ICJudaism: A Teacher’s Guide to Judaism

      Hosted by ICTeachers                                                                Formerly: Mike’s Rough Guide to Judaism

Disclaimer:

The contents of these pages represent the author’s personal views, experience and understanding.
There are bound to be some things here that some Jews would disagree with.

 

Languages

Yiddish

Yiddish might be called a creole - a language originating in the mixture of two other languages. Yiddish has very strong Hebrew and German influences with a healthy admixture of other eastern European languages. There is great scholarly debate about how Yiddish developed but it was certainly spoken by Jews in the cities along the Rhine nearly 1000 years ago. By the beginning of the 20th Century Yiddish was the everyday language of Jewish communities across Germany, Poland, Lithuania and Russia. In the 1930s there were estimated to be about 10 million Yiddish speakers.

A significant number of the world's Yiddish speakers perished in the Holocaust. Many younger Jews in Europe, America and elsewhere abandoned Yiddish in favour of the languages of their home countries. As a result there are now serious concerns for the survival of Yiddish as a spoken language. In recent years, there have been hopeful signs of a revival, among younger Jews, of interest in speaking Yiddish.

English has many Yiddish loan words, eg mishmash, kybosh, bagel, schmaltz, nosh, chutzpah, shtum.

Yiddish is written in Hebrew characters but without nikkudim. Instead some of the characters do duty as vowels. Yiddish is often written in very tiny print and read with the help of a magnifying glass - perhaps a remnant of a time when paper was very expensive.

Ladino

This is the language spoken by the Sephardic Jews. When Jews from the Iberian Peninsula left or were expelled in the late 15th century many of them fled East to places like Turkey, Greece, Italy and the Middle East. Over time their language absorbed words and influences from the people they lived among. Ladino is a combination of Castilian Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Turkish Greek, and other more eastern European languages. It is sometimes known as Judaeo-Spanish. It is estimated that there are now fewer than 200,000 Ladino speakers worldwide (possibly as few as 60,000).

 

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