Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic.
Not really true. It's a fusion of Germanic, Slavic (and today English and Dutch) with Hebrew and Aramaic. One thing that's amazing about Yiddish is the ability to shift from a secular to sacred level within the same language. The language and the culture is a tension between the two, and the writing of Yiddish expresses this by the fact that it reserves a whole set of letters only for religious words.
[Edited to add]: And its Hebrew words are not "forced into it". It's the language of Ashkenazi Jewry who used Hebrew and Aramaic in their day-to-day life too.
There's a Yiddish joke that illustrates the extent that Yiddish has a borrowed vocabulary.
A Rabbi is at an event with the Kaiser. The Kaiser says to him 'Sprichst du Deutsch' - 'do you speak German?'.
The Rabbi replies confidently 'avadah, iz doch unserer mama loshon' - 'certainly, it's our mother tongue'.
The joke being that 'avadah' (certainly) is Aramaic, and 'loshon' (tongue) is Hebrew, so all the Kaiser would understand is 'gibberish our mother gibberish'.
Semitic languages have a root and pattern system which is central to the language and does not exist in Yiddish, that's why it's "forced". The Aramaic is of course a central connecting element in all these languages, including Arabic.
To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively.
It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue.
It’s not just the language barrier of course, but secularization, education etc.
The term “ashkenazi” refers to tradition (reading of the Bible in, customs etc.) but they’re still two different groups, and even more so when you speak about Hasidim.
In Israel at least they’re still uneducated and very poor (living of donations, subsidies, not sharing civil burdens etc.) very much like they lived in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine...) in the Russian empire until the early 20th century.
Yiddish is at least as divergent from Hochdeutsch as Platt or Dutch. It has significant Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and Lithuanian derived vocabulary and the word order is significantly influenced by Slavic languages. It’s pretty easy to learn if you speak German but so is Danish.
Ashkenaz is not just a tradition, it’s an ethnic grouping, even if Galicians and Litvaks are historical sub groups.
Hasidim are not uneducated. They’re highly educated in something you do not, it seems, value, Jewish religious law. They do not live in a manner like they did in the Pale of Settlement. They’re much less economically active and far more integrated into the political community.
It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue.
I personally wouldn't take my source of knowledge about Yiddish from father of the movement whose whole ambition was to abandon the Yiddish world.
To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively.
Sorry but this is plain wrong again. A fusion language of German and Judeo-Semitic languages emerged from around the region of Germany at some point, the earliest writings of which are dated about a thousand years ago. This language spread and came to be known as Yiddish. The 18C Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Moses Mendelsohn in particular derided this Germanic 'jargon'. Where the Haskalah spread in Central and Western Europe, Ashkenazi Jews abandoned Yiddish for the major languages of their hosts - eg High German, French. In the east, especially Poland, where Jews tended to be much poorer and derided by the rich Jews to their west as 'Ostjuden', Yiddish remained the language of Ashkenazi Jewish community. and so it was until the Khurbn (Holocaust/Shoah), Stalin's post-War liquidation of Yiddish intellectuals and the State of Israel's only recently relaxed hostility to the language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to America eventually felt the need to abandon the language too. And that's how a language almost died.
Except it didn't, because religious (Haredi) Jews, who represented a small minority of Jews pre-WWII, had too much at stake in Yiddish - commentaries, writings, the Tzenereneh, teachings - and didn't feel the same need to assimilate as secular Jews. So today the vast majority of Yiddish speakers across the world come from the religious tradition, including the one Israel.
Ashkenazi is associated with German, secular Jews, emancipated and mostly assimilated already by the end of the 19th century.
Eastern-Europeans are neither of that and BTW, using religious study as "education" is misleading.
In the modern world Hasidim and Haredim are not very different from the Taliban (including their objection to education of girls). There are exceptions of course, but the general attitude is very hostile to the idea of modernity in every aspect.
Before you talk about "terroism" and the Taliban, allow me to remind you that Eastern-European Jews are very central to the fascist "revival" in Israel (some of their "leaders" are imports from the USA and Russia)... from Meir Khanh in the 80s, to Baruch Goldstein and the horribleness of whatever is growing in the Settlements in the occupied territories these days.
