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 among some Western Jews, even after Israel travel:
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.
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!)”
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.
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.
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Soooo stupid! I would laugh if it wasn’t that sad…
Paul Gybels
Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture
Institute for Jewish Studies
Universiteit Antwerpen (Belgium, Europe) Paul Gybels(Quote)
I don’t like the “Sephardic” pronunciation used in Israel. It sounds harsh, unpleasant and unnatural — a non-Jewish friend once described it as a “retarded German trying to speak Arabic”, and I couldn’t agree more.
I always liked the Oriental versions of Hebrew: Iraqi, Syrian…
Both Sephardic (the true one, not the one spoken in Israel) and Ashkenazic Hebrew are far from Biblical Hebrew.
When comparing both — especially Ashkenazic — to related languages, such as Classical Arabic and Assyrian Aramaic, this becomes really obvious.
In Oriental Hebrew:
*there are differences between Tav/Thav with/without dagesh
*between Tet and Tav
*Vav is Waw (like in Arabic and Aramaic)
*3ayin (like in Arabic and Aramaic)
*7et and Khaf are not the same
*Aleph is a full glottal stop
*Seen and Samekh are not the same
*He sounds like an H
*Gimel with/without dagesh — hard G or like the Arabic/Aramaic letter Ghein or Jeem
*Qoof and Kaph are not the same
*Resh is thrilled DJ(Quote)
Hmm… two problems: 1. Does anyone really “speak” Ashkenazic Hebrew”? That is, have a conversation, discuss the news, tell a joke, etc.? I don’t think so. Maybe they pray or learn using Ashkenazic pronunciation, just like their parents prayed, or grandparents, or great grandparents for hundreds and hundreds of years. Is that so bad?
Secondly, that Sephardic/Israeli pronunciation is closer to ancient Hebrew is something there’s no reason to believe. Yes, the stress was probably more like Israeli stress, but we can be sure that, like Ashkenazic Hebrew and unlike Israeli Hebrew, there were pronunciation differences between kamatz and patach, segol and tzere, and tav with and without a dagesh. That’s why, as you put it, when a word” ends in a ‘t’”, someone might pronounce it “like an ‘s’”. Abby Gezunt(Quote)
What an assholey insulting ‘consideration’ which manages to diss Europe, the religious, and the radically secular. A vibrant Diaspora culture, an extensive literature, a proud tradition of labor radicalism, and the bulk of Jewish life in Europe is constituted by Yiddish. Zionism is entirely a product of European ideas, practices, and institutions, so don’t be hatin’ on Europe unless you want to be called “self-hatin’”. Unless you consider new forms of weaponry and torture ‘high culture’ I’m not sure how the recent incarnations of Hebrew-speaking nationalism have added anything substantial to Jewish life. My secular friends who have dedicated their lives to the revival of Yiddish life deserve more respect than this shoddy blow-off. The ultra-orthos make up, what? 10–20% of the Israeli population and growing (esp since their decimated numbers in 1945), Though I loathe their racism and religious prejudices, I think they hardly constitute a fringe movement. Elliot Ratzman(Quote)
Sam — I am surprised you find it so insulting that someone would choose a certain language or speak it in a certain way. In the what, 15 years that I have known you, you seemed to have done plenty of seraching for a culture, a religion, a life that you felt was right for you and has lead you to where you are today. If speaking yiddish gives one a connection to their ancestors — so what? Also, the whole “conforming to society” really just seems so foreign to me as someone from the US — I am a bit shocked that you would so quickly leave that attitude on the other side of the Atlantic… Mike(Quote)
You seem to know little or nothing about Ancient Israelite/Judaean pronunciation of Hebrew. Who are these “linguists” you speak of? Did you know that the “tav” in Shabbat used to be pronounced “th,” which diverged to “s” and “t” in mine and your favored pronunciations, respectively? You also seem to know little about modern Hebrew to claim as you do that there is a difference in stress in daily speech. Ashkenazi Hebrew differs from Sephardi Hebrew perhaps in its sparing use of Yiddish words in an ironic sense. Additionally, most Sephardim born in the last twenty years in this country pronounce the “resh” the exact same way that Ashkenazim do. Or perhaps you are bemoaning “Ashkenazi Hebrew“‘s dearth of Arabic slang (which it certainly does incorporate). So unless you are alleging that the pronunciation of Hebrew in ritual contexts is greatly threatening Israeli society, you’d better stick to things you know. Arun(Quote)
This is a phenomenon known as phonem shift.
The letter “tav” denoted originally a strongly aspirated T phonem, which in Aramaic palatalized into similar phonem as in English “thing”. That is the reason why the Hebrew alphabet has both “tet” and “tav”; “tet” denotes an unaspirated, normal T phonem.
The [th] phonem has a tendency to palatalize into [s] in speech. This phenomenon is called “seseo” in Spanish language — the European Spaniards pronounce “c” and “z” as [th] while the Latinoamericans pronounce it as [s]. In the Ibero-Romanian stem language in the Dark Ages, the Latin C phonem, which originally was pronounced as [k], became first [tch], then [tsh] and later [th] like Hebrew “taav”. It is not that Spaniards had lisp, it has been like that since the Middle Ages!
The Ladino language, “Jewish Spanish”, which is the same for Spanish as Yiddish is for German, has retained all the Medieval Spanish six fricative phonems, while Modern Spanish has only two.
My own first language, Finnish, has experienced this shift too. The word for water, “vesi”, used to be “veti” already in the 13th century. That is why we still have words like “vetinen” (watery) instead of “vesinen”.
That is also the reason why the Sephardim celebrate brith and Ashkenazim have bris. The final [th] has transformed into [s] during the centuries. Ironmistress(Quote)
This is also why the Hebrew alphabet has also “koph” and “kaph” letters. They originally have denoted different phonems.
The Sephardim even today pronounce koph and kaph differently, while the Ashkenazim pronounce them the same. Yiddish uses only koph; kaph is reserved only for Biblical usage.
Koph, is, of course, the same as Latin Q, while kaph is Latin K. Latin C, on the other hand, is an Etruscan variant of gimel. Ironmistress(Quote)
“Zionism is entirely a product of European ideas, practices, and institutions”
Not true.
Zionism can be found in early Sephardic literature such as Yehuda haLevy and Ramban. Modern Zionism’s flaws are “entirely a product of European ideas”.
And, by the way, European Zionists were the ones who really despised the Yiddish language. DJ(Quote)
Israel Tours | Jewish Singles | Birthright Israel | Flights | Considerations // Jul 7, 2010 at 18:33