Yiddish is a Germanic language, but also Jewish. Difference between Hebrew and Yiddish

A modern person who has decided to go to Israel for permanent residence will be faced with a choice: what language he will need to learn - Yiddish or Hebrew.

Many representatives of modern society cannot even imagine that, in essence, these languages ​​are not the same set of letters and sounds, but two independent languages. They say that one form of the language is colloquial, that is, generally accepted for the Jewish people, and the other is literary, or standard. Yiddish is also often considered one of the many dialects of the German language, which is absolutely true.

Yiddish and Hebrew are actually two separate worlds, two independent languages, and these linguistic phenomena are united only by the fact that they are spoken by the same people.

Hebrew

Enough for a long time Hebrew was considered a dead language, just like Latin. For hundreds of years, only a limited circle of people were allowed to speak it - rabbis and Talmudic scholars. For everyday communication, the spoken language was chosen - Yiddish, a representative of the European linguistic language group (Germanic). Hebrew was revived as an independent language in the 20th century.

Yiddish

This language was introduced into Jewish culture from the Germanic language group. It originated in southwest Germany approximately in 1100 and is a symbiosis of Hebrew, German and Slavic elements.

Differences

1. For Jews, Hebrew is a language related to religious culture; it is in it that the Holy Scriptures, the most important artifact of the Jewish people, are written. The Torah and Tonakh are also written in the holy language.
2. Yiddish is today considered the spoken language in Jewish society.
3. Hebrew, on the contrary, is officially recognized as the official language of Israel.
4. Yiddish and Hebrew differ in phonemic structure, that is, they are pronounced and heard completely differently. Hebrew is a softer sibilant language.
5. The writing of both languages ​​uses the same Hebrew alphabet, with the only difference being that in Yiddish vowels (dots or dashes under and above letters) are practically not used, but in Hebrew you can always find them.

According to statistical data, it is known for certain that about 8,000,000 people live in the territory of modern Israel. Almost the entire population today chooses to communicate with each other exclusively Hebrew. It, as stated above, is the official language of the state; it is taught in schools, universities and other educational institutions, where English, along with Hebrew, is popular and relevant.

Even in cinemas, it is customary to show English and American films in this foreign language in the original, occasionally accompanying some films with Hebrew subtitles. Most Jews speak exclusively Hebrew and English.

A small group of people use Yiddish in conversation - about 250,000, these include: older Jews and the ultra-dox population.

• At the very beginning of the 20th century, Yiddish was among the official languages ​​that could be found on the territory of the Belarusian SSR; the famous communist slogan about the unification of the proletarians was written in it on the coat of arms of the republic.
• Perhaps the most important reason for the adoption of Hebrew as the official state language is the fact that in its sound Yiddish is very much like the German language, because it is essentially its variety. After the end of World War II, such similarity was extremely inappropriate.
• In Russian prison jargon you can find a huge number of words from Yiddish: parasha, ksiva, shmon, fraer, and so on.
• A scientist from the Tel Aviv Institute, Paul Wexler, suggested that Yiddish did not originate from the German language group, as previously thought, but from the Slavic one, but this fact has not been officially proven.
• Jews believe that a person who does not know Hebrew can neither be called educated nor be considered such.

Influence on folklore and literature

Yiddish has become a stable soil for the creation of literary and folklore works, which in the modern world are considered the richest cultural phenomena. Until the 18th century, researchers clearly traced the difference between literary works written in both Hebrew and Yiddish.

Hebrew was intended to satisfy the preferences of the educated nobility, whose ideals lay in social, religious, intellectual and aesthetic life. The less educated society was content with works written in Yiddish: these people were not familiar with traditional Jewish education. Written sources in Yiddish were educational in nature; they were presented in the idea of ​​various kinds of instructions.

In the 18th century, the Haskalah movement arose, which included Jews who advocated the adoption of European cultural values ​​that arose during the famous Age of Enlightenment. During this period, a split occurred between old and new literature, and the same thing happened with folklore works. Literary works written in Hebrew ceased to be in demand and were banned; everything began to be written exclusively in Yiddish. The situation changed only in the 20th century, when the Hebrew language was revived.

There are many Jewish languages, but the most important among them is Hebrew, the language of the religious tradition of Judaism and the modern state of Israel. Jews believe that in Hebrew the Creator spoke to the first man, Adam. Be that as it may, Hebrew has existed for more than three thousand years - this language is much older than Latin.

Hebrew emerged as an independent language in the second half of the 2nd millennium BC. The first Hebrew monument is the Song of Deborah - part of the Old Testament Book of Judges, which dates back to the 12th-13th centuries BC. e. The oldest surviving Hebrew inscription, the calendar from Gezer, dates back to the 10th century BC. e.

Hebrew belongs to the group of Semitic languages, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic (Semitic-Hamitic) linguistic macrofamily. Among the Semitic languages ​​existing in our time are Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya and Assyrian-New Aramaic, among the dead languages ​​are Phoenician, Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), Ugaritic and others.

The history of Hebrew has six periods:

Biblical (until the 2nd century BC) - the books of the Old Testament were written in it (Hebrew ha-Sfarim or TaNaKH);

Post-biblical - Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran manuscripts), Mishnah and Tosefta (the influence of Aramaic and Greek can be traced);

Talmudic (Masoretic) - lasted from the 3rd to the 7th centuries, when Hebrew ceased to be the language of everyday communication, but was preserved as the language of writing and religion. Monuments of this period are some parts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds;

Medieval (until the 18th century) - diverse religious literature, works on Kabbalah, scientific and legal treatises, secular poetry. During this period, the traditional pronunciation of various Jewish communities took shape: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemenite, Baghdad, etc.;

The era of Haskalah (Hebrew “enlightenment”, cultural and educational Jewish movement of the 18th-19th centuries) - Hebrew becomes the language of high literature, enriched with neologisms;

Modern - from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

Briefly about the features of the Hebrew alphabet. For writing in this language, the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew “alef-bet”) is used in a version of the square font, consisting of 22 consonant letters. Five letters have an additional style for the final letters in a word. Four consonant letters in modern Hebrew are used to write vowels (these letters are called "reading mothers").

Complete recording of vowels is possible with the help of vowels (Hebrew “nekudot”) - a system of dots and dashes invented during the Masoretic period, standing next to the consonant letter. In addition, Hebrew letters can be used for numerical writing, since each letter has a numerical correspondence (gematria).

Writing is done from right to left; there is no difference between uppercase and lowercase letters, which is typical for European languages. When writing, letters, as a rule, are not connected to each other.

At the end of the 19th century, the process of reviving Hebrew began, which by that time had long since become dead (this is the name for languages ​​that are not used for everyday communication and are not native to anyone). Hebrew is the only example that a dead language can be made alive! A significant role in the revival of Hebrew belongs to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (aka Leizer-Yitzchok Perelman). Ben Yehuda's family became the first Hebrew-speaking family in Palestine, and Eliezer's eldest son Ben Zion (later named Itamar Ben Avi) became the first child to speak Hebrew as his native language.

The pronunciation of Sephardi Jews has become the norm for the pronunciation of modern Hebrew. In the 1980s, Hebrew became the language of instruction at the Alliance School (Jerusalem). In 1884, Ben-Yehuda founded the newspaper Ha-Tzvi (Russian: Gazelle; Eretz Ha-Tzvi - Land of Gazelle - one of the ancient poetic names of Israel). He is also credited with founding the Hebrew Committee, which became the Hebrew Academy in 1920, as well as the creation of the “Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.” Thanks to the work of Ben Yehuda and others like him, Hebrew is now spoken by approximately 8 million people.

Yiddish (from jüdisch, "Hebrew") is the language of European Ashkenazi Jews, historically belonging to the Middle German dialects of the High German subgroup of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages. Yiddish appeared in the upper Rhine between the 10th and 14th centuries, incorporating a large array of words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and later from Romance and Slavic languages.

