Yiddish Language

Detailed history of the language

The language was born sometime around the 10th century (c.1100) when Jews from northern France and northern Italy settled in the Rhineland. These early Jewish settlements were dislocated by the Crusades and alter by the persecutions that followed in the wake of the Black Death. The subsequent move to Slavic territory had enormous influence on the development of the language.

Scholars divide the history of Yiddish into four periods: Earliest Yiddish to 1250, Old Yiddish 1250-1500, Middle Yiddish 1500-1750, Modern Yiddish 1750- Present. The earliest Yiddish tradition had a Western Yiddish dialectical basis, writing in this literary dialect continued into the Modern Yiddish period long after the major population centres had shifted to the east. The establishment of the modern literary language on an Eastern Yiddish base occurred only in the early 19th century. At the same time a new style in the language of the Yiddish Bible translation emerged, free from the constraints of the original Hebrew syntax and of the stricture against the use of Yiddish words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin in translating from Hebrew. The continuous contact of Yiddish speakers with Hebrew-Aramaic text and, in the European language area, with one or another Germanic or Slavic languages have been important factors in the development of the language.

From its inception, Yiddish was the language of both the marketplace and the sophisticated logical argumentation in the Talmudic academies. Its literary functions continued to grow over the centuries, especially in genres not covered by traditional Hebrew and Aramaic. The rise of Yiddish printing in the 16th century stimulated the development of a standardized literary language on a Western Yiddish model. Owing to its gradual assimilation to German, as well as to a political campaign to stamp out the language waged by adherents of the late 18th century Germanizing movement, Western Yiddish faded into eventual extinction. By the early 19th century, Eastern Yiddish, by contrast blossomed and became the basis for the new literary language. Prompted at first by the Hasidic movement in the 18th and 19th centuries and spurred later by other social, educational, and political movements, Yiddish was carried to all the world's continents by massive migrations from Eastern Europe, extending its traditional role as the Jewish lingua franca. The Yiddishist movement, dedicated to the growth and enhancement of the language, was strengthened by the proliferation of Yiddish belles lettres. Its achievements include the Czernowitz Language Conference of 1908 9 (which proclaimed Yiddish as a national Jewish language ), the orthographic and linguistic reforms introduced by Ber Borokhov in 1913, and the founding of the YIVO (Yiddish Scientific Institute) in Vilna (Vilnius), Lithuania, in 1925 (housed in New York City since 1940).

You can hear Yiddish spoken today in the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic communities in numerous countries and among secular students of Yiddish at leading universities including Columbia University (New York), Hebrew University (Jerusalem), McGill University (Montreal), the University of Oxford, and the University of Paris.

This is a summarized version of histories provided by the following sources:
Britannica Online

"Yiddish Language"
and
"Languages of the World: Indo-European Languages: Germanic Languages: West Germanic:Yiddish"

Reference Library

Some Children's Stories

Background of Yiddish Literature

My Critical Paper

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This page was last updated December 8, 1998 by Jan Fernheimer

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