JERUSALEM — Whenever I hear American or European Jews speaking Ashkenazi Hebrew on the bus or in synagogue, I go nuts. And I shake my head at the growing popularity and revival of Yiddish in Jewish studies:
Although no one knows exactly how many Yiddish speakers there are today, estimates range from a very realistic minimum of 1 million to a more fanciful 3 million. At the core of this population are the Hasidic and strictly orthodox Jews in New York, Israel, London, Paris, Antwerp and elsewhere for whom Yiddish is their first language. In the UK alone, where the strictly orthodox are growing in number, there are probably as many as 30,000 Yiddish speakers. The vast majority of these Jews live in relatively closed communities, but there is always some “leakage” into the wider Jewish world.
Beyond the very religious, Yiddish has been undergoing a marked revival, especially among young people, for more than 20 years. There are reportedly more than 100 colleges and universities around the world teaching Yiddish, although courses and posts are vulnerable in straightened times. The Zionist drive to stigmatise Yiddish has collapsed and the revival has spread to Israel.
Yiddish Report
There are many variants of English — American, British, Australian, southern American, South African — and there are two main dialects of Hebrew as well: Ashkenazi and Sephardi. As best as linguists can determine, the ancient Israelites (and later Judeans) spoke a Hebrew at religious services that would be considered Sephardi today. (However, the common, everyday language at the time of the Second Temple was Aramaic.)
After the destruction of Jerusalem by the Roman Empire in 70 C.E. and the expulsion of most of the Jews in Judea, many eventually relocated to eastern Europe and Russia after the newly-created kingdoms in western Europe expelled the Jews and the localities in the east offered protection in exchange for access to their trading connections in the Arab world. Over the centuries in eastern Europe, the Hebrew language eventually fused with German to create the hybrid known as Yiddish. It became the common language of everyday Jews. When European Jews emigrated to the United States, they brought Yiddish culture — and Yiddish-accented English, as this famous joke from “Coming to America” showed in 1988:
The differences are Ashkenazi and Sephardi Hebrew are mainly in emphasis, vocabulary, and pronunciation. Sephardi Hebrew, which was based on the Hebrew Bible, adheres to that form, and the last syllable of each word is emphasized. The standard greeting on Friday evenings is “ShaBAT shaLOM! (Peaceful Sabbath!)”
Yiddish Dictionary Phrases
In Yiddish, however, the phrase is “GUT SHAbbes.” The first syllable is emphasized, “gut” is German for “good,” and the “t” sound at the end of the word “Shabbat” becomes an “s.” In Hebrew, “Shabbat ends with the letter “ת,” tav, but in Yiddish it becomes an “s.” Other words ending in “ת” also change to end in “s” like “Succos (rather then Succot)” and “beis (rather than beit).”
Although I grew up in the United States, I learned Hebrew first at Temple Israel in Boston — and the synagogue used Sephardi Hebrew. When I moved to Israel and studied more Hebrew in a language school, the form everyone learned was Sephardi Hebrew. Ashkenazi Hebrew was always foreign to me. It still sounds funny.
The reasons for the adoption of Sephardi Hebrew were political and religious in nature. A friend of mine, a Danish Jew who moved to Israel, told me that synagogues there had used Ashkenazi Hebrew but then switched after the State of Israel was founded in 1948. Israel itself adopted Sephardi Hebrew partly because Zionism rejected the idea that Jews could have a future in Europe after the Holocaust. Moreover, the flood of Mizrahi Jews to Israel from Middle Eastern countries after 1948 increased the prevalence of Sephardi Hebrew — after all, they were completely unfamiliar with Ashkenazi Hebrew for hundreds of years. In addition, Sephardi Hebrew is much closer to biblical Hebrew.
In Israel, most of the people who speak Yiddish or Ashkenazi Hebrew are ultra-Orthodox Jews who refuse to leave the European mindset. The reasons are complex. Some want to keep the old traditions — the great, European yeshivas — alive after they were destroyed by the Holocaust. Some think Ashkenazi culture is superior to other forms. Some are stuck in tradition and refuse to change — no matter how ludicrous it seems to speak Yiddish, wear furry hats, and wear clothes resembling eighteenth-century, Polish nobility in the middle of a steaming desert in the Middle East. Some refuse to recognize the State of Israel — and everything, like language, associated with the place — because the country was founded by men, not God Himself. A fringe group even actively works against Israel and sides with the Palestinians and countries like Iran.
The perseverance of Yiddish and Ashkenazi Hebrew is enraging because it symbolizes a major problem with Israeli society — the power and influence of fringe groups of ultra-Orthodox Jews. They refuse to accept that European Jewry has been on its deathbed since World War II and that the future of Judaism is in Israel. (Europe turned on its Jews, and many European countries and European people today are hostile to Israel and Judaism.) They refuse to integrate into general, Israeli society. They refuse to adapt to the times. They insist that other forms of Judaism — like that of traditional, Mizrahi Jews — is inferior at best or sinful at worst. (And many are extremely racists towards Ethiopian Jews.) Language is an important facet of culture, and a refusal to adopt to your country’s language is ignorant at best and insulting at worst. Moreover, the entire ultra-Orthodox mentality is based on a European “ghetto” culture that no longer exists. Jews have been emancipated and now have their own country; we should embrace this fact.
Yiddishreport
I will never understand it — when a word ends with a “t,” why would someone pronounce it with an “s”? When I first came to Israel on a Birthright Israel trip before moving to Israel two years later, it was refreshing to see Hebrew being spoken with a Sephardi accent.