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The Mystery of the Origins of Yiddish Will Never
Be Solved
How an academic field—marked by petty fighting, misguided ideological
debates, and personal proximity to tragedy—doomed itself
By Baty a Ungar-Sargon | June 2 3 , 2 01 4 1 2 :00 AM | Com m ents: 5
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***
This is the second of two articles on the origins of the
Yiddish language.
Where Did Yiddish Come From?
An explosiv e debate erupts from
footnotes suggesting that Ashkenazi
Jews are Europeans
***
Y iddish, it is an understatement to say, is not simply a
language. It’s a culture, an identity, a past both comic
and tragic—one that continues to inspire feelings as
By Cherie Woodworth
diverse as shame and pride, loathing and longing, philoSemitism, anti-Semitism, and accusations of both.
Though Y iddish is not an endangered language, due to
the hundreds of thousands of Hasidic families for whom it is still mother tongue, the
Holocaust decimated the secular Y iddish-speaking community, casting a shadow over the
perceived destiny of the language, a shadow that spreads to discussions of its past. Often
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this time around
Where Did Yiddish Come From?
By Cherie Woodworth — An explosiv e debate
erupts from footnotes suggesting that
Ashkenazi Jews are Europeans
The Mystery of the Origins of Yiddish
Will Never Be Solved
By Baty a Ungar-Sargon — How an academ ic
field—m arked by petty fighting, m isguided
ideological debates, and personal proxim ity
thought of as a fusion of German and Hebrew with some Slavic thrown into the mix, the
language evokes a deep nostalgia for American Jews; in its weaving together of semitic and
gentilic elements, the language seems to encapsulate the tension at the heart of modern
Jewish existence and operates as a stand-in for feelings about Jewish Diaspora. As director of
the Y IVO Institute for Jewish Research Jonathan Brent put it, “The Y iddish language
represents the very conflict at the core of Jewish identity.”
It’s a conflict that also exists—or originated, depending on your perspective—in the academy.
The main debate among Y iddish linguists is about the origin of the language and coalesces
around a single, unexpectedly loaded question: Is Y iddish an essentially Jewish language, one
that contained a Semitic component from the start, whose particular combination of Jewish
and German elements precisely reflects the dance of contact and seclusion performed by
Jews in their European Diaspora? Or is it just another dialect of German?
“It’s a problem that there’s a close relationship between
German and Y iddish,” said Steffen Krogh, a Danish linguist
who studies the Y iddish of Hasidic communities in
Williamsburg and Antwerp. “It’s like a young girl who has
been raped by her father. This girl can’t deny her origins, of
More on Tablet:
course, but she doesn’t want to have anything to do with her
father. This is how many Jews think of Y iddish. But it’s a fact you can’t deny.”
Like Krogh’s overwrought metaphor, the field of Y iddish linguistics is filled with an intensity
that often leaves the tourist astonished. In her article about the mysterious origins of the
Y iddish language, the late Cherie Woodworth described the field’s dramatis personae as “a
very small but committed cadre of scholars”—a wildly tactful understatement. One
metonymic step away from the Holocaust’s devastation, the tiny field of Y iddish linguistics
has ballooned in importance, becoming a place where both the past and the future of the
Jewish people is battled over, one phoneme at a time, through a combination of academic
and extra-academic means. Threats of legal action are par for the course. So are character
assassinations, pseudonymous academic hits, accusations of lunacy, and denials of the
existence of the Jewish people.
It’s gotten worse over time, but it’s almost always been thus. Take one example from nearly
three decades ago, a mess that ensnared a large group of some of the field’s boldest names. At
the center of it was Dovid Katz, a leading Y iddish linguist. Born in Brooklyn, Katz is the son
of Menke Katz, a Y iddish poet who spoke to his son only in Y iddish. Katz then studied Y iddish
at Columbia with Marvin Herzog. According to his Wikipedia page, “For eighteen years
(1978-1996) he taught Y iddish Studies at Oxford, building from scratch, sometimes singlehandedly, the Oxford Programme in Y iddish.” In 1999, he relocated to Vilnius, Lithuania, to
work on his atlas of in-situ Y iddish speakers, an ongoing project. He established the Vilnius
Y iddish Institute at the University of Vilnius, but he has since left; Katz was discontinued
from his post when he became a political dissident for opposing Holocaust obfuscation (about
which he wrote for Tablet). He has since had a role as a judge on the British TV series Best
Jewish Mum. In addition to being deeply respected for his linguistic contributions, Katz is still
remembered by linguists with exalted chairs at American Universities for the parties he threw
in the 1970s and ’80s, where friends would meet his father in Brooklyn and speak Y iddish
until 8:00 in the morning.
