6 ms·

Being a Germanic language that has vowels, Yiddish should not have the same keyboard layout as a Semitic language.

onyva 7y ago
Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic. It’s unfortunate that because of the number advantage Eastern Europeans (and historical events) Jewish culture was completely altered. Authentic Jewish culture and traditions, which were dominant before the holocaust and are so much part of the Middle East and of course deeply influenced by, and influencing on, Islam and Arabic, are obscured. Some suggest the difference is more than tradition, and we are in fact separate people. Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543
- oldgradstudent 7y ago
  > Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Yiddish is spoken in Israel by significant parts of the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community. The number of speakers is probably in the low hundreds of thousands.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    Indeed, Yiddish is used in Israel, but consider the demographics here. Foreigners don’t come into much contact with the Yiddish-using Haredim. The Haredim tend to stay within their own communities, which are not neighbourhoods where just any tourist is going to pass through. Even when I have often been picked up by Haredim when hitchhiking in Israel, it is hard to have any kind of exchange with them; they will help out a non-religious person, but not chat with them. So, the Israelis whom foreigners are likely to come into contact with are the whole rest of the population. They do not use Yiddish or know a thing about it. Considering how much the more secular part of the country dislikes the Haredim, I can see how they would bristle at any question about a cultural feature they see as Haredim-linked.
  - onyva 7y ago
    "Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community" ... that's my point. They are not "Israeli" in the sense understood by this term today. They might as well be in Brooklin or some shtetl in Poland. Israel is not relveant for them in any meaningful way (excpet for the traditional "shnor").
    - nanna 7y ago
      These are blatant racist tropes about religious Jews!
      - onyva 7y ago
        At least you didn’t say antisemitic. Assuming there’s anything “Semitic” about Eastern Europeans Jews (as per the above linked research paper). BTW talking of which, it’s always fun to go back and read Arthur Ruppin's ideas about race. That’s an ashkenazi eugenist whom couple of institutes in Israel are named after, including the Ruppin academic center.
        azernik 7y ago
        Those Eastern European Jews are also the secular Israeli mainstream, and also most of American Jews. They are, as the paper says, mixed European and Middle Eastern. That paper's results had the mixture for Ashkenazim as approximately 80/20, while others have it at 50/50 or 40/60, with varying low levels of admixture from the Caucasus.
- nanna 7y ago
  > Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic. Not really true. It's a fusion of Germanic, Slavic (and today English and Dutch) with Hebrew and Aramaic. One thing that's amazing about Yiddish is the ability to shift from a secular to sacred level within the same language. The language and the culture is a tension between the two, and the writing of Yiddish expresses this by the fact that it reserves a whole set of letters only for religious words. [Edited to add]: And its Hebrew words are not "forced into it". It's the language of Ashkenazi Jewry who used Hebrew and Aramaic in their day-to-day life too.
  - verbify 7y ago
    There's a Yiddish joke that illustrates the extent that Yiddish has a borrowed vocabulary. A Rabbi is at an event with the Kaiser. The Kaiser says to him 'Sprichst du Deutsch' - 'do you speak German?'. The Rabbi replies confidently 'avadah, iz doch unserer mama loshon' - 'certainly, it's our mother tongue'. The joke being that 'avadah' (certainly) is Aramaic, and 'loshon' (tongue) is Hebrew, so all the Kaiser would understand is 'gibberish our mother gibberish'.
  - onyva 7y ago
    To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively. It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue. It’s not just the language barrier of course, but secularization, education etc. The term “ashkenazi” refers to tradition (reading of the Bible in, customs etc.) but they’re still two different groups, and even more so when you speak about Hasidim. In Israel at least they’re still uneducated and very poor (living of donations, subsidies, not sharing civil burdens etc.) very much like they lived in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine...) in the Russian empire until the early 20th century.