Yiddish has a unique grammar, within which the German root is combined with elements of other languages. Slavic elements were also introduced into the Germanic sound system of the language - for example, sibilant Slavic consonants.

Before World War II, 11 million Jews spoke Yiddish. Today the exact number of native speakers is unknown. Census data from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st year suggest that the largest number of Yiddish-speaking Jews live in Israel (more than 200 thousand people), the USA (about 180 thousand), Russia (more than 30 thousand), Canada (more than 17 thousand) and Moldova ( about 17 thousand people). In total, according to various sources, there are from 500 thousand to 2 million people living on the planet who speak Yiddish.

Yiddish has Western and Eastern dialects, within which a large number of dialects are distinguished. Among Hasidim in the United States, a common dialect arose based on the Transylvanian version of Yiddish; in the USSR, a variant with the phonetics of the Belarusian-Lithuanian (northern) and the grammar of the Ukrainian (southeastern) dialect was considered as the standard Yiddish language. In the 20s of the last century, Yiddish was one of the four state languages ​​of the Belarusian SSR.

Yiddish, like Hebrew, uses the square Hebrew alphabet. The direction of the letter is also the same.

The other major Jewish community, the Sephardim, spoke (and some still do) their own Hebrew language, Ladino. This language, also called Giudio, Judesmo or Spagnol, belongs to the Ibero-Romance subgroup of the Romance language branch and is a development of the medieval Judeo-Castilian dialect. The spread of Ladino in the diaspora is associated with the exodus of Jews from Spain at the end of the 15th century.

The main Ladino dialects are Romanian, Yugoslavian and Turkish. People from North Africa call their dialect "Hakitia". Today, about 100 thousand people speak different Ladino dialects.

The Ladino script exists in various variants - the Hebrew alphabet (Rashi font), Latin and Turkish letters derived from them, the Greek alphabet, and Cyrillic. There is also such a conservative option as the use of the Old Castilian alphabet (Spanish alphabet of the 15th century).

Other Jewish languages ​​are rather ethnolects (speakers of an ethnolect, being included in the linguistic field, nevertheless consider themselves a separate people): Romaniotic (ethnolect of Greek), Jewish-Shiraz (Western Fars), Yinglish (English), Miandobar (Azerbaijani) and so on .

When it comes to the language of the Jews, everyone immediately thinks of Hebrew. In fact, the Jews gave the world 2 more languages: Yiddish and Ladino.

What are their similarities and differences?

Hebrew, the language of the Jews, which has existed for over three thousand years; The oldest dateable literary monuments of Hebrew, preserved by the biblical tradition, date back to the 12th century. or 13th century BC e. (for example, Song of Deborah, Judges 5:2–31), the first inscription is presumably from the 10th century. BC e.

Hebrew is a language of Semitic origin. In addition to Hebrew, the Semitic languages ​​also include Aramaic, Arabic, Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian), Ethiopian and some other languages ​​of Western Asia. The Phoenician and Ugaritic languages, which together with it belong to the Canaanite branch of the Semitic group of languages, are especially close to Hebrew.

Largely due to the fact that Hebrew belongs to the Semitic group of languages, Jews were mistakenly classified as Semitic peoples. This is where anti-Semitism came from; the Jews themselves are representatives of Hasidic peoples.

The history of Hebrew has six periods:

Biblical (until the 2nd century BC) - the books of the Old Testament were written in it (Hebrew ha-Sfarim or TaNaKH);

Post-biblical - Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran manuscripts), Mishnah and Tosefta (the influence of Aramaic and Greek can be traced);

Talmudic (Masoretic) - lasted from the 3rd to the 7th centuries, when Hebrew ceased to be the language of everyday communication, but was preserved as the language of writing and religion. Monuments of this period are some parts of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds;

Medieval (until the 18th century) - diverse religious literature, works on Kabbalah, scientific and legal treatises, secular poetry. During this period, the traditional pronunciation of various Jewish communities took shape: Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Yemenite, Baghdad, etc.;

The era of Haskalah (Hebrew “enlightenment”, cultural and educational Jewish movement of the 18th-19th centuries) - Hebrew becomes the language of high literature, enriched with neologisms;

Modern - from the end of the 19th century to the present day. Revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

Briefly about the features of the Hebrew alphabet. For writing in this language, the Hebrew alphabet (Hebrew “alef-bet”) is used in a version of the square font, consisting of 22 consonant letters. Five letters have an additional style for the final letters in a word. Four consonant letters in modern Hebrew are used to write vowels (these letters are called "reading mothers").

Complete recording of vowels is possible with the help of vowels (Hebrew “nekudot”) - a system of dots and dashes invented during the Masoretic period, standing next to the consonant letter. In addition, Hebrew letters can be used for numerical writing, since each letter has a numerical correspondence (gematria).

Writing is done from right to left; there is no difference between uppercase and lowercase letters, which is typical for European languages. When writing, letters, as a rule, are not connected to each other.

At the end of the 19th century, the process of reviving Hebrew began, which by that time had long since become dead (this is the name for languages ​​that are not used for everyday communication and are not native to anyone). Hebrew is the only example that a dead language can be made alive! A significant role in the revival of Hebrew belongs to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (aka Leizer-Yitzchok Perelman). Ben Yehuda's family became the first Hebrew-speaking family in Palestine, and Eliezer's eldest son Ben Zion (later named Itamar Ben Avi) became the first child to speak Hebrew as his native language.

The pronunciation of Sephardi Jews has become the norm for the pronunciation of modern Hebrew. In the 1980s, Hebrew became the language of instruction at the Alliance School (Jerusalem). In 1884, Ben-Yehuda founded the newspaper Ha-Tzvi (Russian: Gazelle; Eretz Ha-Tzvi - Land of Gazelle - one of the ancient poetic names of Israel). He is also credited with founding the Hebrew Committee, which became the Hebrew Academy in 1920, as well as the creation of the “Complete Dictionary of Ancient and Modern Hebrew.” Thanks to the work of Ben Yehuda and others like him, Hebrew is now spoken by approximately 8 million people.

Yiddish (from jüdisch, "Jewish")- the language of European Ashkenazi Jews, historically belonging to the Middle German dialects of the High German subgroup of the West Germanic group of the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. Yiddish appeared in the upper Rhine between the 10th and 14th centuries, incorporating a large array of words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and later from Romance and Slavic languages.

Yiddish has a unique grammar, within which the German root is combined with elements of other languages. Slavic elements were also introduced into the Germanic sound system of the language - for example, sibilant Slavic consonants.

Before World War II, 11 million Jews spoke Yiddish. Today the exact number of native speakers is unknown. Census data from the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st year suggest that the largest number of Yiddish-speaking Jews live in Israel (more than 200 thousand people), the USA (about 180 thousand), Russia (more than 30 thousand), Canada (more than 17 thousand) and Moldova ( about 17 thousand people). In total, according to various sources, there are from 500 thousand to 2 million people living on the planet who speak Yiddish.

Yiddish has Western and Eastern dialects, within which a large number of dialects are distinguished. Among Hasidim in the United States, a common dialect arose based on the Transylvanian version of Yiddish; in the USSR, a variant with the phonetics of the Belarusian-Lithuanian (northern) and the grammar of the Ukrainian (southeastern) dialect was considered as the standard Yiddish language. In the 20s of the last century, Yiddish was one of the four state languages ​​of the Belarusian SSR.

Yiddish, like Hebrew, uses the square Hebrew alphabet. The direction of the letter is also the same.

To learn about the fate of Yiddish, let us turn to the article “Israel Speaking Yiddish” by A. Lokshin:

"European Jews spoke Yiddish for over a thousand years. At the beginning of the 20th century, literature created in this language was presented to a number of Jewish theorists as a kind of “territory” for a people who had no homeland. There was such a concept as Yiddishland - a special Jewish fatherland. This term was first introduced by the Yiddishist and public figure Chaim Zhitlovsky, who wrote that the spiritual-national home is the place where “our folk language is present and where every breath and every word helps to maintain the national existence of our people.”».