Back in 1985, Katz, then a professor of Y iddish at the Oxford Centre for Postgraduate Hebrew
Studies, held the First Annual Oxford Winter Symposium in Y iddish Language and
Literature. The proceedings were published by Pergamon Press in 1987 in a volume titled
Origins of the Yiddish Language. The next year, a review of the book appeared in Language,
the very respected journal of the Linguistic Society of America. The review consisted of a
scathing critique of many of the papers included, indeed, almost all the papers but the one
written by Paul Wexler, a professor of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. The review, penned
by one Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj, concluded that “the infelicitous combination of many
inadequate papers and the editor’s laissez-faire policy—which lets pass a plethora of errors in
formulation, citation, claims, and typography—cannot be alleviated by the participation of
several illustrious Y iddishists.”
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Dovid Katz, who had edited the book under review, was furious. “We all knew it was Wexler
by the style and the argument,” Katz told me on the phone from Vilnius. He called Sarah
Thomason, the longtime editor of Language and a professor of linguistics at University of
Michigan, demanding a retraction. He insisted that Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj’s review was
published under a pseudonym, a practice not looked upon kindly in academic discourse,
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Thomason said she was soon inundated by complaints. “I got really tired of getting phone
calls from England from Dovid Katz and his people,” she recalled. But Thomason felt
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compelled to pursue the matter due to the seriousness of the allegations and got in touch with
the person who had peer-reviewed Slobodjans’kyj’s review. She told him of Katz’s allegations
against Wexler, “And he said, ‘Oh, yeah, I thought you knew who wrote it.’ I said, ‘Y ou
might have mentioned that!’ He said, ‘Well, suppose you knew who it was, what would you
do?’ And I blew up. ‘What would I do? People publishing reviews of books they contributed
to, published by enemies of theirs—in my journal? No! I would raise the roof!’ ” Thomason
said that it became clear that Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj was “a pseudonym for someone who didn’t
like Dovid Katz. Otherwise why would he write it? Everything pointed to Paul Wexler, but
since he never admitted it to me, I couldn’t put anything in the journal.”
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Thomason decided to do some sleuthing. The review had come postmarked Waltham, Mass.,
so she asked her daughter, who was studying at Harvard, to go to the address supplied and
see if Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj existed. When her daughter knocked on the door, it was opened by
Paul Wexler’s mother-in-law.
“She was a quick thinker,” Thomason recalls.
‘By the time I got out of that mess, I
“She said, ‘Y es, he exists,’ ” and went on to
hoped never to hear about Yiddish
assert that Slobodjans’kyj was staying with
Wexler and that Wexler was helping him out. linguistics again’
From Thomason’s perspective, whether he
was a real person or not was almost beside the point. “It didn’t matter if he existed,”
Thomason said. “He didn’t write the review.”
Thomason said she can’t remember at what point Katz started to threaten to sue her, but she
thinks it had to do with a remark she made to the effect that Y iddish linguistics seemed to be
an extremely contentious field. But when Katz threatened to sue, the Linguistic Society of
America got involved, afraid of losing their insurance. “The threat to sue me over a book
review!” She recalled recently, still dumbfounded. “I don’t know if you know how bizarre that
is.”
Eventually, Thomason published a correction, and then an apology: “In Volume 64, Number
4 (1988) of this journal, a review appeared of a book edited by Dovid Katz entitled Origins of
the Yiddish Language. The name of the reviewer was given as Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj. The
Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America now has strong reason to believe
that a Y iddish language scholar named Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj does not exist and that the
review was submitted pseudonymously. The Executive Committee apologizes to our readers,
Dr. Katz, and the contributors to this volume. Neither the editorial office of the journal nor
the Officers and Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America played a knowing
role in this matter.”
Y ears later, when Thomason found herself introduced to Wexler at a conference, she refused
to shake his hand. “My conclusion was, these people all deserved each other. They were all
pretty unpleasant. By the time I got out of that mess, I hoped never to hear about Y iddish
linguistics again,” she said, adding: “It’s too bad, because it’s a really interesting field.”
