Yiddish

The Yiddish, Yiddish (ייִדיש Yiddish, pron. ['jidiʃ]) or Yiddish (אידיש Yiddish), also known as Judeo-German, is a language belonging to the Ashkenazi Jewish communities of both central and eastern Europe, and their emigrants and descendants in Israel, the American continent and other places in the world. The syntactic base and much of the lexicon of Yiddish comes from High German, but Yiddish also has influences from the Hebrew language and some Slavic languages. Classified as an Alto-Germanic language, the orthography of Yiddish uses the characters of the Hebrew alphabet and the vocalization that characterizes it (known as píntelaj) has unique characteristics. The name of the language comes from High German, where it was originally known as jüdisch-deutsch (Jewish German language).

Yiddish is an ancient language, it developed in both Central and Eastern Europe from the 10th century onwards and has since evolved in each of these regions together with the local languages. Following the emigration of the Jewish population from the aforementioned European regions to the American continent, the devastating effects of the Holocaust, and particularly due to globalization, the Yiddish-speaking population was reduced from 13 million in 1930 to three million people in 2005. ^{[citation required]}

Ultra-Orthodox and some Orthodox Jews use Yiddish daily to communicate with each other, as they consider the ancient Hebrew language to be sacred and should only be used in prayer or Torah study. However, for its writing, Hebrew characters have been used since at least the XIII century, the same ones that appear in the sacred texts of Judaism and used in the writing of modern Hebrew. In this respect, Yiddish follows a common custom of Jewish languages derived from European languages (such as Judeo-Spanish).

Origins

Calligraphic segment in yidis Majzor de Worms, 1272. A majzor is a book of prayers and prayers.

Yiddish dates back to medieval Germany. For several centuries, various European regions received Jewish immigration. Jews assimilated with the population of central and eastern Europe, of Germanic and Slavic origin, formed a group that came to be known as Ashkenazi. For a long time, this group was a minority in relation to the world Jewish population, being concentrated in the central and eastern regions of Europe. In a more recent period, the Ashkenazi population grew and spread throughout the world, thus spreading the Yiddish language.

In order not to lose their cultural and religious identity, the Ashkenazim initially adopted a mixed form of writing, using the characters of the Hebrew language to notate the phonetic description of the language of the region in which they were located. Likewise, some Jewish immigrants wrote Biblical texts in German, Spanish, or French, using the script that was familiar to them.

Over time, the expansion of the Ashkenazi population led to a differentiation of two Yiddish dialects: western (with greater Germanic influence) and eastern (with influence from Slavic languages).

Relationship with Semitic languages

Jewish communities settled in central Europe used three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic and Yiddish. All three had written representation, but only Yiddish could be considered a vernacular language. Perhaps for this reason, Yiddish was initially used in works of a secular nature and for private correspondence. Hebrew was used for community correspondence, biblical commentaries and a whole series of documents. Aramaic was used for the most important texts, including official treatises (especially commentaries on the Talmud) and the Kabbalah. However, the writing of Yiddish resorts to the Hebrew characters. Example:

Yidis	ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה הה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה
Transliteration	Vet hobn gut tog, dy aeyner vas nemt zeyn tfila buk tzu der shul.
Translation	He will have a good day, who takes his book of prayers to the synagogue.

Yiddish alphabet

The word "yidis" written in Hebrew characters (cf.

Lexicon

Most common words are Germanic: מאַמע mame (mother), טאַטע tate (father), ייִנגעלע yingele (child), מײדעלע meydele (girl), but many words come from Hebrew and Aramaic: שבת shabes (Saturday and the Sabbath), אפֿשר efsher (perhaps), מוחל זײַן moykhl zayn (forgive), דירה dire (apartment), חזר khazer (pig).

Traditionally, Yiddish is די מאַמע־לשון di mame-loshn (the mother tongue of the Ashkenazi people) and, in everyday usage, in contrast to לשון־קודש loshn-koydesh (the sacred language, that is, the language of the sacred scriptures of Judaism: Hebrew and Aramaic).

Sayings

Proverbs are one of the hallmarks of Yiddish. The following are just a few examples of popular lore:

• מה מה ה ה ה ה אל ה ה ה ה ה Ein Got azoi fil sonim. - A God and so many enemies.
• מוווה ה ה ה ה ה.ה.ה.ה.ה ה.ה ה ה.ה. ה ה 。 ה 。 ה 。 ה 。 ה 。 。 。 。 。 。. 。 。 。 ה 。 ה 。 。 。 。 — If you can't do what you want, do (then) what (yes) you can.
• אה ה ה ה ה ה ה א ה ה א ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה, ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה,. — Life is nothing but a dream, but do not wake me.
• ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה ה אה Red tzum lomp / tzu de vant . — Talk to a lamp/wall (irony: like she was going to listen to you!).

