The story
By the tenth century a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. Its heartland, in the Rhineland and the Palatinate around Mainz, Worms and Speyer, became known as Ashkenaz, and the Jews who lived there developed their own everyday language. The earliest references to it, from the twelfth century, call it the language of Ashkenaz. Linguists still debate exactly where and how it formed, but most agree it began as Jews adopted the local medieval German and made it their own.
Yiddish is a Germanic language, rooted in Middle High German, that is written in the Hebrew alphabet. It fused German with many words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and as Ashkenazi Jews moved eastward into Eastern Europe, it absorbed Slavic vocabulary as well. The oldest surviving Yiddish writing is a blessing in the Worms Machzor, a prayer book, dated 1272. After the printing press arrived, popular books spread widely: Elia Levita's verse romance, the Bovo-Bukh, was first printed in 1541, and a rich literature developed for women, who often read Yiddish rather than Hebrew. The memoirs of Glückel of Hameln are still in print.
By the late nineteenth century Yiddish was the everyday language of millions, and on the eve of the Second World War it had 11 to 13 million speakers. In Eastern Europe it became the backbone of a vibrant secular culture of books, theatre and, later, cinema. Its classic writers are Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Leib Peretz, and Sholem Aleichem's stories of Tevye the Milkman inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof.
In 1978 Isaac Bashevis Singer, who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking neighbourhood of Warsaw and emigrated to New York in 1935, won the Nobel Prize in Literature "for his impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life". He wrote all his works in Yiddish, including about 20 novels and books for children.
The Holocaust devastated the language: around five million of those murdered, 85 percent of the Jews killed, spoke Yiddish. Yet Yiddish survives. It is officially recognised as a minority language in Sweden, the Netherlands and several other countries, and is spoken daily by hundreds of thousands of Hasidic and other Haredi Jews, whose numbers are growing.
Why it matters
Yiddish literature and theatre gave the world enduring stories of ordinary people, humour and resilience, and its words and wit live on in English and other languages.
Sources
- Yiddish Wikipedia
- Isaac Bashevis Singer: Facts NobelPrize.org
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