Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.054 July 17, 1995 1) Origins of Yiddish (Alice Faber) 2) Origins of Yiddish (Mikhl Herzog) 3) Origins of Yiddish (Tomer Bendovid Shiloach) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sun, 16 Jul 1995 16:29:02 -0400 From: faber@haskins.yale.edu Subject: Sources of Yiddish Bob Rothstein asks about the contradictions between Max Weinreich's view of Yiddish origins and those of others such as Dovid Katz and Paul Wexler. Weinreich's view is obviously the "received view", and certainly correlates with the transmission of the religious and cultural traditions of Ashkenazic Jewry. But there are some serious *linguistic* and *demographic* problems with this view. First, the demographic problems. The earliest semi-reliable population estimates of Eastern European Jewish population come from the mid-17th century. Prior to that, there are 11-12th century estimates for Western Europe (mostly England prior to expulsion and France). Weinreich's historical view requires a gradual eastward migration of these Western European Jews, following the Black Death and the progroms attendant on the Crusades. However, taking into account that Jewish death rates from the Plague were actually comparable to or higher than those of Christians in the same area (the myth of greater survival originated to justify already ongoing anti-Jewish violence, and is not found in the earliest surviving polemics), it seems unlikely that enough Jews survived in Western Europe to migrate east and give rise to the actual numbers of Eastern European Jews observed a few centuries later. It's also worth keeping in mind double counting. That is, the sum of available Eastern European Jews is not the total of English Jews kicked out and exiles east from France, because at least some English exiles went to France, only to move further east when France became less congenial. This demographic problem of the sources of Eastern European Jewry was first noted (to my knowledge) by the historian Dubnow in the early 20th century. Now the linguistic problems. First if there was a heavy core of Old French speakers among early Yiddish speakers, wherever they lived, we would expect to find linguistic traces of OF in Yiddish. Aside from vocabulary (e.g. cholent, benchen), there isn't any. The only "structural" candidate that I know of is plural formation. In particular, Yiddish has many more plurals in -es than does Standard German. One could, I suppose, blame this on French, since -s took over in French, where it is now silent, and in Spanish, from one of the Latin declensions in the accusative (??? Sorry that my Romance could be shaky here). But, it could equally well come from Hebrew/Aramaic, where the Hebrew -ot plural comes out as -es in Yiddish pronunciation. And there may be a natural trend in Germanic to get to the -(e)s plural in any case, since it has been claimed to be the default in German (what you use when you don't know the plural or say anomalous things like "Sonys are better than Panasonics."). Now, no one has denied the Slavic component to Yiddish. However, when you get down to which Slavic, some interesting things emerge. I think Weinreich himself has a list of Yiddish vocabulary having to do with ritual slaughter that all come from Old Czech. So what to we have? A missing demographic component to the Eastern European Jewish population, and some hints of an earlier Slavic contribution to the structure of Yiddish than might be expected from the Standard Story. Whether you can get from this to an undocumented population of South Slavic or Aramaic speakers on South Eastern Europe or the Caucasus I don't know. What I do know is that such a population probably can't be documented. Aside from religious sources (where the great Rabbis whose works were preserved lived), our best information about Jewish population in Europe comes from Roman Catholic records. So, if you had a relatively unreligious Jewish population living in an area that hadn't yet been Christianized or that had converted to some other variety of Christianity (Russian, Arian [*not* Aryan!], etc), there might not have been anyone counting. Probably more than you wanted to know. Most of this info comes from an article I published with Bob King 10-15 years ago called "Yiddish and the Settlement History of Ashkenazic Jews." This first appeared in _Mankind Quarterly_ 24: 393-425, 1984, and it was reprinted in _Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times II_ published by Scholars Press in 1985. Some comes from a paper of mine "A Tangled Web: Whole Hebrew and Ashkenazic Origins", published in _Origins of the Yiddish Language_, Pergamon Press, 1987. Alice Faber 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Jul 95 00:45 EDT From: zogur@cuvmb.columbia.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish Katz's "Aramaic Connection" (as against Weinreich's "French Connection") Bob Rothstein asks whether there is anything more recent than Dovid Katz's 1985 paper on the subject of Katz's "Theory of Origin of Yiddish", which he deals with more fully in his own dissertation for the University of London. I've read only what Katz has written on the subject. My own, more recent experience with it I leave till the end of this message. Katz adduces linguistic evidence for his claims i) that Yiddish was born in the mouths, not of a Judeo-Romance-speaking community, but of an Judeo-Aramaic-speaking community in medieval Europe, ii) not in the Rhineland but more or less in the area of Regensburg. His hypothesis is based, at least in part, on the assumption (assertion?) that Yiddish does not have a Hebrew component; that Hebrew elements in Yiddish are part of the Hebrew component of Aramaic, and that the Semitic component of Yiddish is Aramaic (with _its_ Hebrew component), _not_ Hebrew. Katz's hypothesis is further linked to his so-called "oral transmission theory" as distinct from the "textual transmission" hypothesis which he attributes to Weinreich (although, in some respects, he uses Weinreich as a straw man, in this regard). In support of this, he adduces evidence of this in the consistent anomalous realization of a given number of words of Aramaic (Hebrew?) origin througout the Yiddish dialects which, he claims, can be accounted for only through oral transmission. By the way, if memory serves, Shlomo Birnbaum also proposed that the transmission of the _loshn-koydesh_ component of Yiddish was from "ear to mouth", not from "eye to mouth". Katz's argument is always interesting and sometimes brilliant, but it may lack a crucial component. My own work constantly tempts me to try to make historical inferences from linguistic data. In the absence of supporting non-linguistic evidence, disaster may be lurking. Still, in the absence such evidence, _meyle_, you take a chance; _vi zogt men_? Bemokem she eyn ish, iz hering a fish_. In any event, some years ago, I tried to present a "state of the field" paper at a Columbia Faculty Seminar. Among the three problem areas I chose to discuss, was Katz's "Aramaic" hypothesis. I came a cropper. As I recall, the (Hebrew) linguists from NYU and Yeshiva were there (Columbia's own Aramaic linguistics specialist was not). They, and the historians, gave me a _mishebeyrakh_ I won't easily forget. The crucial missing factor seems to be evidence for the existence of an Aramaic-speaking Jewish community in medieval Europe (in the area of Regensburg, or anywhere else). Can anyone out there supply it? Mikhl Herzog 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 17 Jul 1995 11:08:28 -0600 (CST) From: kruegetd@cnsvax.uwec.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish [Disclaimer: I think this is equally ridiculous as I hope you will find it.] I read recently that Ashkenazim are descendants of Khazars, and are in fact not really Jews at all, but simply converts. The reason they speak Yiddish is because they knew early on [like 2000 years ago] that the [hehe] Germanic and Celtic peoples were descendants of the 10 "lost tribes" and they adopted German [became Yiddish] as their language in an attempt to appear Jewish. Or something like that. :*) Tomer Bendovid Shiloach ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.054