survived only in "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups."

  The old question of whether Yiddish is a real language dates to these decades. Critics have called it a dialect of German, or even "just broken German." In the 1930s, Max Weinreich recorded a remark made by a listener at one of his lectures: "A shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot." It means "A language is a dialect with an army and navy." Virtually all specialists now treat Yiddish as a separate language. For centuries it developed in countries apart from the German-speaking space, and it has its own system of dialects.

  In Eastern Europe, the same pressures pushed the other way. Yiddish became the cohesive force of a secular culture, the Yiddishist movement. Sholem Yankev Abramovitch wrote as Mendele Mocher Sforim. Sholem Rabinovitsh, known as Sholem Aleichem, wrote the stories about Tevye the Milkman that inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. Isaac Leib Peretz was a third leading voice.

  Early in the 20th century, especially after the Socialist October Revolution in Russia, Yiddish was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its literature was published more widely than ever, and Yiddish theatre and cinema were booming. After World War I, educational autonomy for Jews in several countries, notably Poland, brought more Yiddish schooling and a more uniform spelling. In 1925 the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO, was founded. In Vilnius, people debated whether Hebrew or Yiddish should take primacy.

  Michael Wex describes how speakers who moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas quickly dropped Slavic vocabulary. Even the founders of modern Yiddish literature, still living in Slavic countries, revised printed editions of their works to remove "unnecessary" Slavisms. Israeli Yiddish absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and American Yiddish took in English ones. As a result, speakers from Israel and from other countries sometimes struggle to understand each other.

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• 5. Rival to Hebrew

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  In the 1920s and 1930s, a group calling itself the Battalion for the Defence of the Language, in Hebrew gdud maginei hasafa, used rough tactics. Its motto was "Ivri, dabér ivrít," meaning "Hebrew i.e. Jew, speak Hebrew!" Members tore down signs written in foreign languages and disrupted Yiddish theatre gatherings with stink bombs.

  Behind the conflict lay a clash of ideals. Many secular Zionists wanted Hebrew as the only language of Jews, to build one cohesive national identity. Traditionally religious Jews preferred Yiddish, and saw Hebrew as a respected holy language for prayer and study. Among secular Jews worldwide, one camp saw Hebrew and Zionism as the way to define Jewish nationhood, and the other saw Yiddish and Internationalism. In the early 20th century, activists in the Mandate of Palestine tried to make Yiddish socially unacceptable. In 1927, a proposal for a chair in Yiddish at Hebrew University drew protests. The 1922 census of Palestine had counted 1,946 Yiddish speakers, 1,401 of them in the Jerusalem-Jaffa district.

  Linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann argues that the campaign never uprooted Yiddish patterns. In his view, what he calls Israeli holds many Hebrew elements from conscious revival. It also holds many features that survived from the revivalists' mother tongues, such as Yiddish.

  Statehood changed the balance again. A massive wave of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries arrived, and these Mizrahi Jews and their descendants soon made up nearly half of the Jewish population. All knew Hebrew as a liturgical language, but essentially none had any contact with Yiddish. Some of Sephardic origin spoke Judeo-Spanish, and others spoke varieties of Judeo-Arabic. Hebrew became the common denominator.

  Itay Zutra, who teaches Yiddish at the University of Manitoba, says Israel portrayed Yiddish as feminine and unmanly. Writer and critic Shmuel Niger and professor Naomi Seidman argue that the association is older than Zionism. Women were excluded from formal training in Hebrew, so Yiddish was the only Jewish language they could speak, read and write. Yiddish texts and the language as a whole therefore took on feminine traits, even when men wrote and spoke it.

  In 1996, despite that history of marginalization, the Knesset passed a law founding the National Authority for Yiddish Culture. Its aim is to support contemporary Yiddish art and literature and to publish Yiddish classics in Yiddish and in Hebrew translation. Interest is also growing among secular Israelis. Organizations such as YUNG YiDiSH have appeared, and young people take university courses in Yiddish, some reaching considerable fluency. Yiddish theatre there usually comes with simultaneous translation into Hebrew and Russian.

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• 6. The Soviet Experiment

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  Until 1938, the emblem of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic carried the slogan Workers of the world, unite! in Yiddish. During the New Economic Policy of the 1920s, Soviet authorities promoted Yiddish as the language of the Jewish proletariat. They discouraged Hebrew as bourgeois and reactionary. Yiddish also held official status in several agricultural districts of the Galician Soviet Socialist Republic.