***
“Academic Y iddish is a very strange thing,” Dara Horn, a Y iddishist and novelist, told me.
“There’s this self-consciousness to Y iddish. No one believes that it’s a language. The people
who are speaking it don’t believe it’s a language. There was an inferiority complex attached to
Y iddish,” Horn explained, because literacy and religious texts were associated with Hebrew,
the status language in terms of scholarship and literature.
Enter Max Weinreich, the father of 20th-century Y iddish linguistics. Born in what is now
Latvia, Weinreich was raised in a secular, German-speaking household. But he became
enamored with the language spoken by the Jews around him at an early age, and after
earning a doctorate in linguistics, Weinreich established the Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut
—Y iddish Research Institute, known as Y IVO—in 1925, in his apartment in Vilna. Though
Y IVO acquired its own building in 1929, the destiny of academic Y iddish has remained fused
with Weinreich’s own physical and intellectual journey. The outbreak of World War II found
Weinreich en route to a linguistics conference in Denmark, so he made his way to New Y ork,
and so did Y IVO.
Max Weinreich’s theory of the origins of Y iddish is the one most are familiar with: In the
Middle Ages, Jews migrated from France to an area in Western Germany known as the
Rhineland. In France they were speaking a language based on Old French with a HebrewAramaic component called Judeo-French, what Rashi refers to as “Loez.” Upon arriving in
Germany in the 10th century, these Jews created what Weinreich called a “fusion” language
with German. Moreover, explains Paul Glasser in the Y IVO encyclopedia, according to
Weinreich, “Jews never spoke ‘pure German’ but from the beginning of their settlement in
the Rhineland spoke their own language.”
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Weinreich was a deeply charismatic individual, whose interests were hardly limited to the
Y iddish language. “I think he was a genius,” said Glasser, who was until recently the dean of
Y IVO and who edited Weinreich’s life’s work, a 700-page History of the Yiddish Language
and a corresponding 700 pages of notes. “Certainly based on the breadth of his interests. If
you look in his bibliography, it’s not just linguistics, it’s psychology, and it’s literature and it’s
history and it’s pedagogy, and youth psychology. He did so much. Would someone else have
done it? Probably not as well. He wasn’t the first, but he was the most important in the 20th
century for sure.” In addition to his interest in Y iddish, Weinreich published in the Forwertz
under the pseudonyms Sore Brener, Y osef Pearl, and A. Berman. His bibliography stands 16
pages long and includes a translation of Freud’s Introduction to Psychoanalysis.
But Weinreich was also
motivated by ideology. Even
some of Weinreich’s followers
concede that his theory reflected
the need to stake a claim for
Y iddish, on the one hand
separating it from German and
on the other hand establishing it
as more than just jargon, or a
debased kind of dialect.
“Underlying that for Y IVO and
for Weinreich was the need to
prove the nationhood of the
Jewish people in the 1920s and
1930s,” explained Jonathan
Brent. Weinreich was also
fighting another war on a
different front: the language wars
of Hebrew vs. Y iddish. Y iddish
was part of a Jewish identity that competed with the Zionist narrative on the one hand and
the religious lifestyle on the other; Y iddish represented a kind of “Diasporic Nationalism,” as
Hillel Halkin, a translator of Y iddish, calls it.
In recent years, Weinreich’s theory has had some push-back. More and more people have
begun to acknowledge that Weinreich did not provide any evidence that modern Eastern
European Y iddish comes from the Rhineland, nor that it was so old. “All this was a
theoretical construction from Max Weinreich, but he provided no corroboration of his ideas,”
said Alexander Beider, who has just written a book about Y iddish origins. “I really admire
him globally speaking, but at the same time, I think that many general concepts of his are
not really linguistic. They are rather ideological.”
“Weinreich had the great fortune that many of the critics of the French theory were dead,”
explained Alexis Manaster Ramer, a retired professor of linguistics, in an email, “and above
all he was in New Y ork in a milieu which was very welcoming to loud European expatriates
like Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Nabokov, Levi Strauss.” Of course, Manaster Ramer
concedes, Weinreich was a major scholar, with a vast erudition that no one could match or
challenge. But “he was going around advocating a simple and radical idea. That it was
basically bunk didn’t bother too many people, since no one had an alternative idea or anyway
no one was loudly proclaiming one.”
Though Weinreich died in 1969, by and large his ideas continued to reign supreme for
decades—having become even a “kind of a linguistic sect,” in Beider’s words.
