IJSL 2014; 226: 101 – 136 DOI 10.1515/ijsl-2013-0077  Alexander Beider Unity of the German component of Yiddish: myth or reality? To Erika Timm1 Abstract: The article deals with the question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish Before the 16th century, the languages used in works compiled by various Jewish authors from western German-speaking provinces show close similarities to dialects spoken by local Christians and not represent texts ­written in a single specifically Jewish language Texts dating from the 16th to 17th cen­turies demonstrate the existence of two separate Jewish idioms: western and eastern The former covers western Germany and northern Italy and is mainly based on East Franconian and Swabian The latter characterizes works written in  Bohemia and Poland It is closely related to Bohemian colonial dialect of ­German It is inappropriate to consider all varieties of modern Yiddish to be dialects of one single language Indeed, the analysis shows that in many aspects, Southwestern Yiddish inherits features of East Franconian, while Eastern Yiddish is primary based on Bohemian Its consonantal system was later adapted to the Silesian dialect spoken by German Christian urban population in Polish towns These two Yiddish idioms inherit numerous features from the two languages, western and eastern, respectively, that existed during the 16th to 17th centuries As a result, as a whole, Yiddish is not descending from any hypothetical Proto-­ Yiddish Keywords: Yiddish, German dialects, phonology, Ashkenazic Jews, historical ­linguistics Alexander Beider: Paris E-mail: albeider@yahoo.fr 1 This article could not be written without Erika Timm Firstly, her works represent a basis for numerous elements of the analysis presented here Secondly, during the preparation of this text, she shared with me copies of numerous quite helpful sources and answered to many questions of mine   Alexander Beider 102  1 Introduction Given the wide range, in time and space, of various forms of speech and writing in Hebrew letters fundamentally derived from medieval German, how sure are we that all these different kinds of Jewish German or Judeo-German, from the 13th to the 21st century, from Alsace to Eastern Ukraine, are really one and the same Yiddish? This is what we would normally assume when speaking of Yiddish dialects, rather than Yiddish languages Without this assumption, it makes no sense to talk of all these different linguistic systems as Yiddish or even to talk of a single field of Yiddish linguistics The question of the unity of Yiddish has two dimensions: chronological and geographical.2 The first dimension deals with the question of whether the various earlier forms of the Jewish speech based on German are related to modern Western ­Yiddish (WY) and Eastern Yiddish (EY).3 The chronological dimension of the question of the unity of Yiddish was marginal for both Weinreich and Birnbaum, the classical authors in the domain of Yiddish studies Due to their rather broad, and in a large extent extra-linguistic, definition of the term Yiddish, the language of various texts written in the past by Jews using Hebrew letters in their vernacular German-based language automatically receives for them the label Yiddish.4 The second, geographical, dimension deals with the question of whether all the dialects of modern (that is, late 18th to 20th centuries) Yiddish, spread over much of Europe, form a single language, derived from a single source The geographical dimension of the question of the unity of Yiddish thus concerns the origin of WY and EY and their sub-dialects Several works show the unity of the Hebrew-Aramaic component of WY and EY For the German component, in all aspects by far the most important in Yiddish, the situation is much more complicated and far from being consensual Quite logically, the question of unity here is related to several other questions Among them are: To what German dialects are WY and EY akin? How to distinguish Yiddish traits that resulted from internal innovations from those inherited from some German dialects? How to distinguish features that one of the two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish borrowed from another from those that both of them inherited from their ancestor(s)? 2 This formulation is due to Alexis Manaster Ramer (personal communication) 3 For terms basic for German and Yiddish studies, this paper also uses the following abbreviations: MHG (Middle High German), NHG (New High German), OHG (Old High German), StY (Standard Yiddish) 4 See the discussion of their views in Beider (2004: 209–213)   103 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  How to distinguish elements present in EY or WY since their proto-period(s) from those that were acquired later under the influence of German dialects spoken by coterritorial Christians? Globally speaking, any attempt to provide an answer to any of these questions faces serious methodological issues Maybe, it is for these reasons that no one has ever tried to address all of them Generally, Yiddish scholars either avoid/ ignore all of them, or try to suggest a very general answer to some of these questions, principally the first one For example, Landau, who is often considered to have written the first scholarly studies of Yiddish, considered Yiddish to result from a mixture of various German dialects (Landau 1895: 58) The global position by Weinreich and Birnbaum in this domain is somewhat similar to that of Landau Speaking about the