However, in Palestine the Jews, whose “homeland” had hitherto been the text, created a physical home that was identified with one of the languages. Thus, the part was passed off as the whole. The choice of Hebrew as the national language was a direct result of the selective approach of early Zionist ideologists to various periods of the history of the Jewish people. The pre-diaspora existence, the pre-exile period, was surrounded by a halo of romanticism. Antiquity became a source of legitimization and a subject of admiration. The language of the Bible was perceived as part of an era of pure thoughts and goals. The culture of “Yiddishland” has undergone a decisive reassessment. With one revolutionary blow she was deprived of the place she occupied.

The traditional Zionist imperative was, among other things, that the new settlers who arrived in Palestine completely abandoned everything familiar and familiar to them in their old homeland, in the countries where they had lived for centuries. The key point for immigrants from Eastern Europe, according to traditionalist historians, was the abandonment of Yiddish in favor of Hebrew, the exclusivity of which was emphasized by Zionism. Zionist ideologists proceeded from the fact that a new nation should be formed in Eretz Israel, which had nothing in common with the Galut Jews. Yiddish was interpreted as a “jargon” associated with the culture of the rejected Galut. A number of leading Israeli researchers write about the personal and collective rejection of the Halutzim pioneers from the language of the Diaspora as the most important element of the Zionist “birth again”.

It is significant that it was the Hebrew language that became the basis for the new Israeli culture. The question is posed, which, in fact, the study is intended to answer: “What happened to Yiddish, its culture and the speakers of this language” in the country of Israel?

Yiddish was rejected not only as the language of Galut, but also as the language of the old Yishuv, with which the Zionist pioneers wanted nothing to do. Indeed, Jews of European origin living in Eretz Israel in the mid-19th century mostly spoke Yiddish. They existed through haluqa, a system of collections and donations made by Jewish communities outside the country. The Yiddish-speaking old Yishuv was strikingly different from the image of an independent and proactive Jewish community that the Zionists sought to create.

The rejection of Yiddish by the early Zionists was so total that at some stage they were ready to prefer to it not only Hebrew and the complex of cultural ideas associated with it, but even Arab culture. Driven by romantic European orientalist ideas, the halutzim viewed some of its elements (clothing, food, certain customs) as diametrically opposed to Jewish diaspora life and, therefore, suitable for “introducing” the “new Jews” into the environment.

Due to the fact that Hebraic ideology had a negative attitude towards the use of phrases and words from other Jewish languages ​​in Hebrew, Yiddish expressions were “pretended” to be foreign. In this way, many borrowings from Yiddish entered modern literary Hebrew relatively “conflict-free”, as well as into Hebrew slang of the 1940s and 1950s. Haver quotes Yosef Guri, who notes that about a quarter of the thousand idioms in spoken Hebrew are calques of Yiddish.

By 1914, the language of instruction in Jewish educational institutions in Eretz Israel was declared exclusively Hebrew. In 1923, the mandate authorities named Hebrew one of the official languages ​​of Palestine, along with English and Arabic. The leaders and ideologists of the Yishuv confidently created a dominant narrative in which the existence of an alternative culture or even a subculture with its own language was unacceptable, because it called into question the complete success of the Zionist project.

It seemed that the victory of the Hebrew was complete. The official attitude towards “forgetting” Yiddish was so total that even the long conflict between Hebrew and Yiddish was crowded out of collective memory. Thus, one of the pillars of Israeli historiography, Shmuel Etinger, in his seminal work, mentions... the Hebrew-German “language dispute” of 1913 as a key event leading to the victory of Hebrew in Yishuv schools (then the Jewish-German charity organization “Ezra” advocated the introduction of German as the language of instruction in technical schools of the Yishuv, which caused a sharp response).

The majority of residents of the new Yishuv (the Jewish community after the 1880s) in the first decades of its existence remained natural speakers of Yiddish and continued to speak this language. At that time, the Yishuv was not yet able to fully function using Hebrew alone. Neither the founders of Tel Aviv nor the Zionist immigrants in the new settlements began speaking Hebrew overnight. However, this did not stop them from often using the adjective “Hebrew” instead of “Jewish”: Tel Aviv - the “Hebrew” quarter of Jaffa, “Hebrew” workers, etc.

The order in which Yiddish and Hebrew coexisted in the Jewish communities of Europe and each of them took its place in a system established for centuries, was radically transformed in Zionist Palestine. Hebrew was intended for everyday use, but also remained a language of high culture, and Yiddish was completely delegitimized. Officially it became an anomaly, although it remained the de facto language of many, if not most, people, including the 1930s. Ben-Gurion’s words are symptomatic that in propaganda the Zionists are forced to use many languages, but for “our cultural work, Hebrew remains the only language.” In essence, this approach returned the situation to the traditional division into the language of high culture (Hebrew) and the utilitarian language of everyday life (Yiddish).

The dual position of Yiddish was that it was a mother tongue, both loved and rejected for ideological reasons. Leading Israeli historians usually ignore the psychological difficulties of immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe “growing into” Hebrew. Haver's research allows us to talk about a cultural and mental split that occurred at the intersection of ideology and personal experience.

Haver notes that Israeli literary historians who study the history of Hebrew culture essentially ignore the existence of Yiddish literature in Palestine. Meanwhile, during the period of the second Aliyah (1904–1914), Yiddish literature developed quite rapidly in Eretz Israel. The possibilities of Hebrew literature of that time were very limited, since the normative style of new prose in Hebrew arose at the end of the 19th century, that is, even before spoken Hebrew became a reality.

The work of a considerable number of Yishuv writers does not fit into the Zionist narrative. They wrote in Yiddish or both Yiddish and Hebrew. The vitality of Yiddish literature in the Yishuv is explained, among other things, by the fact that, in comparison with Hebrew literature, Yiddish literature was diverse, flexible, and provided more opportunities for reflecting social and ideological differences in society. This allowed the Yiddish writers of Palestine, who shared Zionist aspirations, to create a polyphony that reflected the heterogeneity of the early Yishuv.

The writers whose work is analyzed in the book reflect various generational, ideological and aesthetic trends. The author examines the work of Zalmen Broches, a writer of the Second Aliyah period, whose early works were largely non-Zionist in nature and offered a more complex and varied vision of Palestine than the books of some of his (and our) contemporaries, who idealized the Zionist identity of the early settlers. Another of Haver's heroes, Avrom Rives, also sought to reflect the cultural and ideological diversity of the Yishuv, his works being “populated” by Arabs and Christians. Until her death in the mid-1960s, the poetess Rikuda Potash also wrote in Yiddish...

Moreover, Hebrew literature was also not free from Yiddish influences. Analyzing the construction of sentences and phrases in such undisputed Israeli classics as Yosef Chaim Brenner and the early Agnon, Haver notes the decisive influence on them of the linguistic structures of Yiddish. Brenner was generally one of the few public figures of the Yishuv who allowed himself to speak of Yiddish as a “Zionist language,” “the language of our mothers that bubbles in our mouths.”

Haver not only returns the Yiddish culture of the Yishuv to the reader and introduces essentially unknown texts into circulation - she draws a continuous line, offers an alternative to the generally accepted view of the history of Israeli literature, and builds its “shadow” version. She manages to prove that Yiddish literature was very popular and widespread in the Yishuv - suffice it to say that between 1928 and 1946, 26 literary magazines in Yiddish were published in Eretz Israel. Moreover, at the end of the 1920s, Yiddish culture in the Yishuv was experiencing a kind of “renaissance” (including in the new “Hebrew” city of Tel Aviv - in 1927, the number of reader requests for newspapers in Hebrew and Yiddish in the Tel Aviv public library Aviva was about the same). This is partly due to the arrival of immigrants from the fourth aliyah (1924–1928) (the so-called “Grabski aliyah” from Poland), who widely used Yiddish and were often far from Zionism (it is no coincidence that some contemporaries and researchers accused them of introducing galut into Palestinian reality values).

At the same time, in 1927, the board of directors of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem approved a plan to create a Yiddish department at the university. But at that time it turned out to be impossible to implement this project. The opening of the department was opposed by influential Zionists (including Menachem Usyshkin), as well as by the radical organization Meginei Ha-Safa Ha-Ivrit (“Brigade of Defenders of the Hebrew Language”), which consisted mainly of students from the Herzliya gymnasium, who organized the persecution of Chaim Zhitlovsky during his visit to Palestine back in 1914. The "Brigade", founded in 1923, was active until 1936, especially active in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In public opinion, she was associated with right-wing Zionist revisionists. Its activities were directed mainly against the use of Yiddish (it is significant that the English language did not cause any negative reaction among the members of the “brigade”). In connection with the proposed opening of the department, posters were issued in mourning frames: “The Department of Jargon - the destruction of the Hebrew University” and “The Department of Jargon is an idol in the Hebrew Temple” (the Hebrew University was compared to the Temple in many publications and speeches of that time). As we see, the young secular zealots of Hebrew wrote about Yiddish as a tselem ba-heikhal - a pagan idol in the Temple - that is, they used rabbinic sources to compare the intention to found a Yiddish department with the desecration of the Temple by the Greco-Syrian conquerors and Roman emperors in the 1st century AD. e. Yiddish, the language of a thousand-year-old culture, was demonized as an alien, illegal “jargon” that threatened unity, posing a danger to the formation of a new Hebrew nation, the symbol of which was the university - its “temple.”

And only in 1951, after the destruction of Yiddish culture as a result of the Holocaust and the policy of state anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, as well as after the creation of the State of Israel, when Yiddish no longer posed a threat to Hebrew, the Yiddish department was finally opened. Its creation marked the beginning of the legitimization of Yiddish in Israeli culture. Dov Sadan, speaking at the opening of the department, said that Yiddish helped preserve Hebrew. However, even here Yiddish was relegated to the status of a secondary cultural phenomenon existing in the service of Hebrew. The hierarchy of the two languages ​​became obvious, with Hebrew being the master and Yiddish the servant.

However, as Haver has shown, the role of Yiddish in the life of the Yishuv clearly went beyond the function of preserving the revived Hebrew. The same Dov Sadan, who described Yiddish as a servant of Hebrew, in 1970 used completely different terms. Speaking about Jewish bilingualism to a Yiddish audience in New York, Sadan described the unique vision of the Yiddish writers of the Yishuv: “This particular group was important - it opened up new horizons and a new land for Yiddish literature: the Land of Israel, not as childhood nostalgia or tourist topic, but as a tangible everyday experience of the development and struggle of the Yishuv.”

Haver does not concern the period of existence of the State of Israel. But we know that Yiddish was never expelled from collective memory and was not forgotten. With the beginning of the great aliyah from the USSR/CIS, which coincided with the awakening in Israeli society of interest in its roots and the cultural heritage of the Diaspora, the language of European Jewry received state support. Currently, there are Yiddish clubs throughout the country, a Yiddish theater operates in Tel Aviv, a number of Israeli authors write in Yiddish (most of them come from the Soviet Union), Yiddish is studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University and fiction in this language. In some schools in Israel, Yiddish is included in the curriculum."

Interesting facts about Yiddish:

1) At the beginning of the 20th century, Yiddish was one of the official languages ​​of the Belarusian Soviet Republic, and the famous slogan: “Workers of all countries unite!”, written in Yiddish, immortalized the coat of arms of the republic.

Proletarier fun ale lander, farajnikt sikh!

2) One of the reasons for the adoption of Hebrew as the official state language is the incredible similarity of Yiddish with German, which was completely inappropriate after World War II.

3) Some words of Russian slang migrated to us from Yiddish, for example: ksiva, pots, parasha, fraer, shmon, etc.

4) Tel Aviv University linguistics professor Paul Wexler put forward the hypothesis that Yiddish originated not from the Germanic, but from the Slavic language group, but there were practically no fans of this statement.

5) Three sayings that best explained the difference between the two languages ​​approximately 50-100 years ago:

They learn Hebrew, but they know Yiddish.

He who does not know Hebrew is not educated; he who does not know Yiddish is not a Jew.

God speaks Yiddish on weekdays and Hebrew on Saturday.

All these sayings tell us that a century ago Yiddish was a colloquial, everyday language that absolutely everyone knew, and Hebrew, on the contrary, was the sacred language of the Torah, familiar to not every Jew. But those days have passed and everything has changed exactly the opposite.

Hebrew-Spanish (Sephardic, Judesmo, Ladino) , the spoken and literary language of Jews of Spanish descent. Before World War II, a significant number of speakers of Judeo-Spanish lived in Greece and Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and fewer in Romania. In the 1970s the number of speakers of Jewish-Spanish in the world reached 360 thousand, of which 300 thousand lived in Israel, twenty thousand each in Turkey and the USA, and fifteen thousand in Morocco.

Much of the vocabulary and grammatical structure of Judeo-Spanish can be traced back to the Spanish dialects of the Middle Ages, although there are also strong influences from Catalan and Portuguese. The influence of Hebrew is manifested mainly in the field of religious terminology. The vocabulary of the Hebrew-Spanish language contains a significant number of borrowings from Turkish, Arabic, French and Italian. In the eastern Mediterranean region, Judeo-Spanish is called by various names: Judesmo, Ladino, Romans, Spagnol. Native speakers of Judeo-Spanish have been using it since the 19th century. the name Judesmo, literally “Jewishness” (cf. Yiddish - Yiddishkeit). Although the name “Ladino” has become widespread, in modern science the name “Jewish-Spanish language” is accepted, while “Ladino” is assigned only to the language of Bible translations, which contains a lot of borrowings and distortions from Hebrew and copies the syntax of Hebrew. A dialect of Judeo-Spanish spoken in North Africa is called Haketia.

Hebrew-Spanish uses the Hebrew alphabet with a number of modifications to convey specific phonemes. Early texts are written in square letters with or without vowels, but most printed publications use the so-called Rashi script. In Turkey, since 1928, the Hebrew-Spanish language has used the Latin alphabet in print.

According to one point of view, the Jews living in Spain used the same language as the non-Jews, but their language retained many archaisms and acquired an independent existence after the expulsion of the Jews from the country in 1492. According to another point of view, widely accepted in modern science, Judeo-Spanish, long before 1492, had distinctive linguistic features, not only because of its presence of Hebrew words, but also because of the influence of other Judeo-Romance languages ​​and its greater susceptibility to Arabic influence.

In the field of phonetics, Judeo-Spanish is characterized by diphthongization of the vowels o > ue and e > ie, which is also common in Castilian Spanish, but in many words there is no diphthongization. In the Hebrew-Spanish language, the distinction between three groups of consonants is largely preserved.

Morphological differences from Spanish are expressed in changes in the gender of some nouns; singular forms are used to mean plural and vice versa; some pronominal forms are used differently than in standard Spanish; archaic forms are preserved in the conjugation of a number of present tense verbs; the use of diminutive forms of nouns and adjectives is more common than in modern Spanish.

The syntax of Judeo-Spanish, influenced by different languages, differs significantly from the syntax of Spanish.

Languages ​​close to Judeo-Spanish and apparently absorbed by it are Judeo-Catalan, the language of people from Eastern Spain, and Judeo-Portuguese. The latter received independent development in Holland, Northern Germany and Latin America. In the 18th century The Jewish-Portuguese language was adopted by the blacks of Dutch Guiana (modern Suriname), who called it Joutongo (Hebrew). Only in the 19th century. they switched to Dutch.

YIDDISH (ייִדישע שפּראַך), the language spoken (and partially continues to be spoken) by Ashkenazi Jews (see Ashkenazim) over the last millennium. This language, formed as a fusion of components of different languages, gradually began to perform a wide range of communicative functions. Since the society that used it achieved one of the highest degrees of cultural activity in its spoken language, Yiddish represents an unusually vivid evidence of the characteristics of Jewish culture.

