ייִדיש

Yiddish is a Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet and spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, those whose ancestors settled along the Rhine Valley of Germany in the early medieval period. It emerged from Middle High German around the 10th to 13th centuries, as Jewish communities in cities like Worms, Speyer, and Mainz adapted the local vernacular for a community that also read Hebrew and Aramaic for religious purposes. The borrowings were dense from the start: Hebrew words for ethical and religious concepts, Aramaic grammatical particles, and the German syntax of the Rhineland fused into a hybrid that was neither German nor Hebrew but something genuinely new. By 1250 the language had developed enough distinctiveness to be considered its own tongue.

The name 'Yiddish' is simply the Jewish word for 'Jewish,' derived from Middle High German 'jüdisch,' itself from Latin 'Iudaeus' and ultimately Hebrew 'Yehudi.' Speakers called their language 'Yidish' and sometimes 'Yidish-Taytsh,' meaning Jewish German, to distinguish it from standard German. The name's modesty is characteristic of how Ashkenazi communities understood their vernacular: not a formal literary language but the mame-loshn, the mother tongue, the language of home, market, and prayer. What it lacked in prestige it compensated in expressiveness.

As Jews were expelled from the Rhineland during the 14th and 15th centuries, pushed east by crusader violence and plague accusations, Yiddish traveled with them into Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Galicia. There it absorbed Slavic vocabulary by the hundreds, creating Eastern Yiddish, the dialect that would dominate by the 19th century. By 1900, approximately 11 million people spoke Yiddish, making it one of the major languages of Europe. The great Yiddish literary movement, with writers like Sholem Aleichem (died 1916) and I.L. Peretz (died 1915), had produced a body of work to rival any European vernacular.

The Holocaust killed roughly 85 percent of Yiddish speakers between 1939 and 1945. The language did not die, but it was devastated in a way no other major European language has ever been devastated. What survived emigrated: to Israel, to New York, to Buenos Aires. Today perhaps 1.5 million people speak Yiddish, and active literary and academic movements continue to sustain it. Chutzpah, schlep, schmooze, kvetch, and klutz are among hundreds of Yiddish words that entered American English through immigrant communities on New York's Lower East Side from the 1880s onward.