genesis of Yiddish, Weinreich also refuses to give preference to any of German dialects considering it to be a total mixture of them When considering them separately from each other, he only points to a few phonetic EY forms that he links to dialects of northwestern Germany, relates one major vocalic feature of WY to East Franconian, links a few words to Bavarian – some of them being limited to Central Yiddish – and a few others to East Central German At the same time, he severely criticizes the opinion of Gerzon (see below) who suggests the existence of a genetic link between EY and East Central German.5 Weinreich (1973: Vol 2, 94–110) also makes emphasis on the internal Yiddish innovation He considers – without providing any strong argument – that this process was more important for the development of Yiddish than the influence of German dialects Moreover, Weinreich stresses that numerous German regional items could have come into EY through the mediation of WY rather than directly from German dialects Birnbaum (1979: 72–76) provides a list of a dozen characteristics of EY (and, more precisely, only its western part: Central Yiddish), mainly phonological or lexical, that – according to him – are related either to Upper or Central German features He postulates that Jews principally came to Poland from the areas of Bavarian (sub-dialect of Upper German), Thuringian and Upper Saxonian (sub-­ dialects of East Central German) and, as a result, the German component of EY is to a large extent a mixture of these dialects This idea about the dialectal mixture that took place in Poland contradicts to his own consideration of Yiddish being about one thousand years old For Bin-Nun (1973: 33–37), globally speaking, (Eastern) Yiddish realized a  unique synthesis of different German dialects, taking various items from 5 Inaccuracy of all four linguistic features proposed by Weinreich as distancing ECG from ­Yiddish is shown in Beider (2010: 68, footnote 43)   Alexander Beider 104  i­ ndependent German sources, retaining some of their archaic features, and making a number of innovations According to him (1973: 48), the fact that a German-­ based language became the vernacular tongue for East European Jews can be explained by three principal reasons: (1) massive migrations of German Jews to Poland; (2) the linguistic dominance in Polish towns of numerous German Christian colonists (speaking a dialect related to East Central German) that lasted during sev­eral centuries; (3) regular trade contacts and exchanges of students and teachers between Polish Jews and their coreligionists from German-speaking countries Bin-Nun also addresses the question of where stressed proto-­ diphthongs of WY and EY could appear He states that according to the reflexes of MHG ỵ, ei, û and ou, WY is related to Bavarian (understood in his text as including Northwestern Bohemian and East Franconian, both heavily influenced by Bavarian), while Central Yiddish, a sub-dialect of EY, is mainly related to East Central German To the latter, he also links consonants of proto-EY saying that, generally speaking, the consonantism of Yiddish is similar to that of surrounding German dialects, while the vocalism stays apart: it evolved following internal Jewish innovations (Bin-Nun 1973: 79, 183, 209, 229, 255, 323, 326) Several other comparative studies of the German component of WY and EY, also end up with the idea of the existence of independent sources for WY and EY, and hence the polygenesis of Yiddish as a whole Blosen (1986) bases his analysis on the comparison of the geographic distribution in, on the one side, modern German dialects, and, on the other side, WY and EY, of one morphological element (diminutive suffix) and several phonological features: monophthongization of phonemes related to MHG ie and uo; diphthongization of those related to MHG ỵ and û; unrounding of formerly rounded vowels; reflexes for MHG ei; the consonants [p], [f] or the affricate [pf] in various word environments Taking into account some additional extra-linguistic data (such as the historical importance of Jewish communities in the past in certain geographic areas), Blosen comes to the following conclusions: WY appeared in the Hessian area, while EY is related to Silesian colonial German dialect In comparison to studies by Bin-Nun and Blosen, Beider (2010) introduces two major additional elements Firstly, the analysis does not take into consideration modern dialects only The comparison between German and Jewish dialects is made using the historical data obtained by German linguists Secondly, the paper deals not with separate phonemes but constructs entire systems of stressed proto-vowels It comes to the following conclusion: for WY and EY, these systems could not have had one common ancestor. Stressed vowels of proto-EY are likely to have originated in Central Europe, in  territories where the Gentile population was mixed and consisted of both ­German- and Slavic-speaking people They are primarily related to the influence of Bohemian and, to a lesser extent, Silesian colonial dialects of German Those   105 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  of proto-WY appear to be closely related, first of all, to East Franconian Though these conclusions concern all components of these two major subdivisions of modern Yiddish, the analysis that allowed obtaining these results was focused on the vowels in words from the German component of WY and EY Moreover, the stressed vowels whose reflexes in reconstructed