In the past two decades, the debate has shifted. One the one side of the debate are Weinreich’s
inheritors, who believe that Y iddish originated in Western Germany in the Rhineland and
spread east. On the other side of the debate are those who think that eastern Y iddish, with its
heavy Slavic influence and Bohemian vowel structure, is different enough from western
Y iddish that it must have arisen independently. But because this is Y iddish linguistics, this
debate does not exist so much as rage—intellectually, ideologically, and personally.
***
In the Weinreich camp is one of the most esteemed Y iddishists alive today by most accounts,
Erika Timm, a professor at University of Trier in Germany. Unlike other German scholars,
Timm believes that “Y iddish is one of the ‘Jewish languages,’ in the precise sense given to the
term by Solomon Birnbaum and Max Weinreich,” as she writes in a 2004 article in The Jews
of Europe in the Middle Ages. “Erika Timm proved Max Weinreich’s intuitions,” said Simon
Neuberg, also a professor at Trier. She did this by looking at the earliest written sources of
Y iddish, including Rashi’s biblical and Talmudic commentaries (which, in addition to 3,000
Judeo-French glosses, contain, astoundingly, 24 glosses in Y iddish), and by analyzing
translations of the Bible from Hebrew into Y iddish to show the evolving influence that
Hebrew had on the German parts of Y iddish.
Dovid Katz disagrees with Timm on the question of where Y iddish originated within
Germany. While he accepts that the Jews in the Rhineland spoke a “Germanic based Jewish
language with a Semitic component,” he disputes that this language was Y iddish. Rather,
according to Katz, the Semitic component of Y iddish goes back to a sound system consistent
with manuscripts from the Danube region, which is further east than the Rhineland, where
the true Y iddish originated, while the language spoken in the Rhineland went extinct. In
other words, the linguist’s model (east to west) goes in the opposite direction of the historian’s
model (west to east).
Furthermore, the Semitic components in this eastern-born Y iddish can be traced back to
ancient times. “I was rebelling against the theory that Jews once spoke a purely Germanic
language that then over centuries acquired Hebrew and Aramaic purely through the study of
Hebrew texts,” Katz told me over the phone from Vilnius. “There’s a huge amount of
linguistic evidence for that, that it could not have come from books,” he said, contra Timm.
For example, the Y iddish word for details is protim, but the singular, detail, is prat. “The /a/
in prat reminds us of Sephardic Hebrew. I have traced this system of inherited vowel
alternations to Palestine in the late first millennium A.D.,” Katz said.
In Katz’s theory, the Jews arrived in what Katz calls “the cradle of Y iddish,” the city of
Regensburg, speaking Aramaic. It is this spoken language that provided the source material
for the Semitic component of Y iddish, spreading both further east as well as west, to the
Rhineland, replacing whatever language the western Jews were speaking. Before this
language replacement, the eastern Jews of the Danube region referred to the western Jews of
the Rhineland as “Bnei Hes”—those of “h”—because the western Jews pronounced the “ch”
sound (the sound that opens the word Hannukah) as “h,” whereas the Bohemian Jews
pronounced it as we do—as “ch”—and were called “Bnei Ches.” For Katz, this comes from an
ancient pronunciation, brought by Palestinian Jews in a modified form all the way to
Germany where it proceeded to become the Semitic component of Y iddish. The “ch” of the
Bnei Ches is indicative for Katz of both the ancient origin of Bohemian Y iddish as well as the
easterly location of Y iddish’s origin.
Further proof for Katz’s theory
comes from biblical words that
are replaced later in the Bible by
other biblical words, for example,
the word chag is replaced by
yontif in the Book of Esther;
Y iddish takes yontif, not chag.
“Y iddish always has the latest
historic meaning, which would
not have been the case if they had
come out of the Bible,” Katz said.
Y iddish always preserves the
latest, “coming down the line”
rather than “jumping out of the
text.”
Despite disagreeing with
Weinreich regarding the place of
origin and language of the Jews
immediately prior to Y iddish, Katz views himself as an inheritor of the great Y iddishist.
“Ironically, by positing an inherited Semitic component, my own view is ‘more Weinreich
than Weinreich’ in some sense,” he wrote to me in an email.
On the other side of the spectrum are those, like Alexandre Beider, who has a doctorate in
applied mathematics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology. Beider believes
that western and eastern Y iddish are simply too different to have a common origin. Rather,
Jews spoke German dialects until the 14th century, when gradually their dialects became
different from those of their co-territorialists. “From the sources documented, we see no trace
of any fusion of Hebrew and German before the 15th century,” Beider told me on the phone
from Paris, where he lives. Beider started out life as a mathematician and theoretical
physicist in the former Soviet Union but found himself drawn to Jewish history. He has
written two books of reference, one about Jewish first names and one about Jewish last
names.
But Beider is not even the most far afield from Weinreich. For when fields are weak and
orthodoxies reign, a fringe tends
to develop; in Y iddish linguistics,
that would be Paul Wexler.
***
Wexler is a professor of Y iddish at
Tel Aviv University who holds the
controversial position that
Y iddish is neither German nor
Jewish but a Slavic language
with German and Hebrew words
slotted into Slavic grammar in a
process called “relexification.”
Wexler began by refuting
Weinreich’s claim that the Jews
came to Germany from France
by disputing the French origin of
the Romance elements in Y iddish. He argued that there is no way that these words could
have been derived from French, based on the existence of components that French doesn’t
allow. Instead, Wexler believes and has argued extensively that Y iddish is a Slavic language
with a new German and Semitic lexicon. “It’s pretty straightforward,” he told me on the
phone from Tel Aviv University. “If you take the Y iddish text and translate it to German and
Polish, you immediately see that the grammar of Y iddish is exactly like Polish. It’s like a
mirror image of Polish.”
“The syntax and phonology of the language are predominantly Slavic,” he argues in a 2012
article in a Slavic philology periodical. “There is very little in the grammar of the language
that is unambiguously German.” For example, where German requires an umlaut when
adjectives go superlative (strongàstronger would be starkàstaarker), Y iddish does not
(starkàstarker). “The lack of umlaut in Y iddish,” Wexler argues, “has its origins in the Slavic
languages.” He also shows that certain words in Y iddish have significantly different
meanings than their German counterparts, for example, where German has bluehen—to
bloom—Y iddish has blien; but when you add the prefix ver in German or far in Y iddish, you
get radically different meanings: verbluehen means to wilt, while farblien means to begin to
blossom. Furthermore, the “so-called ‘Hebrew’ component turns out to be neologisms formed
from existing Old Hebrew roots invented mainly by Y iddish speakers,” Wexler argues. “The
situation with Slavic is exactly the opposite; the number of genuine Slavisms far outweighs
the number of ‘Slavoidisms’ in Y iddish, thus suggesting that Slavic is the oldest component of
Y iddish.”
The word Ashkenaz itself, he argues, only
‘I deny the existence of the Jewish
acquired its present referent—Jews of
people. Ninety-five percent of the
Germany—after the 11th century. It comes
from a biblical word that signified the
Jews are of Iranian origin.’
Scythians, in other words, the Iranians; for
Wexler, this provides a crucial clue as to where the Jews came from and who they were prior
to this date. Indeed, Wexler does not believe that the Jews were forced out of Palestine in the
Roman period, but rather, that the Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of Iranian, Turkic, and
Slavic converts to Judaism.
And here’s where things get thorny. “I deny the existence of the Jewish people,” Wexler told
me on the phone. “Ninety-five percent of the Jews are of Iranian origin.” But Wexler insists
that he did not set out to prove such an extra-linguistic thesis. “This was not my goal. It turns
out to be the logical conclusion of my linguistic theories.”
Other linguists have not taken kindly to the Slavic hypothesis, nor to its author. “I have no
impression that Paul Wexler is searching for the truth,” said Beider. “Sometimes I even
wonder if he himself believes in what he writes. If he is not believing, but making a
provocation, his writings of the last 20 years are oriented just to prove that Jews are not
Jews. In this case, there is nothing to discuss.” Indeed, though he has a following amongst
non-specialists, most linguists disagree with Wexler. “I respect him as a linguist, but I don’t
agree with him,” said Steffen Krogh. Simon Neuberg called the relexification theory “very
adventurous” but said ultimately it “seems more of a marketing trick.”
And, one imagines, that bizarre journal dust-up didn’t endear him to his colleagues in the
field. When I asked Wexler if he was Pavlo Slobodjans’kyj, there was a pause. “No,” he finally
said and offered a litany of facts about the mysterious Pavlo. “I know him vaguely. He was in
America. I met him, I can’t remember at the moment how. He was interested in Slavic
literature and language, his main specialty was Russian. He was Jewish. I know that he went
back to Ukraine in the ’80s for family reasons. I think one of his kids had cancer. After that, I
lost contact.”
