Where is yiddish used

Frankel comments on how secular Judaism has contributed to the death of Yiddish and a simultaneous loss of traditional Jewish identity:. The secular community is dead, dead, dead. There's no Yiddish press, no Yiddish theater [not quite accurate since there is one still-vibrant group, the National Yiddish Theater-Folksbiene]. Dead, dead, dead. There were hundreds of Sholem Aleichem schools, Peretz schools.

Where are they? How many Yiddish books are being published? The secular people dominated everything and now they've lost. Hasidim are pushing everyone to be more religious, more Jewish.

Rabbi Frankel's bemoaning of the potential extinction of Yiddish illuminates a greater issue: The language has become synonymous with Orthodox Judaism and has lost its meaning within the secular parts of the faith. It's a dying language among mainstream Jewish Americans but a thriving one among the Hasidim, who speak the language almost exclusively. Historically, American Jews have been more moderate and relaxed in following the tenets of Judaism, classifying themselves as "Reform" or "Conservative" more often than "Orthodox.

In total, 83 percent of Jews in America did not consider themselves Orthodox, and even those raised Orthodox tend to switch over to the less traditional forms of Judaism at higher rates than those raised in other parts of the faith. Berger experienced this switchover firsthand. They might have gone to schul , but that's it. But the Orthodox community's previous status as a reclusive community is changing—and rapidly.

Alan Cooperman , the director of religion research at Pew, said that the growth of the Orthodox community is a story of demographics. In its 1,plus-year history, the Yiddish language has been called many things, including the tender name mameloshen mother tongue , the adversarial moniker zhargon jargon and the more matter-of-fact Judeo-German.

What is Yiddish? Though its basic vocabulary and grammar are derived from medieval West German, Yiddish integrates many languages including German, Hebrew, Aramaic and various Slavic and Romance languages.

It is impossible to pin down exactly where or when Yiddish emerged, but the most widely-accepted theory is that the language came into formation in the 10th century, when Jews from France and Italy began to migrate to the German Rhine Valley. As Jews continued to migrate eastward —a result of the Crusades and the Black Plague—Yiddish spread across Central and Eastern Europe and began to include more elements from Slavic languages.

In Ashkenazi societies, Hebrew was the language of the Bible and prayer, Aramaic was the language of learning and Yiddish was the language of everyday life. Scholars refer to this as the internal trilingualism of Ashkenaz.

Though they vary in sound and use, all three languages are written in the same alphabet. Beginning in the 14th century Yiddish was commonly used for epic poems such as the Shmuel-bukh , which reworks the biblical story of the prophet Samuel into a European knightly romance. Yiddish publishing became widespread in the s, nearly a century after the invention of the printing press.

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Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Related Articles Expand or collapse the "related articles" section about About Related Articles close popup. Indo-European Etymology. Your current browser may not support copying via this button. Introduction According to its main system-level characteristics, Yiddish belongs to the High German branch of West Germanic languages.

In certain cases, Yiddish and the culture it spawned became the bases of important Jewish political movements as well. The Bund, for example, a Russian Jewish socialist party, considered the retension of the Yiddish language, as opposed to Russian or Hebrew, to be a central part of its platform.

The six million European Jews who died in the Holocaust comprised the majority of the world's Yiddish speakers. Thus in a period of six years, between and , Yiddish was dealt a near mortal blow. The majority of those Jews who escaped Europe and made it to Israel or to the United States soon learned the local language and made Yiddish their secondary tongue, at best. The large number of Yiddish-speaking Jews who remained in the Soviet Union found Yiddish outlawed by Stalin during and after the Holocaust.

Because of the Holocaust and these repressive Soviet measures, Yiddish came to an almost immediate standstill. The post-Holocaust generations were being taught the local vernaculars, not Yiddish. It was predicted that Yiddish would quickly become a dead tongue. Despite these obstacles, Yiddish is today enjoying a resurgence.

Several populations use it as their main language: primarily the generation that lived during and immediately after the Holocaust , and the ultra-Orthodox populations living in New York and parts of Israel. But more significantly, Yiddish is today receiving attention from the non-Jewish scholarly community as a real language, and not as the "corrupted tongue" that it was considered throughout history. Many universities worldwide offer courses and even degree programs in Yiddish linguistics, and the literature of the Yiddish cultural period is receiving attention for its astute depiction of contemporary Jewish existence.

Even linguists of the German language are learning Yiddish, because the development of the German language, is related to the medieval versions of it that today are manifested only in Yiddish. Sources: "Germany.

Indiana University Press, Mendes-Flohr, Paul, and Judah Reinharz. Oxford University Press. Translated by R. Translated by S. Zvi Gitelman. Download our mobile app for on-the-go access to the Jewish Virtual Library. Category » Yiddish.