An Introduction to Yiddish

Yiddish originated in Germany, but was eventually spoken by Jews all over Europe.

By Andrew Dalby

Reprinted from Dictionary of Languages with the permission of Columbia University Press.

Yiddish is one of the Germanic languages--a language closely related to German, spoken by Jews. The Yiddish language and its culture have suffered more than any other from 20th‑century barbarism. About three‑quarters of its speakers, well over five million people, were killed in German‑occupied Europe between about 1940 and 1945.

The Origins of Yiddish

How do we explain Yiddish as a separate, German‑like language spoken over the same territory where German is spoken?

The origin of Yiddish can be traced to the Rhineland cities of Germany in the early Middle Ages--for Yiddish shows clear links to the old German dialects of the middle Rhine. From their ancient settlements here, German‑speaking Jews gradually spread eastwards and south‑eastwards, beginning as early as the 10th century, across a vast area of central Europe.

It has been supposed that Jews in medieval Germany initially spoke German no different from that of other inhabitants, and that Yiddish gradually became a distinct language because of the separateness, partly compulsory, of Jewish communities in medieval German cities; because of their independent culture and religion, rooted in their religious languages, Hebrew and Aramaic; and also because, as they spread eastward across central Europe and into Russia, and as they began to leave Germany itself, Yiddish speakers were eventually no longer surrounded by German speakers.

It is not entirely a false picture: But the origins of Yiddish are more complex, and older, than this. The Jewish communities of the Rhineland were, in the 10th‑century context, part of a culture region extending not eastward into Germany but westward across most of France; thus medieval French, as well as Aramaic, Hebrew and medieval German, had its part in earliest Yiddish, which has been aptly described (by Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish language, 1980) as a "fusion language."

Some German words in Hebrew script are found in 12th‑century Jewish manuscripts, but the first real texts in a language that can be identified as Yiddish date from the 14th century.

By the 18th century, Yiddish‑speaking Jewish settlements, most of them in cities, existed from eastern France and north Italy eastward as far as the Baltic states, Ukraine, Moldavia, and the Crimea. The majority, probably, was in the largely German‑speaking Holy Roman Empire and Austrian Empire, but a considerable minority was to be found living under various governments to the east. Major cities of Yiddish‑speaking settlement included Krakow, Wroclaw, Warsaw, Vilnius, Lvov, Chernovtsy, Odessa, and Kiev.

Jews had not been allowed to settle in the Russian Empire: However, as Russia annexed Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, eastern Poland, and the Khanate of the Crimea, mostly in the 18th century, it also annexed a large number of Jewish citizens. By the beginning of the 20th century they numbered over five million. Nearly all of these were speakers of Yiddish, and most of them lived in separate communities, in urban ghettos and rural shtetls.

The Yiddish‑speaking population of Belorussia was particularly large: Later, in Soviet times, the Belorussian coat of arms would bear the words "Proletarians of all countries, unite!" in Belorussian, Russian, Polish, and Yiddish. Even in the 1990s, there are Yiddish radio broadcasts in independent Belarus.

The Diaspora of the 19th and 20th Centuries

In the 19th century, a westward migration gathered pace, speeded by increases in anti‑Jewish activity. Preferred destinations were western Europe, the United States, Argentina, and other Latin American countries. Already by 1900, the United States could be regarded as the center of Yiddish and its culture. There was, and still is, a very large Yiddish‑speaking population in New York.

The East End of London--Aldgate, Whitechapel, Spitalfields--was another major Yiddish‑speaking community. In the early 20th century, migration to Israel became an option, one that has continued to attract large numbers of Yiddish speakers.

Meanwhile, toward the end of the 19th century there was a growing awareness of Yiddish as a language. The first World Congress of Yiddish was held in Czernowitz in 1908.

Most of the German and central European speakers of Yiddish who had not emigrated were killed in the early 1940s. Very few indeed are now to be found in Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, or Hungary.

Most remaining Belorussian, Ukrainian, and Lithuanian Jews were also killed during the German occupation of eastern Europe. Of the surviving Jews of the Soviet Union, whose numbers gradually declined through emigration and assimilation, only about a sixth declared their first language as Yiddish in the 1979 census. There are now perhaps 80,000 speakers in Russia, 80,000 in Ukraine, and 10,000 in Belarus. The "Jewish Autonomous Region" of Birobijan, established in eastern Siberia in 1934, has only about 7,000 Jewish inhabitants--though much higher estimates have been published.

Since the Second World War, the general role of Yiddish has been as the mother tongue of refugees from Jewish communities all over eastern Europe. But in this role it will not survive long. Yiddish is generally heavily discouraged in Jewish education, which favors linguistic and cultural assimilation--to Hebrew in Israel, to national languages elsewhere.

But Yiddish has a special importance as the language of fundamentalist communities of Ashkenazi Jews of eastern European origin, concentrated in New York and Israel. Their children are still brought up with Yiddish as their mother tongue, and modern Hebrew is avoided. For this community, Hebrew is the language of religious texts but Yiddish is the language of exposition and of festivity.

Linguistic Characteristics

Yiddish is almost purely German in its structure. Its vocabulary comes largely from German but also from the other languages spoken by Jews. From Hebrew come numerous terms for religious concepts and tradition. Other loans are drawn from Aramaic, from medieval French, Provencal, and Italian, and from the Slavonic languages. Modern Yiddish is rich in English and Russian loanwords. In return, colloquial English borrows freely from Yiddish: kosher, schmaltz.

Yiddish is traditionally written in Hebrew script--the feature that most obviously distinguishes it from its close relative, German. A new standardized orthography was agreed in 1937. The vowels are written fully in native German words, while loanwords from Hebrew are written with their usual Hebrew spelling in which most vowels are unmarked. A now‑standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet, based on the Lithuanian pronunciation of Yiddish, is quite often used.

Yiddish must be seen now as a threatened language. It retains official status in Russia and Belarus, but has none in Israel. As linguistic assimilation proceeds it is likely to give way to Hebrew there, to Spanish in Argentina, and to English in the United States.

Andrew Dalby is a linguist and historian; the languages in his repertoire include Sanskrit, Pali, French, Latin, Greek, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, German, and Burmese. He is the author of Language in Danger.