For his part, Manaster Ramer has come to believe that Wexler and Weinreich—ostensibly
two opposing poles on a spectrum—are in fact part and parcel of the same culture, one that
puts the cart of ideological conclusion before the scientific horse.
***
Alexis Manaster Ramer was not easy to find. Now in his fifties, Manaster Ramer was born in
Poland to Holocaust survivors and emigrated at a young age to the United States. He
emerged onto the field of linguistics as a young prodigy in the 1980s when he got his
doctorate at the University of Chicago. It is hard to imagine his equal in terms of linguistic
credentials. He was the first person to organize a conference on the mathematics of language.
He has published on Australian, Eskimo, Austronesian languages, Indo-European, UtoAztecan, Nostratic, Altaic, Haida-Nadene, Pakawan/Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa-Nadene, Vedic
and Homeric poetics, and medieval Y iddish. Despite this, he is currently unaffiliated with any
institution. He taught linguistics at University of Michigan and computer science at Wayne
State University before he was forced to retire due to a mysterious illness. He was
subsequently honored by a worshipful festschrift titled The Linguist’s Linguist: A Collection of
Papers in Honour of Alexis Manaster Ramer. He now splits his time between Bulgaria and
Venice Beach, Calif., and if you catch him on a good day, he will indulge questions about
Y iddish linguistics and answer them with lengthy, often furious emails that ultimately make
surprising, even unnerving, sense, methodically devastating the arguments of others.
For instance, Manaster Ramer takes issue with Wexler’s claims that Y iddish is a Slavic
language. Per Wexler, Y iddish’s lack of umlaut proves that it could not be descended from
German. But Manaster Ramer argues that by that logic, neither English nor Dutch would be
considered Germanic languages, and neither would many German dialects, since they too
have lost their umlaut in many of the same places where Y iddish has. Languages consistently
lose their umlauts through contact and evolution. The loss of a feature like an umlaut is a
sign of a language’s distance from its source—the umlaut-bearing German—rather than its
closeness to another source—the non-umlauted Slavic.
Along similar lines, the fact that
Y iddish has some words that
have evolved beyond recognition
as German, while its Slavic words
are still highly recognizable as
Slavic, is another sign that the
Slavic influences are later, not
earlier, as Wexler claims. Wordchange is an example of
something that happens to
languages as they stray from
their sources. The less time a
feature or an influence, like
Slavic, has been in a language,
the less time it will have to evolve
and the more similar the words
will be to the source. The more
time a feature has been part of a
language, the less like its origin
that feature will be. “The Romance elements of Y iddish are often quite evolved beyond their
Romance sources,” Manaster Ramer writes in an email, “and similarly the German ones. The
Slavic ones much less so. This is the opposite of what Wexler’s theory predicts.”
Manaster Ramer also disputes Beider’s claim that Y iddish could have originated in two
places. “There is no way Jews in Eastern Europe could have independently invented the very
specific Romance and Hebrew features and western German Jewish names,” he wrote in an
email, “but they could easily have changed their German to agree with that of their eastern
German neighbors over hundreds of years of interaction in both eastern Germany and
Bohemia.” Features of a language can change in one generation; that doesn’t make the new
version a different language than the old. An analogy: John F. Kennedy, Jr. didn’t pronounce
the final “r,” which his children then reintroduced into their speech. By Beider’s logic, they
would be speaking different languages.
As for Katz, Manaster Ramer believes his argument is actually brilliant. “This is exactly what
linguists are supposed to do,” he said: come up with a theory based on facts. It’s one of the
cleverest arguments in the field, he said—one that has been underestimated because “there is
no Aramaic lobby.”
But Manaster Ramer also thinks Katz is wrong. He points out that the Maharil, a 14thcentury Talmudist from Mainz in the Rhineland, used the word yontif, too, in which case,
this can’t be proof of the Danube thesis. Furthermore, the Kaufmann Haggadah, a Sephardic
Haggadah from the 14th century, also has the vowel change we see in prat/protim; if this is
the case, this can’t be unique to the Danube region and thus cannot rule out a Rhineland
origin for Y iddish.