Songbook and musical expressions

Among the classic expressions of Yiddish culture, the following stand out:

• Chiribim Chiribom — Daniel Pruzansky
• Iánkele — Mordechai Gebirtig
• Ídish Lid — Misha Alexandrovich
• Kinderiohren'' — Bente Kahan
• Main Shtetéle Belz — Talila
• Maine Yiddische Mame — Regine Zylberberg
• Oyfn Pripetchik — Esther Ofarim
• Roménye, Roménye — Aaron Lebedeff
• Tumbalaika — Rika Zarai
• La Cumparsita — Tango rioplatense, tribute with reflections on yidis.
• Bei mir bistu shein (For me you are beautiful) — Max Raabe, yidis with explanations in English
• Di Goldene Pave — A Jewish Odyssey

A considerable part of Yiddish musical production and also its scores are preserved at the American Yale University.

Yiddish and painting

Not a few sayings from Yiddish have found their expression in the visual arts. An artist of enormous inventiveness and creativity, Marc Chagall often captured the humor and spirit of Yiddish culture in his avant-garde imagery. Different aspects of Yiddish culture are also reflected in the work of many other Jewish painters prior to Chagall, who generally cultivated pictorial realism and among whom Isidor Kaufmann, Maurycy Gottlieb and Maurycy Mikowski deserve to be mentioned.

Literature

Much of the Hasidic literature, especially the parables, was written in Yiddish. However, it was not until the 19th century century that a sophisticated secular literature appeared in the language. Yiddish literature of the XIX century had three main exponents: Sholem Aleichem, Yitzjac Leibush Peretz, Mendele Moijer Sforim (seller of books in Hebrew) and Sholem Asch. Other famous Yiddish writers include Zalman Shneour, Chaim Grade, and Isaac Bashevis Singer. The latter received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1978. In Spanish, a selection of his short works is published by Cátedra publishing house: "A friend of Kafka and other stories", as well as the novel "The Moskat family", edited by RBA, which represents a faithful reflection of the way of life and customs of Polish Jews before the Holocaust.

Influence in North America

This language has also contributed to enriching English in the United States. Many American Jews know something of the Yiddish language, and many use it as if it were part of the English language. There are several words and expressions in Yiddish that are frequently used by Jews when they are speaking English. It is more common among older Jews, but even the younger generation knows something of this language because they hear it at home. Yiddish words are heard a lot on TV and in movies, although many viewers don't realize this. Sometimes these words and expressions are used for comic effect in speech. For example, many people say oy vey (אוי װײ, literally "woe, [what] pain", and used to mean "woe is me!& #3. 4;); It is an expression that is used when the person is stressed or surprised or when they hear something that hurts them (equivalent to saying "ay, my God" in Spanish). We also use nosh, which means "to eat". Words such as shikse (שיקסע), meaning a non-Jewish girl and, occasionally, a housemaid, ended up being widely discarded.

Yiddish is also still alive thanks to newspapers such as The Jewish Daily Forward, a newspaper published in New York and which, although today its pages are in English, maintains supplements –and also a version of Internet– in Yiddish. Founded in 1897 by Abraham Cahan, it helped spread the culture carried by the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe in those years of strong migration to the United States.

Languages and history: Yiddish and Hebrew

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Eastern European Jewish community was divided in language. On the one hand, supporters of Zionism, as well as the Tnuot Noar, were trying to "revive" Hebrew as the vernacular and to modernize it so that it was a symbol of the national renaissance that had already begun to take place in the Land of Israel. Since language was then understood as one of the fundamental bases of nationality, such supporters argued that it was necessary to implement a common language for all Jews (and not just Ashkenazim).

On the other hand, the supporters of Bundism (Bund, Jewish social-democratic labor party of Russia, Lithuania and Poland), which at that time was the majority political group among the Jewish masses, raised the need to accompany the international socialist epic with a national cultural construction. Such efforts included spreading Jewish Yiddish theater and literature, as well as promoting its teaching. in contrast to Biblical and Talmudic Hebrew, inherited from the religious tradition and from which they wanted to get rid of. Moreover, the Bundists saw the modernization of the Hebrew language as a strategy of "bourgeois nationalism" of the Zionists.

