Yiddish was the everyday language of Ashkenazi Jews across Eastern Europe for nearly a thousand years. It grew out of medieval German, picked up Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic and a little French, and was written in Hebrew letters from right to left. By the late nineteenth century it was the first language of around eleven million people, from Vilna in the north to Odessa in the south, and from Warsaw west to Berlin and east to Kyiv.
Yiddish was not just a spoken tongue. It had a literature. Sholem Aleichem, the writer best known to the wider world for the stories that became Fiddler on the Roof, wrote in Yiddish. So did I.L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, Sholem Asch, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and a long list of poets, playwrights and novelists. By the 1920s there were Yiddish daily newspapers in Warsaw, Vilna, Łódź, Berlin and New York. There were Yiddish schools, Yiddish theatres, Yiddish film studios, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had its headquarters in Vilna and was the centre of academic study of the language.
What happened to Yiddish
The great majority of Yiddish speakers in Europe were murdered in the Holocaust. The towns and shtetls where Yiddish was the first language of every shop and street and school were emptied. The schools and the newspapers and the theatres were shut. The libraries were burned or carted off to Berlin to be studied as relics of an extinct people. By 1945 the Yiddish-speaking world of Europe was effectively gone.
Yiddish survived in three places. In the United States, where the great wave of Yiddish-speaking emigrants of 1880 to 1924 had built a community now numbering several million. In Israel, where Yiddish was treated by the new state as the language of the diaspora and discouraged in favour of Hebrew, but which still had a community of speakers. And in the Hasidic communities of Brooklyn, Antwerp, Stamford Hill in London and a few other cities, where Yiddish is still the first language of children today and where the population is growing.
What was lost
The wider Yiddish-speaking culture, the secular newspaper-and-theatre world of pre-war Eastern Europe, no longer exists. The language is studied at universities. The literature is read in translation. A few small magazines still appear. But the everyday Yiddish of the streets and the markets and the schools, the language a child grew up speaking and an old man died speaking, was killed with the people who spoke it.
See also
- The Hasidic Movement
- The Jews of Salonika
- The Jews of Łódź
- The Jews of Warsaw
- The Sephardic Communities
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards