Yiddish

Yiddish took shape among Jewish communities in German-speaking Europe and became the everyday language of Ashkenazi Jewry across a territory that eventually reached from the Rhine to the Dnieper. Its grammar and its commonest words are West Germanic, close enough to German that a German speaker catches much of it, but it is not a dialect of German. Three stocks sit inside one language. The Germanic core supplies the ordinary business of speech. A Hebrew and Aramaic component, called loshn-koydesh, supplies most of the religious, legal and learned vocabulary, and keeps its original spelling rather than being respelled. Centuries of settlement in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine and Belarus added a Slavic layer of words, diminutives and sentence patterns.

It is written right to left in the Hebrew alphabet. The Germanic and Slavic words are spelled phonetically, with several Hebrew consonant letters pressed into service as vowels, so a reader must know which component a word belongs to before knowing how to read it. The YIVO Institute settled a standard orthography in the interwar years, and it is the one used in scholarship, though Hasidic publishing keeps older conventions.

Dialect divides the language east and west. Western Yiddish, spoken in Germany, Alsace and Bohemia, had largely given way to German by the nineteenth century. The eastern dialects, Lithuanian, Polish and Ukrainian in the usual naming, carried the great majority of speakers, and the standard literary language was built from them. The Holocaust destroyed the communities in which most of those speakers lived. What survived did so through emigration and through the Hasidic communities that rebuilt after the war.

Ashkenazi religious life ran on a division of labour between languages, and Yiddish had a defined half of it. The fixed liturgy stayed in Hebrew and Aramaic. So did the legal literature, the responsa and the commentaries. Yiddish did everything else: it explained those texts, taught them to children, preached from them, and told stories about the people who had lived by them.

The verb taytshn means to translate or to gloss, and it names the classroom method by which a boy learned scripture, one Hebrew word at a time answered by its Yiddish equivalent in a fixed chant. The habit produced a whole translation register, wooden and word-for-word, which readers recognised as a language of study rather than of speech.

Out of that register came the best selling Jewish book of Ashkenaz. The Tsene-rene retells the weekly Torah portion in Yiddish with midrash and moral commentary woven in, and it was printed and reprinted from the turn of the seventeenth century onward. It was read at home, especially by women, who were not taught the Hebrew curriculum, and it shaped what most Ashkenazi Jews actually knew of the biblical narrative. Beside it stood the tkhines, supplicatory prayers composed in Yiddish for occasions the fixed liturgy did not cover, many of them written for and some by women.

Hasidism, from the eighteenth century, prayed in Hebrew and preached in Yiddish, and made the Yiddish tale a religious form in its own right. That arrangement has not lapsed. In Hasidic communities today Yiddish is still the language of instruction, of the sermon and of ordinary life, while the prayers are said in the older tongues.