    - nanna 7y ago
      > It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue. I personally wouldn't take my source of knowledge about Yiddish from father of the movement whose whole ambition was to abandon the Yiddish world. > To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively. Sorry but this is plain wrong again. A fusion language of German and Judeo-Semitic languages emerged from around the region of Germany at some point, the earliest writings of which are dated about a thousand years ago. This language spread and came to be known as Yiddish. The 18C Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Moses Mendelsohn in particular derided this Germanic 'jargon'. Where the Haskalah spread in Central and Western Europe, Ashkenazi Jews abandoned Yiddish for the major languages of their hosts - eg High German, French. In the east, especially Poland, where Jews tended to be much poorer and derided by the rich Jews to their west as 'Ostjuden', Yiddish remained the language of Ashkenazi Jewish community. and so it was until the Khurbn (Holocaust/Shoah), Stalin's post-War liquidation of Yiddish intellectuals and the State of Israel's only recently relaxed hostility to the language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to America eventually felt the need to abandon the language too. And that's how a language almost died. Except it didn't, because religious (Haredi) Jews, who represented a small minority of Jews pre-WWII, had too much at stake in Yiddish - commentaries, writings, the Tzenereneh, teachings - and didn't feel the same need to assimilate as secular Jews. So today the vast majority of Yiddish speakers across the world come from the religious tradition, including the one Israel.
- barry-cotter 7y ago
  > Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented. People who hate the Hasidim? Ashkenazi Labour voters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish > In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, particularly the Hasidic Jews and the Lithuanian yeshiva world (see Lithuanian Jews), who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem. There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere. > In 2011, the number of persons in the United States above the age of 5 speaking Yiddish at home was 160,968.[65] > There are a few predominantly Hasidic communities in the United States in which Yiddish remains the majority language including concentrations in the Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York, in the 2000 census, nearly 90% of residents of Kiryas Joel reported speaking Yiddish at home.[66]
  - onyva 7y ago
    Which are not Israeli... some are anti zionists in fact, but that’s not the issue. Equating American jews, Hasidic community or not, with being an Israeli is a common mistake and a real put off to most us.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      > There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere. Emphasis not in original. I was not equating Israeli Jews with other Jews. If you have a problem speak plainly. I’m aware Israelis and Jews in the diaspora are not the same, American Jews and Israelis in America are separate communities and leftist politics are normative among American Jews and a remnant of a dead ideology in Israel for two. American Jews think Israelis are rude and vulgar.

Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic. It’s unfortunate that because of the number advantage Eastern Europeans (and historical events) Jewish culture was completely altered. Authentic Jewish culture and traditions, which were dominant before the holocaust and are so much part of the Middle East and of course deeply influenced by, and influencing on, Islam and Arabic, are obscured. Some suggest the difference is more than tradition, and we are in fact separate people. Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented. https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543 https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543

oldgradstudent 7y ago
> Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Yiddish is spoken in Israel by significant parts of the Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community. The number of speakers is probably in the low hundreds of thousands.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  Indeed, Yiddish is used in Israel, but consider the demographics here. Foreigners don’t come into much contact with the Yiddish-using Haredim. The Haredim tend to stay within their own communities, which are not neighbourhoods where just any tourist is going to pass through. Even when I have often been picked up by Haredim when hitchhiking in Israel, it is hard to have any kind of exchange with them; they will help out a non-religious person, but not chat with them. So, the Israelis whom foreigners are likely to come into contact with are the whole rest of the population. They do not use Yiddish or know a thing about it. Considering how much the more secular part of the country dislikes the Haredim, I can see how they would bristle at any question about a cultural feature they see as Haredim-linked.
- onyva 7y ago
  "Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox community" ... that's my point. They are not "Israeli" in the sense understood by this term today. They might as well be in Brooklin or some shtetl in Poland. Israel is not relveant for them in any meaningful way (excpet for the traditional "shnor").
  - nanna 7y ago
    These are blatant racist tropes about religious Jews!
    - onyva 7y ago
      At least you didn’t say antisemitic. Assuming there’s anything “Semitic” about Eastern Europeans Jews (as per the above linked research paper). BTW talking of which, it’s always fun to go back and read Arthur Ruppin's ideas about race. That’s an ashkenazi eugenist whom couple of institutes in Israel are named after, including the Ruppin academic center.
      - azernik 7y ago
        Those Eastern European Jews are also the secular Israeli mainstream, and also most of American Jews. They are, as the paper says, mixed European and Middle Eastern. That paper's results had the mixture for Ashkenazim as approximately 80/20, while others have it at 50/50 or 40/60, with varying low levels of admixture from the Caucasus.
nanna 7y ago
> Yiddish really has nothing to do with Hebrew other than the script and borrowed words which are forced into it. Sort of like Farsi and Arabic. Not really true. It's a fusion of Germanic, Slavic (and today English and Dutch) with Hebrew and Aramaic. One thing that's amazing about Yiddish is the ability to shift from a secular to sacred level within the same language. The language and the culture is a tension between the two, and the writing of Yiddish expresses this by the fact that it reserves a whole set of letters only for religious words. [Edited to add]: And its Hebrew words are not "forced into it". It's the language of Ashkenazi Jewry who used Hebrew and Aramaic in their day-to-day life too.
