I speak native English, fluent German and beginning Dutch. A few years ago I picked up a Yiddish primer. In my layman's eyes, Yiddish is indisputably a Germanic language. Learning it was like learning to read German backwards in Hebrew letters. I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic. And yet...
> I understand why Yiddish speakers would not want to believe Yiddish is Germanic.
I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic. This is a recurring theme in Ashkenazi literature: Yiddish is understood to be the מאַמע־לשין -- the mother tongue, essentially grounded and practical, in contrast with Hebrew.
(Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however. Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones.)
> I don't think there's any controversy among Yiddish speakers that Yiddish is primarily Germanic.
Ah, we had one Yiddish speaker in r/germany who ragequit after it was pointed out to him that Yiddish basically just sounds like an Eastern-European dialect of German to native speakers, with a number of Hebrew words thrown in, and German native speakers usually can understand it after being exposed to it for some time (like for all dialects, you need to adjust your hearing).
> Yiddish speakers might find the (non-joking) assertion that Yiddish is just broken German offensive, however.
Well, it's definitely not "broken" German, it follows the same pattern as other German dialects with influences from other languages. Phonetic shift plus imported words.
> Or similarly, that Yiddish's non-German components are somehow less desirable than its German ones
German has quite a number of words of Hebrew origin [1], and nobody finds them offensive, or somehow not desirable.
It’s mostly about diminution: Czech and Slovak are mutually intelligible, but describing one as a dialect of the other is likely to cause offense. This is particularly salient in the case of Yiddish, where relabeling as a dialect distorts the historical relationship between European Jewry and Europe.
(I don’t know anything about the commenter you’re referring to, but I suspect I would be mildly annoyed by a forum of Germans insisting that my family’s mostly dead language was “just a dialect“ of their language. Which is distinct from the unobjectionable claim that Yiddish is a Germanic language.)
The Weinstein witticism has already been posted once in this thread: a sprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot :-)
Would it be crazy to call Judaism in 1920s Germany basically like a German subculture of people who are ethnically German and speak a variation of the language? I’ve met so many other Jews (that fled Germany originally) that to me are basically German (even have German last names).
It would be ahistorical, at least: many of the Jews in 1920s Germany had fled pogroms in Ukraine and Russia just 20 or 30 years prior. Many were not particularly integrated, and only spoke Eastern Yiddish dialects.
(The Jews who were already in Germany prior were much more assimilated and less religious than their Eastern counterparts, which is why they often have more Germanic names. This appears in other forms across European Jewry, e.g. Litvaks, being more Western, typically being less religious and more assimilated than the Galitzianers.)
Ashkenazi Jews are not ethnically German. Genetic studies estimate them to be roughly 45% Levantine, 45% Southern European, and 10% Slavic. Germans are 100% North-Western European.
It looks like there's a mixed consensus on ancestry, but a fair bit of evidence they at least intermixed with European locals since prehistoric times [0]
To be clear, that paper is not arguing Jewish ethnic groups were intermixing with European locals since prehistoric times, it is arguing that the Ashkenazi Jews (or perhaps it would be better to say: the proto-Asheknazi Jews) assimilated lots of European converts with ancestry in Europe dating back to prehistoric times.
How do estimates of genetic origin relate to ethnic affiliation? Ethnicity is about culture, customs, and language, not genetics.
As far as genetics go, it's worth pointing out that there's a bit of question begging involved in identifying specific genetics with regional cultural groups in the first place.
Genetics are a poor proxy for ethnicity. There are many who would even refer to the use of blood quantum (e.g. 23-and-me) to determine ethnicity as a form of race (pseudo)science.
I’m curious how they assign percentage to geographic location. For me it fails the sniff tests. Like how far back do you pick your line of ancestry (which has migrated all over the world) when you say stop and determine, this is the place 20% of my bloodline is from?