Orthodox Jewish sectors also supported the promotion of Yiddish, but for reasons very different from the Bund's national cultural and socialist project: religious Jews believed that the Zionist proposal of wanting to use the sacred language (Hebrew) as everyday language was sacrilegious, so many of them rejected it outright.

Favouring secularism and grouped in the Folkspartei, liberals and petty bourgeois also preferred Yiddish, but were opposed to both the Zionist project and the revolutionary intentions of the Bund.

As a result of anti-Semitism in Russia and many regions of Europe, the emigration of a considerable number of European Jews to the eastern Mediterranean, the formulation of Hebrew as the national language of the Israelite people, the murder of two thirds of European Jewry (Shoah) and the subsequent creation of the modern State of Israel, the prospects for Yiddish as a possible national language for the Jewish people reached something of a dead end.

Mass emigration, the murder of two thirds of European Jewish communities during World War II and the policies of repression and acculturation implemented by the Soviets led to an enormous and irreparable loss to the Yiddish language and the different cultural expressions that they were attached to it.

However, historically, and even during the many centuries in which it was not a daily spoken language, the Hebrew language was always a constant factor of cohesion of the people of Israel through the sacred Scriptures for Judaism and unfailingly preserved in Hebrew by all Jewish communities both in Israel and in the Diaspora.

The rise of the State of Israel in 1948, as well as the arrival of numerous waves of Jews from Israelite communities around the world, particularly from Islamic and Eastern countries, led to the official adoption of the historical language of the people of Israel: Hebrew then acquired the status of the national language of Israel.

Between 1870 and 1945, Yiddish was a transmigratory European language, used by those Jews who emigrated to the American continent but only for a few decades and until they integrated into the new societies that had received them. Those who survived the Shoah in many cases they also emigrated and later adopted the languages of the countries where they were received; although in some cases they kept the Yiddish with nostalgia, as a memory of a destroyed world. Today, Yiddish survives among Orthodox Jewish groups, who still use it to preserve the "sanctity" of the Hebrew language, to which they only resort in their prayers and liturgy. Both in Tel Aviv and in Europe there has been a renewed interest in Yiddish, highlighting the fact that it does not only occur among Jewish groups.

Yiddishkayt

In Yiddish, the term Yiddishkayt (ייִדישקייט — lit. 'Judaicity'; a term whose closest expression would be "life and culture Yiddish") refers to both being a Jew and one's way of life. When used by observant Ashkenazi Jews, it usually means "Judaism". But it is also used to describe the habits and customs of European and American Ashkenazi Jews, both religious and secular.

Before the Haskalah and the emancipation of the Jews, fundamental for the Yiddishkayt were the study of the Torah and the Talmud, in the case of men; and the family together with community life, both governed by respect for Jewish Law, both for men and women. Among observant Eastern European Jews, the term designates this latter meaning in particular. With secularization, Yiddishkayt has come to encompass not only traditional Jewish religious practice, but also a wide range of activities in which lay members of Jewish communities participate, including cultural movements and ideologies, but without leaving aside their Jewish identity and belonging and identification with the Jewish people; To this must also be added ways of speaking and humor, these being ruled by the cultural association and level of education. In this sense, and as expressed by contemporary Orthodox Jews, Yiddishkayt is a word analogous to "Orthodoxy" and "Observance" (of Halacha), but perhaps it suggests an emotional attachment and a feeling of identification with the Jewish People even more than a commitment to carry out a way of life based solely on compliance with the precepts that emanate from the Torah.

Yiddish dialects

Western Yidis.East Yidis. Segmented lines establish areas with differences of cadence or intonation.

• There are two main dialectal branches of the yidis: Western and eastern. However, both branches of the yidis are the two known alternatively as Jewish.
• The Western originated in Germany and extended through the Netherlands, Switzerland, Alsace (France), Czechoslovakia and western Hungary. The western yidis is spoken by 50 000 people. The intergenerational transmission of the western yidis is now problematic and is in the process of rupture, but the language is still used, so the efforts to revitalize the language could transmit it to the next generation and restore it as domestic language.
• The eastern Ukraine, Romania, Poland, the eastern part of Hungary, Lithuania and Belarus. The eastern yidis is spoken by 1 505 030 people. The yidis oriental has the language status at the educational level: it is a language still vigorously employed, provided with standardization and literature, sustained and disseminated through an institutionalized educational system, even beyond domestic and community use.
• Both the eastern like Western They are spoken languages in Israel, possessing institutionalized educational status there and also forming part of the cultural heritage of the Jewish people.