Since its inception in the 10th century. and until the end of the 18th century. Yiddish was the predominant means of oral communication among Jews from Holland to the Ukraine, as well as in Ashkenazi settlements in Italy, the Balkans, and Eretz Israel. Along with Hebrew, it was also an important means of literary and written communication (see Yiddish literature). During the era of emancipation, there was a strong desire to move away from Yiddish to non-Jewish vernacular languages. Waves of emigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. led to the widespread spread of Yiddish in North America and a number of Latin American countries, to the emergence of Yiddish centers in England, France, and South Africa (followed by the gradual transition of Jews, descendants of Eastern European emigrants, to the languages ​​of the surrounding population). The development of the press, theater, secular education system, and research institutes led to a varied use of the Yiddish language.

Both in the number of speakers and in the volume of original literature, Yiddish for a long time occupied first place among the Jewish languages. The number of Yiddish speakers, estimated at 11 million before World War II, declined sharply as a result of the Holocaust and the mass conversion of Jews to other languages ​​that were prevalent in their environment. In most countries this transition was made voluntarily. The exception is the Soviet Union, where the change of Yiddish to the languages ​​of the surrounding population (mainly Russian and, to a much lesser extent, Ukrainian), which also began voluntarily, was accelerated by official measures taken in the second half of the 1940s. and in the early 1950s. repressive in nature (closing of Jewish educational and cultural institutions, liquidation of literature, press and theater, arrest and physical destruction of Yiddish cultural figures). Limited resumption of publications and concert and theater activities in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s. was in the nature of a political and propaganda action aimed at satisfying world public opinion. The total number of Yiddish speakers today can be estimated at no more than two million people (mostly people of the older generation). Among Ashkenazi Jews around the world, knowledge of Yiddish as a second language is widespread. There is a revival of interest in Yiddish among young people. Yiddish departments exist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Columbia University in New York. In addition, Yiddish is studied and taught in many universities in the USA, France, Germany and other countries. The main center for the study of Yiddish is the Institute of Higher Education (New York), which carries out normative activities to standardize Yiddish spelling and terminology.

Modern literary Yiddish. Over the centuries, Yiddish has spread over vast territories, and although its regional varieties differ from each other, certain norms have always been observed in written communication. Such normativity characterizes both the old literary language, which dominated until the beginning of the 19th century, and modern literary Yiddish, which has developed as an interregional language since the middle of the last century. The relative homogeneity of literary Yiddish is a remarkable phenomenon because it developed without the help of those unifying factors provided by the nation-state (especially through a unified school system). The following sections describe mainly the structure of literary Yiddish.

Phonological system. The Yiddish phoneme system is determined mainly by those German dialects from which it borrowed its basic lexical composition.

Yiddish has expiratory stress, and although the location of word stress is not always completely predictable, there are several basic characteristic word stress distributions. A triangular vowel system with three degrees of opening and two positions of articulation.

The most characteristic diphthongs are the combination of [e], [a], [o] with [i].

The consonant system is highly symmetrical. Unlike the German language, the series of plosives and fricatives differ not in tension, but in voicing - obviously under Slavic influence, which also affected the emergence of palatal consonants. Unlike German, the occurrence of voiced consonants in the outcome of words is also observed. Due to the influx of words of Hebrew-Aramaic and Slavic origin, numerous initial consonant combinations unusual for the German language penetrated into Yiddish (for example, bd-, px-).

Regional varieties of Yiddish show great differences in the vowel system, ranging from the opposition between short open i and long closed i, and ending with models with complete parallel rows of short and long vowels. Also found in dialects ü and diphthongs ending in - w. However, literary Yiddish exhibits the greatest diversity in the consonant system. Some dialects lack a phoneme h, some differ in fewer palatals, and Western Yiddish does not differentiate in voicing. Articulation r varies in different areas from r apical to (mostly) r uvular.

Writing system. The writing is based on the Hebrew alphabet with some standard diacritics: אַ, אָ, בֿ, וּ, יִ, יַי, כּ, פּ, פֿ, שֹ, תּ (For the peculiarities of Yiddish writing in the Soviet Union and a number of other countries, see below.) Most words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic have retained their traditional spelling. The rest of the vocabulary is, in general, a system of one-to-one correspondence between sounds, on the one hand, and letters or their combinations, on the other. At the same time, of course, established Jewish traditions are preserved, concerning, for example, the graphics of certain final letters, or the rule about the initial unpronounceable א. In the process of evolution in Yiddish, the tendency to systematically use the letter א to indicate the sound [a], אָ - to convey [o]; כ is used to convey [χ], וו - to convey [v]. Over time, the use of the letter ע as a symbol of the vowel sound [e] became established. This innovation, characteristic of the Ashkenazi pronunciation of Hebrew, which lost the consonant sound indicated by the letter ע, dates back to the 14th century. The methods of rendering diphthongs and unstressed vowels, as well as the rules of word division, varied significantly in different periods of history. Nowadays, a diphthong is indicated by the combination וי, a diphthong by the combination יי, a diphthong by the same combination with an additional diacritic sign - ײַ (the diacritic sign is not used in all publications). [ž] and [č] are represented by the digraphs זש and טש, respectively.

Although some publishers still do not comply with all the rules, deviations from them are minor. Since the 1920s in the Soviet Union (and then in some communist and pro-Soviet publishing houses in a number of other countries) the principle of historical-etymological spelling of words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin was rejected and the phonetic principle of spelling was adopted (either because of anti-traditionalist ideology or because of linguistic rationalism) . In the Soviet Union, in 1961, they returned to writing final letters.

Morphology and syntax. The basic "cut" of the Yiddish grammatical system follows the model of the German language, but with a significant number of innovations. New patterns of word order have emerged in syntax. The word order in the main and subordinate clauses became the same. The distance between nouns and their modifiers, as well as between parts of verb phrases, has been reduced.

The name system continues to be characterized by four cases and three genders. However, the genitive case became possessive, losing most of its other functions. The accusative case is omitted after prepositions. The Germanic distinction between weak and strong declension of adjectives has disappeared, but a new distinction has emerged between modifiable predicative adjectives. Many nouns were distributed among different plural patterns. Under the influence of Slavic languages, diminutive forms of nouns and adjectives developed. In the verb, all tenses and moods, except for the present tense of the indicative mood, began to be formed analytically. A consistent distinction between the perfect and imperfect forms, alien to the structure of the Germanic languages, developed, and a number of new forms appeared, expressing specific and voicing shades.

The present participle also acquired new functions. Conjugation forms have in many cases undergone innovation, and new classes of periphrastic conjugation have emerged.

Regional differences in the grammar of spoken Yiddish most affected the system of case and gender. In central and northeastern Yiddish, the distinction between the dative and accusative cases has disappeared. In the northeast, the neuter gender disappeared and a new system of quasi-genders with a high degree of semantic motivation developed. The greatest number of innovations is found in the eastern dialects. Here, the most widespread use of inflected adjectives as part of predicates, as well as new specific shades of verbs.

Vocabulary composition. The Yiddish dictionary is characterized by the presence of words of various origins: Hebrew-Aramaic, Romance, Slavic and “international”. However, the mechanical attribution of words of this language to their primary etymological sources is an extremely unrealistic approach to the characteristics of Yiddish. Yes, word mench(`person`) is formally related to the German word Mensch, but in Yiddish it acquired a number of important additional meanings (`employee`, `reliable, mature person`), which are lost if we proceed from the German original “external form” of this word. Similar remarks are true regarding words of other origins. Yes, in a word unterzogn(`whisper in the ear`) both the prefix and the root resemble the German unter and sagen, but the German word untersagen has no corresponding meaning. The meaning of this word in Yiddish can be much better explained as a translation from a Slavic verb with a prefix (cf. Ukrainian pid-kazati). The meaning of many common words in Yiddish (for example, oiszong- “to reveal a secret, a mystery,” etc.) cannot be explained either through German or through Slavic languages. It is also necessary to keep in mind that Yiddish uses only a small part of the vocabulary of the languages ​​from which the Yiddish vocabulary was borrowed; on the other hand, Yiddish retained some elements of the original languages, which they themselves had ceased to be used. An example from the German language is the words shver(`father-in-law`, `father-in-law`) and let's go(`son-in-law`).