I imagine they do some sort of cluster analysis to find correlation along with self-identification. If so, then this is undeniably junk science based on junk-in junk-out statistical models (which is often the case with cluster-analysis).
I’m simply curious here, cluster analysis is the only method I can think of (other than guessing/categorizing arbitrarily).
I don’t think the ancestry tests compare the DNA with archeological finds. If they did I wouldn’t trust it given the relatively small sample size of archeological finds with intact DNA.
I thought those were done to investigate migratory patterns, movements, and inter-connectivity of historic populations, not to establish ancestral lineage of living population, and certainly not to assign a geographical region to existing ethnic groups.
Yeah I think it's clustering and dimensionality reduction. E.g. if French people form a rough cluster in DNA space and Japanese people form another cluster, someone with a French mom and Japanese dad would show up as a data point roughly halfway between those two clusters.
I went on a little Wikipedia expedition hoping to find the methodology (and failed), but I did find an interesting (though not surprising) quote from one scientist (Adam Rutherford): “[These tests] don’t necessarily show your geographical origins in the past. They show with whom you have common ancestry today.”
So when our thread’s ancestor (pun unfortunate) says “45% Levantine” they mean they 45% of people alive today that are from that region (which includes many European immigrants). I bet this gets very messy given immigration patterns. Like which immigrants count as ancestry sample, and which don’t? For this problem I would personally use cluster analyses, however I would probably simply give up, knowing that cluster analysis would give me junk (and ultimately arbitrary) results with such noisy (and potentially skewed) data.
EDIT: The answer was right there next to this quote, in one of the aside picture for the same article[1]. They use Principal Component Analysis. Which IMO is even more fraught than cluster analysis, as you have even more control over what you want to get out of the model. If I remember correctly PCA—along with factor analyses—is used heavily in personality psychology and intelligence testing, the latter of which is very famous for radicalized pseudo science.
My understanding of ethnicity on a genetic level is basically that it's the degree of relatedness above "clan", e.g., you have something of a hierarchy from: individual > family > clan > ethnicity. What's the issue with declaring some sufficiently high degree of relatedness ethnicity? Or is relatedness that diffuse not measurable?
It is not that genetic simmilarity is inherently meaninglessness. Just that it is not a good proxy for the social concepts people are generally using it to talk about.
The amount of assimilation was not homogeneous anywhere in Europe. In urban environments, some Jewish families were highly assimilated, and there was a great deal of interaction between Jewish people and Gentiles. If these dynamics are interesting to you, you might want to read about the haskalah:
Out in the stetls (in rural towns), there was far less assimilation (although a lot of interaction). For example, in Poland prior to WW2, Jewish society was almost a parallel world. Polish Jews had their own religious institutions, shops, and, at various times, a parallel government. For centuries, Poland was like two separate worlds that inhabited the same physical space.
It's really too bad that it ended. I grieve for something I never even knew.
Or more likely Prussian, or some other pre-modern political identity. I had the chance to visit a museum outlining the history of the German region and it was a shock to me, even coming from a background as a student of ancient China, how many iterations of how many petty polities existed in this area. Mind boggling. My takeaway: the modern 'nation state' cultural notion is a poor ally in examining the history of the region of modern Germany and its surroundings prior to the 20th century. Shifting alliances of nominally independent city-states combined with evidence toward enthusiastic adoption of distributed printing and popular literacy could be argued to underpin some of the more positive ideals of the EU today, despite the negative interludes.
Yes, it's a relatively late concept, but one could rationally argue it's objectively more correct than 'German' in default modern interpretation, both spatially in that it additionally encompasses what is now western Poland, and temporally in that it is closer to the timeframe in question. As for identity, this can be argued until the cows come home, but many Jews served in the Prussian army (google suggests 100,000-150,000) and you don't put your life on the line without some sense of connection. Little did they know their families would soon be killed by the successor of the very state they had fought to protect.
Prussia was a state that included plenty of culturally in no way Prussian territories in the 1800s.