And what of the Bnei Ches and the Bnei Hes, which provided evidence for Katz’s claim that
Y iddish originated in Regensburg and replaced the Rhineland dialect? These don’t necessarily
lead to Katz’s conclusion, Manaster Ramer said. Katz assumes that because western Jews
ultimately stopped being Bnei Hes and selected the pronunciation of Bnei Ches means either
that the population of Bnei Hes was replaced, or that the remaining Rhineland Jews replaced
their entire language. But there is another option—they could have simply changed this one
feature of their language, just like JFK’s kids. Even if Y iddish had originated in the Rhineland
and moved east, as Weinreich argued, there is no reason that the Rhineland population
couldn’t have corrected their language from Hes to Ches to fit their texts at some point, or
been influenced by an influx of Ches-pronouncing Jews from another country, both of which
are consistent with Jewish behavior throughout the ages. Indeed, transcriptions of people’s
names from the Danube region show Hes pronunciation as late as the 14th century,
suggesting that even in the east, the Ches pronunciation is not a modification of an ancient
pronunciation, but rather itself a 14th-century linguistic change. Indeed, this was Max
Weinreich’s theory on the subject.
Rather, Manaster Ramer believes that Roman Jews speaking a Romance dialect, not French
but related to it, lived in both western and southern areas of what would become Germany.
When the German tribes invaded the Roman territories, these Jews learned perfect German.
His evidence for this comes from the Romance words in Y iddish, as well as certain names
that bear features that couldn’t possibly have come from French. For example, Beyle was a
women’s name frequently found among the victims of the first crusade. The name is almost
certainly not French, because if it were, the vowel would be short to accommodate the double
consonant, like in the French version—Belle. Beyle implies a Romance dialect that has a long
vowel, rather than a long consonant. Another example would be the word sterdish—defiant—
which looks German because of the suffix but can’t be of German origin, or it would begin
with sht. But it also can’t be French because the Old French word begins with a vowel—
estordie—meaning a crazy action.
And those Old French words and names usually cited as evidence that the earliest German
Jews spoke French probably entered the language centuries later than is claimed. Take for
example the word most often cited to prove the French origin of the Ashkenazi Jews: cholent,
the slow-cooked, slow-digested Sabbath food. Received wisdom tells us that this word is
mentioned in some of our earliest sources of Y iddish, such as the writings of Isaac ben Moses
of Vienna, otherwise known as the Or Zarua, who lived from 1200-1270. But if one looks at
the text of the Or Zarua, one sees immediately that the word cholent is glossed. The Or
Zarua, visiting his Rabbi (one of the Rabbeinu Tam) in France, describes the practices
deployed by French Jews for heating “their cholent, in other words, tamun.” Rather than
proof that Ashkenazi Jews called the beans and meat mixture cholent, the Or Zarua provides
quite the opposite, proof that his readers called it something else. In other words, while the
French word did eventually become a Y iddish word, it is not evidence for anything
approximating an Old French origin for the Ashkenazi Jews.
So, if the Jews who started speaking Y iddish originally spoke German, how and when did the
Semitic component enter the language? The question itself is unscientific, said Manaster
Ramer, ignoring as it does the historical context in which Y iddish came to be, which
incidentally was a time in which German too underwent a similar process, incorporating
loan words from Latin. Indeed, said Manaster Ramer, the influence of Latin on German was
far greater than the Hebrew and Aramaic influence on Y iddish, “and yet no Y iddishist seems
to asks, why does the massive Latin influence on German not mean that German is not
German, if the much smaller Hebrew influence on Y iddish is supposed to mean that Y iddish
is not German,” he wrote in an email. Any language spoken by polyglot people can
incorporate words from their second or third language at any time. Furthermore, he said,
almost all of the Hebrew and Aramaic words in Y iddish are accretions added to the language
after the 13th century.
***
In the end, what’s clear is that the field of Y iddish linguistics is certainly weakening. “There
are no graduate studies in Y iddish in the United States anymore. And it’s almost gone in
Israel. There’s a little in Germany and a little in Warsaw, which is very problematic if you
think about the Jewish people,” said Rakhmiel Peltz, director of the Judaic Studies Program
and professor of sociolinguistics at Drexel University. “I’m in a university that has graduate
programs in inhalation therapy! There’s no Y iddish, but there’s inhalation therapy.” Peltz said
that this is in part due to the fact that there is no distinction between the training experts
receive and that of students.