  The Evsektsii, the Jewish Communist group, and the Bund, the Jewish Socialist group, pushed hard for Yiddish. Both worked alongside the Bolshevik government. Both backed the Jewish movement toward assimilation, and they saw Yiddish as a step away from the religious side of Judaism and toward its cultural side.

  A public school system built on Yiddish grew up, running from kindergartens through technical schools and university departments. Its roots lay in the Russian Empire, where the government feared that Jewish children were crowding non-Jews out of regular schools and spreading revolutionary ideas. Laws passed in 1914 guaranteed Jews a Jewish education. After the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, more Yiddish schools opened with Bolshevik and Jewish support. The teaching language was Yiddish, but the curriculum was Soviet. The schools were meant to draw Jews into a Soviet education under the guise of a Jewish institution.

  Enrollment fell as families preferred Russian-language schools and as Yiddish schools lost standing among Yiddish-speaking Soviets. General denationalization programs and secularization policies cut enrollment and funding further. Some schools taught in Yiddish into the 1950s, and the last closed in 1951. The language stayed widely spoken for decades in areas with compact Jewish populations, mainly Moldova and Ukraine and, to a lesser extent, Belarus.

  In 1934, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast was formed in the Russian Far East, with its capital at Birobidzhan and Yiddish as its official language. The plan was for the Soviet Jewish population to settle there. Yiddish theaters began opening in the 1970s. The newspaper Birobidzhaner Shtern still carries two to four pages in Yiddish, largely written by authors who live in other cities and countries. The First Birobidzhan International Summer Program for Yiddish Language and Culture began in 2007. Even so, census data counted only 97 Yiddish speakers in the region.

  The 2010 census found 1,683 Yiddish speakers in Russia, roughly 1 percent of the country's Jews. Mikhail Shvydkoy, a former Russian Minister of Culture who is himself of Jewish origin, is blunt about it. In his words, "Yiddish culture is dying and this should be treated with utmost calm." He argues that what remains is memory, and that an artificial culture without replenishment is meaningless.

  Yiddish was an official language of the Ukrainian People's Republic from 1917 to 1921. Today only 3,100 of the remaining Jews in Ukraine speak it as a first language. Its Southeastern dialect carries many Ukrainian loanwords from long contact. In Saint Petersburg in 2004, a periodical called Der Nayer Fraynd, The New Friend, revived an earlier Yiddish journal, Der Fraynd, The Friend.

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• 7. Yiddish Abroad

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  In 1915, the daily Yiddish papers of New York City had a combined circulation of half a million, and 600,000 nationwide. Forverts, The Forward, was one of seven Yiddish dailies in the city. Early Jews in the United States were mostly Sephardic and did not speak Yiddish. That changed from the mid-to-late 19th century, when German Jews and then Central and Eastern European Jews arrived. Yiddish newspapers became a forum for Jews of every European background. Theatre in New York's Yiddish Theatre District and interest in klezmer music kept the language vital. Typical circulation today is a few thousand.

  Isaac Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Memory Yet Green that Yiddish was his first and only spoken language. It stayed so for about two years after he emigrated to the United States as a small child. His younger siblings, born in America, never became fluent. Words from Yiddish passed into New York English, used by Jews and non-Jews alike, often without knowing their origin. Leo Rosten documented many in The Joys of Yiddish. Legal scholars Eugene Volokh and Alex Kozinski argue that Yiddish is supplanting Latin as the spice in American legal argot.

  The 1975 film Hester Street, much of it in Yiddish, was later chosen for the Library of Congress National Film Registry. In 1976, Saul Bellow won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Bellow was fluent in Yiddish and had translated Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Gimpel the Fool" into English. Singer, who wrote in Yiddish, won the same prize in 1978.

  Montreal's daily Der Keneder Adler, The Canadian Eagle, founded by Hirsch Wolofsky, appeared from 1907 to 1988. For the whole first half of the 20th century, Yiddish was the city's third language after French and English. The Monument-National was the center of Yiddish theater from 1896, until the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, now the Segal Centre, was inaugurated on the 24th of September 1967. The Dora Wasserman Yiddish Theatre there remains the only permanent Yiddish theatre in North America. Mordecai Richler, Leonard Cohen and former interim mayor Michael Applebaum all count Yiddish as an immediate ancestral language.