Calling someone from Cologne Prussian was about as silly as claiming that Belgian Walloons were Dutch prior to 1830. Most people who lived in the Kingdom of Prussia in the early 1900s weren’t really Prussian in most senses.
There was a large population of Jews in Berlin but most of the remaining ones lived in the Rhineland, Westphalia etc.
My dad learned Yiddish in his family home, both parents were immigrants and native speakers, though he never spoke it. But he loved to watch WWII movies, and would translate the German dialog for us and sometimes correct the subtitles.
I saw the film A Serious Man[0] at a cinema in Amsterdam when it came out. There's an opening scene with Yiddisch dialogue and it had no subtitles but judging from the laughs everyone understood it.
I‘m a run-of-the-mill West German dude with no particular talent for languages, and second this. It’s somewhere between “normal” German and Dutch in terms of understandibility for me.
I'm guessing the reason why is that the Jews migrated northwards from the Levantine / Africa / Spain upwards through Italy, Austria and then Germany, Poland, the Baltics.
Are there any Italian or Piedmontese / Venetian traces in Yiddish?
A lot of words and expressions in the old Viennese dialect are Yiddish, though that dialect has all but disappeared from day to day interactions (you can find it in old movies and recordings).
Close your eyes, hear an Israeli speak English and then a German and the only difference you will notice is the same intonational difference between standard German and Yiddish. Other than that, they basically will have the same accent.
Is there a regional aspect to it? I have been listening to a lot of Yiddish/Russian music lately and people say that there are a lot of Russian loan words and it is hard to understand for non-Russian Yiddish speakers.
Yep -- Eastern and Western Yiddish are mutually intelligible, but have substantially different accents and word choices. Most people speaking Yiddish today speak an Eastern dialect.
In theory sure. I think in practice it is very common that a Hindi or Urdu speaker will talk to someone else speaking "the other language" and not even realize it.
We spent several years in a francophone ski station that attracted a fair number of Haredi tourists. My wife and I had several brief convos with them, and I'm sure from their side they were in yiddish, while from ours they were in german.
My favourite anecdote from this period was when my wife crossed a family on the trail at the lake, and one of the kids asked a question of the father about "the lady", as if she couldn't understand, and they were all surprised when she answered "sure, sure". ("doch, doch", written left-to-right, from her point of view; "dokh, dokh", written right-to-left in a different script, from theirs)
I wasn't trying to be pedantic :) The OP's claim was that they are essentially the same language. My point was that while they are mutually intelligible to a large extent, Hindi and Urdu are distinct languages. That was pretty much it.
Yiddish follows the same pattern as other Jewish languages, ie. starting out as a sociolect of the local language with additional Hebraic vocabulary for subject matters specific to Jews.
It doesn't seem any less German than say Austro-Bavarian.
In any case I've heard from the mouths of Yiddish-speaking Polish Jews who had been through the Nazi concentrationary system that they in some respects had an easier navigating it than Western or Greek Jews because they spoke "more or less German".
Yiddish speakers today are mostly ultra-orthodox Jews. The language binds them together across country boundaries, and cuts them off from the surrounding society. Even in Israel, which runs on Hebrew.
This is recently relevant as the Israeli Supreme Court recently ruled that the draft exemption for the ultra-orthodox must end.[2] Many will speak only Yiddish. The IDF has a crash one month course in Hebrew for foreign Jews who want to join and some other ethnic groups, so they will cope. Israel nominally has compulsory military service, but the ultra-orthodox have been exempted so they can supposedly study Torah. When that started in the 1940s, only 4,000 were in that status. Now it's 1.4 million. There's currently political unrest in Israel over this.
Some speak perfect conversational Hebrew in a standard Israeli accent but switch to an Ashenazi/Yiddish accent in biblical or liturgical contexts. Pretty cool actually.
From my understanding, the Jewish European languages, including Yiddish and Ladino (judeo-spanish) have a short of frozen in time quality.