Contrary to widespread belief among non-specialists, there is no strict correspondence between the functions of elements of the Yiddish vocabulary and their origins. Thus, various words from Hebrew and Aramaic can have solemn, neutral, and even vernacular connotations depending on the individual word. The nature of the process of mixing heterogeneous elements in Yiddish does not allow us to accurately determine the percentage of words from different sources in this language. The task is further complicated by the existence of such “adhesions” as mefunice(`fastidious woman`), which combine origins from two sources - mefunac(`spoiled') from Hebrew and -ice from Slavic languages. Few words of Romance origin survive in modern Yiddish; however, they figure prominently in his vocabulary (e.g. Leyenen- `read`, benchn- `bless`). They represent traces of the lexical heritage of early times, when emigrants from Romance countries who arrived in Germany contributed to a new language. From Slavic languages, Yiddish borrowed not only thousands of lexical units, but also numerous productive models for the formation of new words. Among the Slavic languages, the most prominent places in terms of the degree of influence on Yiddish are occupied by Polish, Ukrainian and Belarusian. The past connections between Yiddish and Czech and its relatively recent contacts with the Russian language left a much smaller trace. In some cases, competing words of the same meaning from different Slavic languages ​​entered Yiddish. So, for example, the word pieschen(`to pamper`) of Polish origin exists alongside the word posten, borrowed from Ukrainian. In other cases, one word becomes widespread in Yiddish (for example, blond- `wander` from Polish).

Dialect differences. European Yiddish is divided on a territorial basis into two main categories - Western and Eastern. In the western regions, roughly covering Holland, Alsace and Lorraine, Switzerland and most of Germany, there are also peculiarities in the pronunciation of Hebrew in synagogue services. Phonologically, Western Yiddish is generally distinguished by the use of the long sound [ā] in words such as Kafn Flas(koifn fleisch - `buy meat`). The Yiddish language of the countries located south of the Carpathian Mountains occupies an intermediate position between the West and the East. In the western part of this region - in Bohemia, Moravia, western Slovakia, western Hungary - Jews speak a dialect lexically close to Eastern European and phonologically close to Western European. In the east of this region - in the valleys of Hungary, in Transylvania and Transcarpathia - Yiddish is the result of a mixture of the western Transcarpathian dialect with the dialects of the Hasidim who moved here from Galicia.

The eastern area of ​​distribution of Yiddish can be divided into three clearly defined regions: northeastern (Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia), central (Poland, western Galicia) and southeastern (Ukraine with part of eastern Galicia, Romania), occupying an intermediate position between the first two . Using the same example phrase coifn flash, we get in the northeast Caifn Fleisch, in the central region Koifn Fleisch and as if a compromise option coifn flash in the southeast.

The literary norm as such is fixed in written Yiddish ( buhsprakh) and usually coincides with the northeastern dialect. However, when reading texts, both book and various dialect pronunciation options are equally valid.

Historical development. It can be established with complete confidence that the most important event in the history of the development of Yiddish was its penetration into the Slavic environment and moving away from the German sphere of influence. Due to the influence of Slavic languages, the grammatical structure of Yiddish changed and its genetic connection with the German language weakened. The main milestones in the history of the development of Yiddish are considered to be 1250, 1500 and 1700.

The oldest period in the history of the development of Yiddish is considered to be the time when Jews did not yet have stable contact with the sphere of influence of Slavic languages. The end point of this period is considered to be 1250. During this era, Jews from northern France and northern Italy, whose spoken language was a dialect they called “ la'az” (see Judeo-French), first penetrated into Lorraine, where they apparently encountered several dialectal varieties of the German language. A method of enriching the vocabulary of a language, which was resorted to by Jews who spoke la'az- borrowing words from the sources of the sacred language of the Jewish people - was also used at this stage of the development of Yiddish. In exactly the same way they followed what was accepted in la'az a method of expressing spoken language in writing using the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.

During the subsequent ancient period of the development of Yiddish (1250–1500), Jews whose spoken language was Yiddish came into contact with Slavs and Jews who spoke Slavic languages ​​- first in southeastern Germany and Bohemia, then in Poland, and later in more eastern regions. Both in the numerous communities founded in the new lands, and in the Jewish settlements that already existed there, whose inhabitants had previously spoken Slavic languages, Yiddish became the generally accepted language. During this period, even before the invention of printing, a relatively homogeneous literary Yiddish also emerged.

The middle period of the development of Yiddish (1500–1700) is characterized by a significant expansion of the territory in which Ashkenazim lived and, consequently, an increase in the percentage of Jews speaking Yiddish outside Germany and areas adjacent to the German-speaking cities of the Slavic lands. The monuments of literary Yiddish of this period are prose and poetic works (see Yiddish literature). Private correspondence, recordings of witness testimony, satirical couplets, etc. serve as valuable material for the study of spoken Yiddish of that time.

The period of modern Yiddish. After 1700, Yiddish began a slow but almost steady decline in the West. Around 1820, new norms based on Eastern Yiddish began to take shape. Yiddish becomes the language of organized social movements of the Jewish masses and rapidly developing literary activity. The linguistic self-awareness of its speakers is increasing, which reaches its peak at the Chernivtsi Conference on the Yiddish Language (1908). The subsequent introduction of teaching in Yiddish in schools, research work and organizational activities contributed to the expansion of the vocabulary and stabilization of the language. During the period between the two world wars, a network of educational and cultural institutions in Yiddish existed in Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Romania, and the Soviet Union. In a number of regions of the Soviet Union with a significant Jewish population, Yiddish also enjoyed the status of an official language in court and lower bodies of local administration (for more details, see the relevant sections in the articles about these countries). Modernist poetry turned out to be especially inventive in developing the internal possibilities of Yiddish (see Di Junge, In zikh).

Yiddish and Hebrew. The main sources of borrowings from Hebrew for Yiddish were the texts of the Pentateuch, prayers and technical terms of Talmudic and rabbinic literature (from the Talmudic and rabbinic texts a certain number of Aramaisms entered Yiddish). IN lately Yiddish is, of course, significantly influenced by Israeli Hebrew, and this influence is noticeable both in Israel itself and beyond its borders. As a result, words such as traditional coexist in Yiddish aliyah(challenge in the synagogue to read a passage from the Torah) and modern Aliya(immigration to Israel).

Modern Hebrew has been significantly influenced by Yiddish, especially since the late 19th century. until the 50s 20th century, when the majority of the Yishuv were Ashkenazi Jews. Under the influence of Yiddish, the phonological structure of the revived Hebrew changed, new phraseological units and calques from Yiddish arose: lakahat el ha-lev(from Yiddish nemen tsum hartsn- `take to heart`), lekashkesh bakumkum (hack a teapot- `chat`), etc., as well as direct borrowings: schnorer- `beggar`, Blintzes- `pancakes`, alte zahn- `rags`, etc.

Studying Yiddish. Although the first attempts to study Yiddish date back to the 16th century, up to the 1920s. This was done only by individuals with various scientific backgrounds. In the 1920s in some countries, scientific institutions were created wholly or partially dedicated to the study of Yiddish (at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian SSR, the Jewish Scientific Institute of the IVO in Vilnius). These institutions became centers for the systematic collection of linguistic materials and the preparation of fundamental works, including dictionaries and dialectological atlases. The publications of these institutions provided a scientific forum for Yiddish researchers; For the first time, it became possible to train scientific personnel specializing in the study of Yiddish. Some of these institutions played the role of authorities, establishing spelling standards and uniform terminology.

