THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 28, 1896

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 22, No. 22.

THE YIDDISH LANGUAGE.

ONE hundred thousand inhabitants of New York City, or more than five per cent. of the whole population (1,957,452 by the Board of Health census), speak colloquially a language that is hybrid, mongrel, indefinite, without grammar or literature, without rules or declensions, denationalized and variant, known as Yiddish or Jewish jargon, the language of the East Side. It is the dialect of the goose market, the pedler, and of the orthodox rabbis, tho not of the synagogue. It is the language spoken almost exclusively on the East Side by Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Roumanian, and Lithuanian Jews. To what country or nation does this jargon trace its origin? To no land and no government. It is a reflex of wanderings; a language founded on successive persecutions.

Intelligent Jews subdivide the history of their race in Europe by periods of persecution; the eleventh century in Spain, the thirteenth in England, the fifteenth in Germany, the seventeenth in Austria, and the nineteenth in Russia. There is a tradition which many Jews reject, but which is accepted as true by all Christian historians, that King Casimir III., of Poland, known in English histories as Casimir the Great, and called in Polish, Krol Kmiotkow (King of the Peasants), fell in love with Esther, a Jewish girl, and that through her influence, which continued for many years, and by her intervention, the whole of Poland, now Russian, Austrian, or Prussian, became an asylum for the Jews, who were then bitterly and cruelly persecuted throughout Germany. The refugees from the west spoke German, mixed with a few English, Spanish, and Hebrew words. The Poles, the most hospitable people of northern Europe, followed the example of their king, and received the Jews kindly; the latter began to learn, not grammatically, but in the ordinary course of business, the Polish language, which in flexibility, richness, and power is hardly excelled by any language of Europe.

Out of this mixture of colloquial German, with a few words of English, Spanish, and Old Hebrew, with Polish, further corrupted by additions from other languages, Russian, Hungarian, Roumanian, and Bohemian, was formed the conglomerate form of speech which is the Jewish jargon spoken in New York. But in this jargon German and Polish predominate. Six daily newspapers are published in New York City in this jargon. Speeches are delivered in it, sermons are preached in it, discussions are held, and business transacted in this language, without grammar or standard of usage. The characters used are genuine Hebrew letters. The age of this jargon is about three hundred years. It is not an attractive language; it is not musical, but is rich in diminutives, expletives, and terse abbreviations, and is readily learned.—Public Opinion, Feb. 15, 1895.