I know more about Ladino because I know Spanish and am always interested in romance languages. Many (though by no means all) of the differences between that and modern Castilian are that Ladino has not kept current with Spanish phonetic changes from the 1500s onwards. I believe I've also read Yiddish has a similar quality of seeming, from a distance, like it has some characteristics that might have been seen among German speaking gentiles in prior times.
I think that when you see separations of populations, you sometimes see the preservation of "archaic" language features.
Luther was a major force on the standardization of (school) German, wasn't he? It makes sense to me that his influence would have bypassed Yiddish. I take it to be mostly a variant of old regional German. I base this on transcriptions to the Latin alphabet that I have seen, for I have never learned the Hebrew alphabet.
Archaic language features: I have heard that Quebecois French was some centuries behind what is spoken in France.
The article is quite interesting, but I have to say I don't understand why Yiddish being a Slavic language would suddenly mean that all European Jews are Iranian; the Slavic languages aren't descended from anything spoken in Iran in the first century CE. That really feels like it came out of nowhere.
It didn't exactly come out of nowhere, it was prefaced by "a fringe tends to develop; in Yiddish linguistics, that would be Paul Wexler".
As an L2 german (standard & dialect) speaker who's learning a slavic language I think "fringe" may be the charitable way to put it. (I've experimented with alemannic dialect speakers and upon first exposure they tend to think of yiddish as a different german dialect with some bizarre vocabulary)
> In a lokh in der erd hot gevoynt a hobit. Nit keyn bridke, koytike, nase lokh, ongefilt mit di ekn fun verem un a dripendikn reyekh, oykh nit keyn trukene, hoyle, zamdike lokh mit gornisht vu zikh avektsuzetsn tsi vos tsu esn: zi iz geven a hobit-lokh, un dos heyst bakvemlekhkeyt. —JRRT
As a native Slavic speaker that can also speak an almost fluent Dutch, and knowing what the quoted Hobbit line says, I can't even see how this having anything to do with Slavic languages is even a discussion.
There is one word of Slavic origin in that paragraph: bridke (English ugly, Polish brzydki, German hässlich). (And I can't find a cognate for "dripendikn" in any other language.)
I wonder why anyone would think that. The words predominantly come from German, and the grammar is more of a thing of its own, far from resembling anything Slavic...
Most people who encounter Yiddish outside of the religious Jewish community encounter Western Yiddish. Most people who learn Yiddish as a first language today would be speaking Eastern Yiddish (think Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia), which has more obviously Slavic elements.
The standard historical explanation for this is that Yiddish began as a Germanic language, and the Eastern dialects developed after Jews were expelled from Germany in the 14th century and migrated East. There were already Jews living there, but the population grew tremendously with the migration.
Paul Wexler's thesis is that the Eastern dialects of Yiddish actually independently descend from early Jewish Slavic languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language), and the Western dialects are derived from the Eastern ones.
Paul Wexler's thesis is that the Eastern dialects of Yiddish actually independently descend from early Jewish Slavic languages (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language), and the Western dialects are derived from the Eastern ones,
"... a hypothesis that has been widely rejected by other Yiddish and Germanic linguists and geneticists", says his WP bio.
The fringe nature of this hypothesis is discussed in the article itself. I was just explaining why one would even think to go down this road to begin with.
As another comment mentioned, both of those claims come from one theory that is considered as fringe in this field. That is explained in the article, although how those specific claims are being linked is not detailed.
Iranian languages and peoples that are referred here are not from Iran though. During ancient and middle ages there were various Iranian peoples in Eastern Europe, speaking Iranian languages and distantly related to modern people in Iran. These were very prominent, with two of these peoples, Scythians and Sarmatians, being used as names for the whole East Europe during the times of ancient Greek and Rome. In early middle ages, the Iranian tribe Alans also spread to western Europe, and there are still Iranian peoples such as Ossetians living in north of the Caucasus. For the first century CE, it would be these Iranian populations in eastern Europe which interacted with Slavs and are a source of many loanwords.