Oy gevalt this escalated fast. I thought this was about typing in a language called Yiddish, and you're bringing the discussion to Kahan and Goldstein? Can you imagine if this was an article about typing in Pashtun and someone escalated it to talk about the Taliban? At the very least it's not very HN is it? (Ahem, moderators?)
My friend, I appreciate that from Israel you might identify Yiddish with Haredim (religious Jews) because they're the main ones who speak it in your country anymore, but what I am trying to say is that Yiddish != Haredim. Yiddish is a language and a culture that is a millenia old. It exceeds anything you might find in Mea Sharim. Clearly you are secular and anti-religious but stop projecting that onto Ashkenazi culture as a whole.
Here are some secular Yiddish things in Israel you might want to get check out.
Given their weird insistence that European-descended secular Israelis are not Ashkenazi, I strongly doubt that this person is from Israel. Their political and ethnic vocabulary is totally divorced from Israeli discourse.
The European components (called, in Israeli discource, Ashkenazi) of the secular Israeli mainstream overwhelmingly trace their roots to Eastern Europe; Ben Gurion was born in Poland, Dayan's parents were from Ukraine, and the fathers of both Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu were born in Poland.
As Eastern European Jews secularized, many of them began to use non-Jewish languages for secular literature, while others (notably the more nationalist or socialist ones, e.g. the Bund or the Folkists) began using Yiddish as a secular language. However, those who went to Israel used Hebrew for these purposes, and those who stayed in Europe were killed.
Generally, it sounds like you're working under the misconception that the ultra-Orthodox and National Religious [1] are ethnically different from European-descended secular Israelis. They are not. They are distinguished by the ideological leanings of their grandparents in the early-20th-century, after which point individuals moving between the blocs became less and less frequent (though not unheard of).
[1] Very different groups, by the way - the National Religious uniformly speak Hebrew, and are most of the religious people in the settlements you're talking about.
Comments
Not really true. It's a fusion of Germanic, Slavic (and today English and Dutch) with Hebrew and Aramaic. One thing that's amazing about Yiddish is the ability to shift from a secular to sacred level within the same language. The language and the culture is a tension between the two, and the writing of Yiddish expresses this by the fact that it reserves a whole set of letters only for religious words.
[Edited to add]: And its Hebrew words are not "forced into it". It's the language of Ashkenazi Jewry who used Hebrew and Aramaic in their day-to-day life too.
There's a Yiddish joke that illustrates the extent that Yiddish has a borrowed vocabulary.
A Rabbi is at an event with the Kaiser. The Kaiser says to him 'Sprichst du Deutsch' - 'do you speak German?'.
The Rabbi replies confidently 'avadah, iz doch unserer mama loshon' - 'certainly, it's our mother tongue'.
The joke being that 'avadah' (certainly) is Aramaic, and 'loshon' (tongue) is Hebrew, so all the Kaiser would understand is 'gibberish our mother gibberish'.
Semitic languages have a root and pattern system which is central to the language and does not exist in Yiddish, that's why it's "forced". The Aramaic is of course a central connecting element in all these languages, including Arabic.
Loanwords Are A Normal Thing In Languages.
To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively.
It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue.
It’s not just the language barrier of course, but secularization, education etc.
The term “ashkenazi” refers to tradition (reading of the Bible in, customs etc.) but they’re still two different groups, and even more so when you speak about Hasidim.
In Israel at least they’re still uneducated and very poor (living of donations, subsidies, not sharing civil burdens etc.) very much like they lived in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine...) in the Russian empire until the early 20th century.
Yiddish is at least as divergent from Hochdeutsch as Platt or Dutch. It has significant Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and Lithuanian derived vocabulary and the word order is significantly influenced by Slavic languages. It’s pretty easy to learn if you speak German but so is Danish.
Ashkenaz is not just a tradition, it’s an ethnic grouping, even if Galicians and Litvaks are historical sub groups.
Hasidim are not uneducated. They’re highly educated in something you do not, it seems, value, Jewish religious law. They do not live in a manner like they did in the Pale of Settlement. They’re much less economically active and far more integrated into the political community.
I personally wouldn't take my source of knowledge about Yiddish from father of the movement whose whole ambition was to abandon the Yiddish world.