But it may also have to do with the desire some had to distance themselves from the
mamaloshen. Professor Y osef Haim Y erushalmi, the Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of
Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University from 1980 to 2008, used to tell a
story about giving an academic lecture that his mother attended. At some point during the
lecture, she turned to someone and said, “Kuk nor vi er shvitst”—Look how he’s sweating. “If
your mother is saying that over your shoulder, it’s not easy to jump into the Y iddish pool,”
Peltz concluded.
“The standards are a lot lower,” both today and in comparison to other fields, admitted Katz.
“The professors writing are professors of Slavic, or a mathematician. It’s a lively field, but I
don’t believe the debates are at the level that they were a generation ago, when there were
major incumbent professors of Y iddish who have now died.”
As a result, Manaster Ramer believes the field of Y iddish linguistics tolerates and even
encourages charlatans, whose work is treated with seriousness. As he explained in an email,
“When you read Mein Kampf, you do not respond by saying Prof. Hitler has made a cogent
and important case for Jews being vermin who should be exterminated, however on p. 250
we note that his discussion of whatever the fuck it is is perhaps not documented sufficiently,
and we might consider the alternative theory that they are merely scum who deserve to be
put to slave labor or slowly starved to death, although of course in light of his powerful
arguments passim, very likely the former hypothesis is correct after all. This is the kind of
mealy-mouthed and indeed respectful reaction that even the most irresponsible and
incompetent work in this field gets. And this makes the situation much worse than if blatant
error and deliberate misrepresentation were simply ignored the way scientists often simply
disregard pseudo-science.”
Manaster Ramer—like many of the other prominent Y iddish linguists—certainly has reason
to be emotional about Y iddish. His mother survived the war partially due to the fact that she
was a native speaker of Polish and didn’t have the distinctive Y iddish 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.
But, as people like Manaster Ramer might argue, allowing personal connections to morph
into ideological motivations is the opposite of science—and the tendency to do so on the part
of so many in Y iddish linguistics is what’s dooming the field. Steffen Krogh—who defined
Manaster Ramer’s approach to Y iddish as “completely unsentimental”—remembers once
confessing to his friend that he was worried about the future of Y iddish.
“He said to me,” recalled Krogh, “ ‘Steffen, I am only worried about its past.’ ”
***
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Batya Ungar-Sargon is a staff w riter at Tablet Magazine. Her Tw itter feed is @bungarsargon.
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AUSTRIA
PAUL WEXLER
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CHERIE WOODWORTH
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Posting as Dovid Katz (Not you?)
Comment
Mumme Loohshen - An Anatomy of Yiddish, by Joseph Witriol
As with the earlier article by Cherie Woodworth, may I add a link to my late father's Mumme
Loohshen - An Anatomy of Yiddish. He wrote it in 1974/1975 and declares that the "Yiddish
recorded in this book is that spoken by my mother, mumme loohshen. In the few instances
where this deviates, or seems to deviate, from “printed” Yiddish I still record what I heard my
mother speak."
http://mummeloohshen.wordpress.com/
Reply · Like ·
1 · Follow Post · about an hour ago
Leah Chanin ·
School
Top Commenter · Stephens College, Southern Methodist Univ. , Mercer Law
What a horrible analogy, Mr. Krogh! Comparing a girl raped by her father to almost anything else
is truly disgusting.
Reply · Like · Follow Post · 3 hours ago
Henry Gottlieb ·
Top Commenter
This is almost as important as, lighting the chanukah candles left to right or right to left
Reply · Like · Follow Post · 44 minutes ago
Jacques Borek ·
Top Commenter
I am amazed by the style and futility of this Article: pages of vain "stories and empty debate to tell
Nothing. I join here some observations I quickly noticed on a page I just copy paste right now
with no much correction. I hope that people will go to Library and have a look on Genral History
and Geography of Europe and focuse on realities and not wishful-nthinking.
That rape is not a vain analogy: the refusing of Jewish Heterogeneity and multiple proselytrism
is one of the most stupid attitude of the Jews toxward their true origin. They should be all in
fatherline Haplogroup T from Mesopotamia and they are 4% maximum. So Abraham had no
biological posterity..... but a great Moral one...
My excerpts and Notes of Reading: (ndl in french)
In the Middle Ages, Jews migrated from France to an area in Western Germany known as the ...
See More
Reply · Like · Follow Post · 33 minutes ago
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