- verbify 7y ago
  There's a Yiddish joke that illustrates the extent that Yiddish has a borrowed vocabulary. A Rabbi is at an event with the Kaiser. The Kaiser says to him 'Sprichst du Deutsch' - 'do you speak German?'. The Rabbi replies confidently 'avadah, iz doch unserer mama loshon' - 'certainly, it's our mother tongue'. The joke being that 'avadah' (certainly) is Aramaic, and 'loshon' (tongue) is Hebrew, so all the Kaiser would understand is 'gibberish our mother gibberish'.
- onyva 7y ago
  To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively. It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue. It’s not just the language barrier of course, but secularization, education etc. The term “ashkenazi” refers to tradition (reading of the Bible in, customs etc.) but they’re still two different groups, and even more so when you speak about Hasidim. In Israel at least they’re still uneducated and very poor (living of donations, subsidies, not sharing civil burdens etc.) very much like they lived in the Pale of Settlement (Poland, Ukraine...) in the Russian empire until the early 20th century.
  - nanna 7y ago
    > It’s fascinating still to read, for example, Hertzl’s (Sephardi on his fathers’s side) commentary about this specific issue. I personally wouldn't take my source of knowledge about Yiddish from father of the movement whose whole ambition was to abandon the Yiddish world. > To be accurate, Ashkenazi jews don’t speak Yiddish they speak German. There was a cultural disconnect between these two groups themselves. The term oestjuden for example was used pejoratively. Sorry but this is plain wrong again. A fusion language of German and Judeo-Semitic languages emerged from around the region of Germany at some point, the earliest writings of which are dated about a thousand years ago. This language spread and came to be known as Yiddish. The 18C Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Moses Mendelsohn in particular derided this Germanic 'jargon'. Where the Haskalah spread in Central and Western Europe, Ashkenazi Jews abandoned Yiddish for the major languages of their hosts - eg High German, French. In the east, especially Poland, where Jews tended to be much poorer and derided by the rich Jews to their west as 'Ostjuden', Yiddish remained the language of Ashkenazi Jewish community. and so it was until the Khurbn (Holocaust/Shoah), Stalin's post-War liquidation of Yiddish intellectuals and the State of Israel's only recently relaxed hostility to the language and culture. Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to America eventually felt the need to abandon the language too. And that's how a language almost died. Except it didn't, because religious (Haredi) Jews, who represented a small minority of Jews pre-WWII, had too much at stake in Yiddish - commentaries, writings, the Tzenereneh, teachings - and didn't feel the same need to assimilate as secular Jews. So today the vast majority of Yiddish speakers across the world come from the religious tradition, including the one Israel.
barry-cotter 7y ago
> Many Israelis still find it offensive when foreigners ask them if Yiddish is spoken in Israel. It is not. Zionism tried so very hard to burry it and the culture it represented. People who hate the Hasidim? Ashkenazi Labour voters? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yiddish > In religious circles, it is the Ashkenazi Haredi Jews, particularly the Hasidic Jews and the Lithuanian yeshiva world (see Lithuanian Jews), who continue to teach, speak and use Yiddish, making it a language used regularly by hundreds of thousands of Haredi Jews today. The largest of these centers are in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem. There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere. > In 2011, the number of persons in the United States above the age of 5 speaking Yiddish at home was 160,968.[65] > There are a few predominantly Hasidic communities in the United States in which Yiddish remains the majority language including concentrations in the Crown Heights, Borough Park, and Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn. In Kiryas Joel in Orange County, New York, in the 2000 census, nearly 90% of residents of Kiryas Joel reported speaking Yiddish at home.[66]
- onyva 7y ago
  Which are not Israeli... some are anti zionists in fact, but that’s not the issue. Equating American jews, Hasidic community or not, with being an Israeli is a common mistake and a real put off to most us.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    > There are also active communities of Yiddish speakers in the US, and elsewhere. Emphasis not in original. I was not equating Israeli Jews with other Jews. If you have a problem speak plainly. I’m aware Israelis and Jews in the diaspora are not the same, American Jews and Israelis in America are separate communities and leftist politics are normative among American Jews and a remnant of a dead ideology in Israel for two. American Jews think Israelis are rude and vulgar.