Sorry but this is plain wrong again. A fusion language of German and Judeo-Semitic languages emerged from around the region of Germany at some point, the earliest writings of which are dated about a thousand years ago. This language spread and came to be known as Yiddish. The 18C Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Moses Mendelsohn in particular derided this Germanic 'jargon'. Where the Haskalah spread in Central and Western Europe, Ashkenazi Jews abandoned Yiddish for the major languages of their hosts - eg High German, French. In the east, especially Poland, where Jews tended to be much poorer and derided by the rich Jews to their west as 'Ostjuden', Yiddish remained the language of Ashkenazi Jewish community. and so it was until the Khurbn (Holocaust/Shoah), Stalin's post-War liquidation of Yiddish intellectuals and the State of Israel's only recently relaxed hostility to the language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to America eventually felt the need to abandon the language too. And that's how a language almost died.
Except it didn't, because religious (Haredi) Jews, who represented a small minority of Jews pre-WWII, had too much at stake in Yiddish - commentaries, writings, the Tzenereneh, teachings - and didn't feel the same need to assimilate as secular Jews. So today the vast majority of Yiddish speakers across the world come from the religious tradition, including the one Israel.
Eastern-European, not Ashkenazi.
Ashkenazi is associated with German, secular Jews, emancipated and mostly assimilated already by the end of the 19th century.
Eastern-Europeans are neither of that and BTW, using religious study as "education" is misleading.
In the modern world Hasidim and Haredim are not very different from the Taliban (including their objection to education of girls). There are exceptions of course, but the general attitude is very hostile to the idea of modernity in every aspect.
Before you talk about "terroism" and the Taliban, allow me to remind you that Eastern-European Jews are very central to the fascist "revival" in Israel (some of their "leaders" are imports from the USA and Russia)... from Meir Khanh in the 80s, to Baruch Goldstein and the horribleness of whatever is growing in the Settlements in the occupied territories these days.
Oy gevalt this escalated fast. I thought this was about typing in a language called Yiddish, and you're bringing the discussion to Kahan and Goldstein? Can you imagine if this was an article about typing in Pashtun and someone escalated it to talk about the Taliban? At the very least it's not very HN is it? (Ahem, moderators?)
My friend, I appreciate that from Israel you might identify Yiddish with Haredim (religious Jews) because they're the main ones who speak it in your country anymore, but what I am trying to say is that Yiddish != Haredim. Yiddish is a language and a culture that is a millenia old. It exceeds anything you might find in Mea Sharim. Clearly you are secular and anti-religious but stop projecting that onto Ashkenazi culture as a whole.
Here are some secular Yiddish things in Israel you might want to get check out.
https://international.tau.ac.il/Yiddish_Summer_Program
http://yiddish.co.il/en/about/
https://www.facebook.com/oydivision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bE6uhKxmYU
Now quit being a nudnik and a nar and let me work on the keyboard. Onyva!
Given their weird insistence that European-descended secular Israelis are not Ashkenazi, I strongly doubt that this person is from Israel. Their political and ethnic vocabulary is totally divorced from Israeli discourse.
That's... not what Ashkenazi means at all.
The European components (called, in Israeli discource, Ashkenazi) of the secular Israeli mainstream overwhelmingly trace their roots to Eastern Europe; Ben Gurion was born in Poland, Dayan's parents were from Ukraine, and the fathers of both Tzipi Livni and Bibi Netanyahu were born in Poland.
As Eastern European Jews secularized, many of them began to use non-Jewish languages for secular literature, while others (notably the more nationalist or socialist ones, e.g. the Bund or the Folkists) began using Yiddish as a secular language. However, those who went to Israel used Hebrew for these purposes, and those who stayed in Europe were killed.
Generally, it sounds like you're working under the misconception that the ultra-Orthodox and National Religious [1] are ethnically different from European-descended secular Israelis. They are not. They are distinguished by the ideological leanings of their grandparents in the early-20th-century, after which point individuals moving between the blocs became less and less frequent (though not unheard of).
[1] Very different groups, by the way - the National Religious uniformly speak Hebrew, and are most of the religious people in the settlements you're talking about.