The suppression of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union and the Catastrophe of European Jewry led to the destruction of a significant part of the scientific personnel involved in the study of Yiddish. After World War II, the United States became the center of Yiddish studies. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the study of Yiddish is carried out in close coordination with the study of other Jewish disciplines.

In 1906, the aspiring Jewish writer Zalman Shneur entered the University of Bern. The chances of admission were slim: how could a young man pass an exam in written German if he had not even mastered spoken language properly?

Shneur found an original way to get out of the difficulty: he wrote an essay on a free topic in his native language - Yiddish, using the Latin alphabet.

“I must admit, I was very pleased to find in your text old German words that have been preserved in the Yiddish language.” This funny story well illustrates the relationship between Yiddish and German. The two languages ​​are so close that sometimes you can hear: “Yiddish is not a language at all, but some kind of distorted German.” This opinion is as erroneous as the assertion that the Ukrainian language is a distorted Russian. German and Yiddish, just like Russian and Ukrainian, are independent languages, but very close relatives.

If we depict the genealogy of all languages ​​that have ever existed and currently exist in the form of a tree, we will see that German and Yiddish descended from a common branch - one of the Old German dialects, presumably Middle High German. Those of us who now live in southwest Germany, in the Rhine Valley, are exactly where most scholars believe Yiddish originated. Just as twin brothers become less and less alike over the years, so Yiddish and its German “twin” gradually, over the centuries, changed each in their own way.

And if in the 10th century the language of the Jews living in Germany differed from German mainly in that it used quite a lot of words from Hebrew, today even native Germans who are interested in Yiddish have to seriously study it. Listen to Yiddish. It contains a lot of words of Germanic origin, but their pronunciation is very different from German, and some words will be completely unfamiliar - these are borrowings from Hebrew.

It was these that the German language, in turn, adopted from Yiddish, so when we say “this word came to German from Yiddish,” let’s not forget that in fact these words are Hebrew, and Yiddish only served as a conductor for them. Thanks to Yiddish, many borrowings from Hebrew have become so firmly established in the German language that, as one journalist aptly noted, “even neo-Nazis sometimes speak Hebrew without realizing it.”

I sometimes have to visit the small Jewish museum of Emmendingen, a town in southwestern Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg. Before 1940, Jews made up 13% of the city's population. It is not surprising that Hebrew words have been preserved in the local (Baden) dialect to this day. Through the efforts of local historians, a list of 70 such words was compiled, which can be seen in the museum. It is interesting to watch museum visitors familiarize themselves with the list.

Every now and then they are surprised: “How? Is Mischpoche also a Hebrew word? Maloche... I remember that’s what my grandmother often said...” Let’s take a closer look at this list. Words are quite easily divided into several groups. The first will include those that reflected specific Jewish realities, the Jewish way of life and, naturally, had no analogues in German: Schabbes - Jewish Saturday, Matze - matzah, Goj - not a Jew, koscher - clean, suitable, made according to the rules. The expression “das ist nicht ganz koscher” (the matter is not entirely clean) has taken root in the German language.

In the second group we will collect words related to everyday life, household: Bajes - house, Bosser - meat, Chulew - milk, Ssus - horse, Bore - cow, Eigel - calf. There are quite a lot of words that reflect financial activity: Gudel in these parts was called a thousand (from the Hebrew gadol - big), Mejes - a hundred (from mea - hundred), Mu - fifty dollars (from maot - coins). Expressions meaning bankruptcy have enriched not only the Baden dialect, but also literary German, and you will find them in any dictionary: Pleite - bankruptcy, Pleite machen - to go bankrupt, das ist eine große Pleite - this is a complete collapse, machulle (machulle machen) - to go bankrupt , er ist machulle - he failed.

This, of course, is not an accident: Jews were honored to be creditors of German entrepreneurs. A very interesting group of words that were “adopted” into the German language for their special expressiveness. They conveyed some special shade of meaning, so they were and are still used in parallel with German words of similar meaning. In the south of Germany you can hear the word Kalaumis - (nonsense, nonsense, nonsense).

In Yiddish the word chaloimes is used in the same sense and goes back to the Hebrew сhalom (dream). The Berlin dialect, thanks to the Hebrew word dawka (out of stubbornness, on the contrary), acquired the expression aus Daffke tun (to do something out of stubbornness). Many of these particularly apt words are used throughout Germany. So the word Maloche (from the Hebrew melacha - work prohibited on Saturday) means painstaking, exhausting, manual work in German.

Accordingly, the verb malochen (malochnen, malochemen) is translated as “work hard.” In order to translate the famous Hebrew word Zores, the German-Russian dictionary needed as many as a dozen words: need, trouble, plight, annoyance, grief, trouble, confusion, confusion, chaos, turmoil. Especially many Hebrew words came into the German language that denote all sorts of strange personalities: Meschugge (madman, eccentric, absurd person), Golem (image, ghost, phantom), Kaffer (simp, hillbilly, from Hebrew kfar - village), Schlemihl (loser ), Schlamassel (one who is always unlucky).

The last two words are very firmly established in the German language. Schlamassel is not only an unlucky person, but also a careless housewife, a nuisance, a confusion, an awkward situation. The word Schlemihl became especially common in the early 19th century, after the romantic writer Chamisso gave the hapless hero of his story, a man who had lost his shadow, the surname Schlemihl (Adalbert von Chamisso, “Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte”). Yiddish (or rather, again, Hebrew) enriched not only literary German, but also... thieves' jargon.

This happened, of course, not because Jews were especially actively in contact with criminals. Wanting to make their speech as incomprehensible as possible to the uninitiated, the “language creators” of the underworld borrowed words from an “exotic” language or used already known Hebrew words in a special sense. Thus, the completely respectable word Mischpoche (family, relatives) acquired the meaning of “rabble, gang, clique” in thieves’ jargon. The neutral word achаl "(eat, eat) acquired a rough meaning: acheln - eat, shovel, chop.

Well, the words Ganove (thief, swindler), ganoven (to steal), Ganoventum (theft, fraud) were written into German jargon without changing the original meaning: in Hebrew ganaw means “thief”. It is curious that Russian thieves' jargon also borrowed words from Hebrew. The well-known word “shmon” (search, raid) comes from the Hebrew word schmone - “eight” and got its meaning because the police carried out raids at eight o’clock in the evening. The word chevra in Hebrew means "fellowship, community."

In Russian thieves' jargon, it received a similar, but far from so respectable meaning: hevra are lads, dubious friends, a gang of thieves. The word "ksiva" (in the language of prisoners "documents") comes from the very significant word in Hebrew ktuba - marriage certificate. Let's leave, however, the colorful, but not very nice topic of thieves' jargon and, since we have already started talking about the connections of Yiddish with the Russian language, let's see how the fate of Yiddish turned out in the Slavic lands. Yiddish can be called a travel language.

Starting from the 13th century, Jews, fleeing cruel persecution, moved from the banks of the Rhine further and further east - to Bohemia, Moravia, Poland, Lithuania. In the 17th century, history tragically repeated itself: Jews moved from Poland to Ukraine. Along its centuries-old path, Yiddish interacted with at least a dozen languages. Naturally, the version of Yiddish that remained in its homeland, Germany, accumulated differences from its brother - the German language - not as rapidly as the Yiddish of Eastern European Jews.

Just as in Germany, Yiddish became a connecting link between languages ​​in Eastern Europe: thanks to Yiddish, words of Germanic origin and individual words from Hebrew penetrated into the Slavic languages. Let us recall a few words that came into the Russian language from Hebrew through Yiddish. Hochma - a joke, a witty trick (from chochma - reason); challah - a loaf in the shape of a braid; The Talmud is a thick, sophisticated book.

How did the expression “raise up the hubbub” come into Russian? shout loudly? The word “gewalt” (violence) was shouted by Jews in moments of danger; in Russian in such cases they shout “guard”. The connections between Yiddish and the Russian language were, however, not as strong as with Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish. What do you say, for example, about this Belarusian proverb: Not good reydele (from “reden” - to speak), but good meinele (from “meinen” - to think).