schemas of proto-WY and proto-­ EY are different (namely, proto-diphthongs and front rounded vowels /y/ and /⊘/ appearing in proto-WY but absent from proto-EY), are present only in words from the German component Timm (1987: 457) suggests an idea about numerous features of WY originally appearing in the Jewish speech in areas where Christian population spoke Rhine Franconian or, to a lesser extent, East Franconian, before being spread out to other western German-speaking territories during the 15th and early 16th cen­ tury. For drawing such conclusion, she considers several phonological features: (1) merging of [e]- and [ε]-qualities for short vowels, but different development for long or lengthened; (2) reflexes for MHG ie and uo became equal to lengthened MHG i and u, respectively; (3) [a:]-realization for both MHG ei and ou; (4) diphthongal reflexes of MHG ê and ô and lengthened MHG e and o; (5) lowering /i/ > /e/ and /u/ > /o/ before /r/ The genesis of EY was out of her scope On the contrary, there exist a number of studies whose authors ignore WY, but try to establish links between EY and some German dialects Gerzon (1902: 131) takes into account only one phonological feature (the distribution of [p]-[pf]-[f]) and makes a remark about the possible close relationship between EY and ECG Several authors suggest the derivation of the German component of EY from Bavarian.6 Two of them, correspond to the first quarter of the 20th century Sainéan (1902) starts by postulating this link (1902: 94) and later adds a small list of peculiar items from Central Yiddish vocabulary that he generally relates to Bavarian (1902: 132– 137) The Bavarian origin of Yiddish represents one of the main ideas of Mieses (1924) whose linguistic arguments are rather poor During the last quarter of the 20th century, these theories were revived, principally thanks to efforts by King (compare Faber and King 1984; King 1992, 1993) His argumentation includes a list of four major phonological features of EY, two of its morphological characteristics (namely, the diminutive and plural suffixes), and a group of peculiar 6 Bavarian is mainly understood by them as covering not only Bavaria and Austria, as in standard works on German dialectology, but also the speech of German colonists in Bohemia and Moravia Moreover, examples are generally checked by these authors in Schmeller (1827–1837), a book that covers the territory of the state of Bavaria at the moment when the book was compiled This area incorporates territories where Christians spoke not only Bavarian, but also (eastern) Swabian, East Franconian, and (partly) Palatinate German   Alexander Beider 106  ­ ronouns (actually limited to Central Yiddish and not to all of EY) that he all links p to Bavarian, the German dialect he declares to be the basis for the German component of EY To this, he adds a list of three phonological features that Yiddish received due to its contacts with East Central German One part of his arguments does not represent King’s original ideas Certain of them were already quoted in Weinreich (1973), Bin-Nun (1973) or Birnbaum (1979) Contrary to King, these scholars never generalized these similarities to advocate the Bavarian origins of Yiddish Gold (1986) and Katz (1993: 12–14) provided the first criticism of his ideas Manaster Ramer and Wolf (1996) clearly demonstrated striking methodological drawbacks of King’s approach Eggers (1998) is another proponent of the theory of the Bavarian origin of Yiddish To support his ideas, he suggests a list of a few grammatical, morphological, and phonological features considered by him as “markers” of Bavarian Many of them are taken from Mieses (1924), some are similar to King’s arguments, and others are original Manaster Ramer (1997) deals with common origins of varieties of modern Yiddish He provides a wide list of lexical, semantic, phonological, morphological, and phraseological features, proper to both EY and WY and unknown in other languages A similar approach also characterizes Timm (1987: 375–385) who, moreover, presents the earliest references to certain words Globally speaking, after almost one hundred years since the first scholarly publications about Yiddish appeared, both the geographical and chronological dimensions of the question of unity of the German component of that language ­remain in many aspects controversial It was the study by Timm (2005) that created the first real breakthrough in this domain She shows that a large number of semantic and morphological peculiarities of the German component of both WY and EY have common origins that can often be traced to medieval Jewish texts from West Germany A large pan-Yiddish layer considered in detail by her is due to the tradition of the translation of the biblical text into the vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews This continuous tradition – whose distinct traces can be found in western Germany by the end of the 14th century and whose stabilization is clearly observable in sources compiled during the 16th to 17th centuries by Jews in such distant areas as western Germany, northern Italy, Bohemia and Poland – had a huge influence on the formation of the German component of Yiddish This is principally because all Ashkenazic boys in different European countries were being educated in Jewish elementary schools using translated biblical texts Timm’s opus magnum provides a profound insight for both dimensions of the question of the unity of Yiddish In some major aspects, Timm