  In London, Di Tsayt, The Time, was a Yiddish daily from the 1910s to the 1950s. Romanian-born Morris Myer founded it and edited it from offices on Whitechapel Road. His son Harry succeeded him after his death in 1943. The United Kingdom now has over 30,000 Yiddish speakers, with the largest group in Stamford Hill in North London. A bilingual Yiddish and English café, Pink Peacock, opened in Glasgow in 2021 and closed in 2023.

  In 1906, South African legislator Morris Alexander won a parliamentary fight to reclassify Yiddish from a Semitic language to a European one. The change let Yiddish speakers immigrate. In Mexico, the poet Isaac Berliner wrote about the life of Mexican Jews. There, Yiddish became a marker of Ashkenazi ethnic identity and a way to build a secular culture.

  The 1992 European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages brought Yiddish recognition in several countries. The Netherlands listed it in 1996 and Sweden in 2000. Romania followed in 2008, Poland in 2009, and Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2010. Sweden's parliament passed its law in June 1999, effective April 2000. Swedish schoolchildren may now study Yiddish as a mother tongue, and public radio and television carry programs in it. Linguist Mikael Parkvall estimated in 2009 that Sweden had 750 to 1,500 native speakers, mostly adults and many elderly.

  Yiddish has also left marks on Cockney in England, on the city dialect of Amsterdam, and to some degree on those of Vienna and Berlin. French argot has taken in some Yiddish words too.

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• 8. Loss and Return

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  On the eve of World War II, Yiddish had 11 to 13 million speakers. Around five million of the roughly six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, 85 percent of them, were Yiddish speakers. The eastern and central European communities, religious and secular, that used Yiddish in daily life were largely destroyed.

  Professor Hannah Pollin-Galay uses the term Khurbn Yiddish for the speech shaped by Yiddish speakers' experience in the Holocaust. Prisoners developed new words and slang, particularly about theft, protest and sexuality.

  Millions of speakers survived the war, including nearly all of those in the Americas. Even so, further assimilation in the United States and the Soviet Union eroded Eastern Yiddish. Aliyah, immigration to Israel, and the shift toward Modern Hebrew among secular Jews sped the change.

  Counts of speakers since then vary widely. Ethnologue estimated 1.5 million speakers of Eastern Yiddish, based on publications through 1991. A 1996 Council of Europe report put the worldwide figure at about two million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University totaled 600,000, made up of 250,000 in the United States, 250,000 in Israel and 100,000 elsewhere. For Western Yiddish, Ethnologue reports an ethnic population of 50,000 in 2000 and an undated speaking population of 5,400, mostly in Germany.

  In 2014, YIVO stated that most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim. Their communities, from Brooklyn to Antwerp, keep it as a home and school language. In Kiryas Joel in New York, nearly 90 percent of residents reported speaking Yiddish at home in the 2000 census. Young children are still taught to translate the Torah into Yiddish, a practice called taytshn. Hasidic rebbes generally speak only Yiddish. The Satmar Hasidim view everyday Hebrew as a form of Zionism, so they use Yiddish almost exclusively. In Israel's Hasidic communities, boys speak more Yiddish among themselves than girls do, since girls learn more secular subjects and meet Hebrew more often.

  Vilnius Yiddish Institute, part of the four-century-old Vilnius University, was the first Yiddish center of higher learning in post-Holocaust Eastern Europe. The scholar Dovid Katz is among its faculty. In Kraków, the Galicia Jewish Museum offers Yiddish classes and song workshops. Sholem Aleichem College, a secular Jewish primary school in Melbourne, was founded in 1975 by the Bund movement in Australia and still teaches Yiddish daily. Learners who struggle to find places to speak the language have one more option, a farm in Goshen, New York, set up for Yiddishists.

  More than eleven thousand Yiddish texts are now online, between a sixth and a quarter of all published works in Yiddish. They come from the work of the Yiddish Book Center, volunteers and the Internet Archive. Google Translate and Google Search accept Yiddish. Motorola added Yiddish keyboard access to its smartphones in late 2016, and Duolingo added a Yiddish course in April 2021. In January 2013, The Forward launched a daily version of its website, with a blog written in contemporary Hasidic dialects.

  In a study of the first half of 2024, the German media association Internationale Medienhilfe found more than 40 printed Yiddish newspapers and magazines worldwide. It said the trend was rising, and it put the number of speakers close to two million.

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