In a Belarusian village they said about a girl who had many gentlemen: she has got hosans (from the Hebrew shatan - groom). About a young woman who enjoyed success with men, they noticed: bokhers go to her at night (from the Hebrew bachur - guy). Yiddish not only penetrated the languages ​​of neighboring peoples, but also changed under their influence, “gaining” verbal wealth from them. Gradually it fragmented into dialects, which moved further and further from the original Germanic basis and were more and more different from each other.

For example, the German “klug und gro?” in the Lithuanian dialect of Yiddish it would sound like “klug in grei?”, and in Galician it would sound like “klig in grojs”. Having absorbed many of the languages ​​of neighboring peoples, Yiddish turned into a fusion language: experts believe that in the end no more than 75% of Germanic words remained in Yiddish, about 15% of words came from Hebrew, and about 10% from Eastern European languages, primarily Slavic. 10 percent... It doesn't seem like much. But think about it: every tenth word in the language of Eastern European Jews had Slavic roots, and these 10 percent were also different for different dialects!

Mame, tate (father), laske, bulbe, (potato), blinze (pancakes), kasche (buckwheat porridge), take (so), sejde (grandfather), bobe (grandmother), pripetschik (stove), samovar, bublitschkes ( bagels) ... These are just some of the words that came to Yiddish from Slavic languages. This list goes on and on. Many readers of “Partner”, who are familiar with Yiddish first-hand, will probably remember Ukrainian words familiar from childhood, “registered” in Yiddish, and will give examples of how, thanks to Yiddish, Slavic languages ​​have been enriched.

There is an opinion that even the famous word “cibulya”, so similar to the German “Zwiebel”, came into the Ukrainian language from Yiddish. In the witty jokes, jokes, sayings and sayings that Yiddish is so rich in, Germanic and Slavic words were easily combined. Thus, the popular and very polysemantic expression “a gitz in steam locomotive” comes from the German eine Hitze (in Yiddish, a gitz is heat, ardor) and the Russian “steam locomotive”. A gitz in locomotive is meaningless troubles, stupid hype, empty talk, outdated news.

Interestingly, over time the expression acquired additional meaning. “A gitz in” was pronounced “agitsyn”, and due to its consonance, “agitsin steam locomotive” became associated with the propaganda trains of the first post-revolutionary years. As a result, the noisy undertakings of the Soviet government, which soon disappeared without a trace, like locomotive smoke, quite rightly began to be called “Agitsyn locomotive.”

The ability to give your own words and master others lies in the very nature of Yiddish. When you hear this affectionate, caustic-sharp and piercingly sad language, when its unique intonations touch your soul, when you catch in the flow of speech either the familiar German, or the exotic Hebrew, or the native Slavic sound, you inevitably wonder: what is the secret of the charm of Yiddish? Maybe it’s precisely because the three linguistic elements, like three fairy fairies, generously gifted him?

The German element gave Yiddish orderliness; ancient Hebrew added eastern wisdom and temperament; the Slavic element introduced a soft melodiousness. It was not because of a good life that Yiddish became a nomadic language. The fate of the people who spoke this language is beyond measure filled with suffering and pain.

But language contains not only traces of the sorrows experienced, but also traces of everyday life, everyday communication with neighbors. The history of words is the history of peoples who lived side by side for centuries. And we just need to be able to read this story.

Marina Agranovskaya
Source: www.maranat.de

For an inexperienced person, Yiddish and Hebrew are interchangeable concepts. However, in fact, these are two Hebrew languages ​​that differ from each other in many ways, including age, origin, areas of use, etc.

Yiddish and Hebrew are two different languages, and a person who knows only Hebrew will not be able to talk to a person who knows only Yiddish.

Origin and written notes

Hebrew is one of the most ancient human languages, belonging to the Semitic group. There is no consensus regarding its origin. Some believe that this language separated from the northwestern part of the Semitic group, becoming independent in the 13th century. BC Others attribute it to Shem, a descendant of Noah. If you trust the Holy Scriptures, then not only Shem spoke Hebrew, but also Noah and even the first man Adam. The language did not change until Abraham, the first Jew.

Of course, centuries-old history has left its mark on Hebrew. Thus, the Old Testament of the period from the 15th to the 5th centuries BC. was written in the Hebrew form of that language. It is the main document for the study of the primordial nature of Hebrew. There are thousands of manuscripts, fragments in which you can trace how the spelling of letters changed. Written non-biblical memorials are few. This is the Gezer calendar of the 10th century. BC, clay shards of Samaritans from the 8th century. BC, from Lachish 6th century. BC, Siloam inscription from the time of Hezekiah. These historical documents allow you to learn about the semantic system, lexical borrowings from Arabic, Aramaic, Akkadian languages, grammatical structure, and the development of Hebrew.

Yiddish is a younger language compared to its brother. Its appearance in Central and Eastern Europe dates back to the 10th-14th centuries. The basic part of the language is the vocabulary of Middle High German dialects with extensive borrowings from Aramaic and Hebrew, Slavic, and later German. In other words, Yiddish is a peculiar mixture of Germanic, Semitic, Slavic linguistic systems. Most of his words have German roots and are constructed according to the grammatical rules of the German language. So, initially Yiddish was perceived more as a jargon, rather than an independent language or dialect.

Naturally, due to its origin, it cannot boast of such ancient written sources as Hebrew.

Further development

Until a certain time, Hebrew, being the only language of everyday communication, was used for both written and oral speech. However, already in the 2nd century. AD it ceased to serve as an active colloquial dialect. The language began to be used exclusively for worship. However, it managed to survive thanks to the Masoretes - scribes of the Old Testament. And the whole point is in an interesting feature of this Hebrew language: the words in it in writing consisted of only consonants. Vowels were inserted during reading.

When Hebrew began to disappear from everyday life, and Jewish speech was rarely heard, new generations no longer knew the pronunciation of some words. And then the Masoretes came up with a system of vowels, that is, symbols of vowel sounds in writing. This allowed Hebrew to be preserved to this day. During the 18th centuries it was not used as a colloquial language, but remained as a language in which religious services were conducted and literary and journalistic works were written.

The revival of Hebrew is associated with the formation of Israel. Since 1948 it has been the official state language. Thanks to the movement, which supported the active introduction of Hebrew into all spheres of life, Hebrew, after being in a bookish state, began to sound again on the streets, in schools, shops, and institutions.

Yiddish was not as widespread as Hebrew. It was spoken only by Jews living in Europe. However, despite the fact that there were more than 11 million Yiddish speakers here, this language was officially recognized as a full-fledged language only at the beginning of the last century.

Due to the prevailing circumstances, Yiddish was supplanted by Hebrew. This is largely due to the extermination of a huge number of Jews who spoke Yiddish during the Second World War. In addition, it is Hebrew, and not Yiddish, that is the language of the Jews of the Promised Land.

Alphabet

The basis for the writing of these two languages, the alphabet of which consists of 22 letters and is called consonantal (after all, the letters represent only consonant sounds), was the Hebrew square letter. Modern writing was recorded in the 6th century. BC after the Babylonian captivity.

Hebrew sometimes adds vowels to make reading easier, which are not found in Yiddish. This is one of the main differences when writing letters. In the Hebrew alphabet, letters are arranged according to the European pattern - from left to right, and in Yiddish - from right to left.

Summing up

The differences between the two Jewish languages ​​can be distinguished by the following fundamental factors:

Hebrew is significantly older than Yiddish;

Hebrew belongs to the group of Semitic languages, Yiddish, in addition to Semitic roots, has Slavic and German roots;

Hebrew has vowels, Yiddish does not;

Hebrew has a larger distribution area than Yiddish.

In general, these two Hebrew languages ​​have much in common. If we talk about purely everyday factors, then by and large they differ in the purposes of use. Previously, Hebrew was a book language, used for religious purposes, while Yiddish was used for everyday communication. Currently, the situation has changed dramatically.