I guess the theory goes so that a significant Iranian population in central or east Europe would have converted to Judaism and thus they would make up a large portion of European Jews' ancestry. It's probably not so, because while there certainly were many individuals or small groups converting and thus being part of Jewish ancestry, we don't really have evidence of large-scale conversions.
Of course there has been the whole political debate based on these theories, which goes to claim that "Jews are not Jews" because according to their views, almost all Ashkenazi Jews would be descended from European converts and have little to none Middle Eastern ancestry. This often goes to antisemitic direction if it's used as basis to deny some part of Jewish culture, for example. But if such conversions ever happened in a large scale, that was 1000 years ago, and surely the Jewish people whose ancestry is from one of those groups who converted, are as Jewish as are those with Middle Eastern ancestry.
These discussions generally do not cover Knaanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knaanic_language. Based on Old Czech, it is the first language like Yiddish or Ladino and predates all of them by like 500 years.
And they wouldn't, because the only person who suggests that Knaanic was ancestral to Yiddish, rather than having been displaced by it, is Wexler. Who is an unpleasant and academically dishonest crank, who, in addition to his discredited linguistic views, makes claims about the ethnic origins of the Ashkenazim which were always on shaky ground, and which have been conclusively disproven by modern genetic analysis. Not that this fact has motivated Wexler to retract his bullshit arguments.
I'm saying that discussions of the origins of Yiddish do not cover Knaanic because it isn't a part of the origin of Yiddish. No different from Judeo-Arabic in that sense: an interesting topic in its own right, just not relevant.
> German Jews saw Knaanic and were inspired to create their own language
This is... not how it works. I know of only one case of "inspired to create their own language" in all of history, and it's Modern Hebrew. Which is a revival, not de novo.
No, I don't. Early jewish communities in Central Europe spoke the local language, then carried this language with them as they moved into Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Over centuries it diverged from its ancestral origin, as all languages do. At no point did anyone look at another jewish language and go “oh that's interesting; let's do something like that.”
I have a hunch that Jews came from Eastern Europe (I mean Israel before that). No, I don't think they are Khazars. But Ashkenaz was in Scythia, i.e. Eastern Europe.
Their history is very well documented. The Ashkenazi came from Italy into Germany, then moved into Poland (a bit different geographically from modern day Poland) after crusader pogroms in the 11th century.
I think that's a genuine dispute, because people consciously deciding to make a new language is a relatively rare phenomenon. Most language change is informal and unplanned.
"Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic, or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter) extending over parts of Germany and France.[29] There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects"
I didn't know any serious linguist ever questioned that Yiddish is a variant of German. One might ask if Germanic and other IE languages carry some old Afroasiatic Neolithic stratum from before the spread out of Anatolia / Southern Caucasus but that's a much deeper question.
>> His mother survived the war partially due to the fact that she was a native speaker of Polish and didn’t have the distinctive Yiddish accent, which is precisely what sent many Jews to their graves as the surest means of identifying them as Jews. (Her horrific experiences during the Holocaust are chronicled in a 1983 video from the Holocaust Memorial Center oral history project.) The lack of accent, coupled with the fact that neither of his parents looked stereotypically Jewish, enabled them to pass as Catholic Poles.
A Shibboleth!
⁴Jephthah then called together the men of Gilead and fought against Ephraim. The Gileadites struck them down because the Ephraimites had said, “You Gileadites are renegades from Ephraim and Manasseh.” ⁵The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” ⁶they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’ ” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.
related: if you really wish to know someone's L1 and suspect that the language they count in isn't it, hit them with a $5 wrench and see what language they say "ow!" in. (my L1 is english but I can make two kinds of 'ch' sound, neither of which is the english "tsh" one, so I suspect the wrench test, while far from perfect, may still be better than sibboleths)
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