joins general, ­rather intuitive, ideas about the existence of the unity exposed in the past by Weinreich and Birnbaum, providing first strong evidence that corroborate the ideas in question   107 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  Timm’s work mainly focuses on linguistic innovations that occurred within Ashkenazic communities and not features that are shared by Yiddish and German Links that could exist between Yiddish and various German dialects are outside of the scope of her book The aim of the present paper consists in providing additional insight into the  controversial question of the unity of the German component of Yiddish It ­attempts to complement the results obtained by Timm by a systematic study of  elements that not represent internal Jewish innovations but likely were ­inherited by Yiddish varieties from German dialects The paper primarily ad­ dresses phonological differences: isoglosses from this domain generally serve to identify various German dialects Moreover, phonological isoglosses are often more useful for establishing genetic links than morphosyntactic To avoid paying attention only to a few characteristics whose choice could, in principle, be considered as random, the selection of phonological elements in this study is primarily based on the synthesis made by Žirmunskij (1956), one of the most authoritative in German dialectology Comparisons are made between the following entities: – High German dialects (considered in the historical perspective) – Modern Yiddish varieties – Languages of a sample of available early Ashkenazic sources (13th to 17th centuries) The first comparison (Section 3) is done between German dialects and the language(s) of early Ashkenazic sources in order to see whether it is appropriate or not to consider these vernacular Jewish idioms to be different from the dialects spoken by coterritorial Christian population Since their links to modern Yiddish remains to be proven, it is on purpose that the word “Yiddish” is never used in this paper when speaking about these early idioms The second comparison (Section 4) is done between modern Yiddish varieties and German dialects to see whether any distinctive links between them can be discerned It sheds more light on the geographic dimension of the question of unity of Yiddish Modern Yiddish varieties are also compared to the languages of early Jewish sources in order to establish genetic links between them This process – dealing with the chronological dimension of the question of unity of Yiddish – allows separating some features that were really inherited by modern Yiddish varieties from their ancestors, from those features that are due to rather recent phenomena of interdialectal borrowing internal to Yiddish or to the influence of coterritorial dialects spoken by German Christians In Section 5, modern Yiddish varieties are compared between themselves and the non-adequacy of their classification currently used in linguistics is established For this reason, the expression “Yiddish dialects” is avoided in   Alexander Beider 108  this article when speaking about WY versus EY, or about various Jewish idioms generally considered being subdivisions of WY Yet, during the preparation of this article no information was found contradicting the idea of unity of EY Subdivisions of EY clearly descend from the same ancestor and for them the expression “EY dialects” is totally adequate For establishing links between linguistic entities, the importance of various  elements is not the same It is clear that of smallest importance are items that concern only individual words The interest of this layer is particularly marginal when dealing with old sources because (a) we can be dealing with a scribe error; and (b) we never know the exact geographic distribution of any particular word in various German dialects during the period under consideration To this category – marginal for the analysis present in this article – belong all lexical ­elements except for a few basic vocabulary terms, as well as numerous phono­ logical and certain morphological elements too On the other hand, of partic­ ular significance are elements that are structural for the development of a dialect and concern a large number of words For these elements, crucial for our analysis,  the dialectal geography either was already totally established before the early Ashkenazic sources known to us were compiled (this is particularly true for consonants), or the chronology of changes in various German dialects is well documented In this article, when discussing links between various dialects, attention is paid to characteristics that make dialects different and not to those according to which the dialects look similar The main advantage of this method consists in avoiding the construction of logically incorrect inferences.7 Its main drawback: when measuring a difference between two dialects, the existence of correlation between them according to some feature is not favored in comparison to the situation when the information about this feature in one of these dialects is lacking Nevertheless, this drawback is less significant than the advantage formulated above The following abbreviations are used in this paper for High German: CB (Central Bavarian), CF (Central Franconian), CG (Central German), ECG (East Central German), EF (East Franconian), HA (High Alemannic), LA (Low Alemannic), MF (Moselle Franconian), NB (North Bavarian), PG (Palatinate German), RF (Rhine Franconian), SB (South Bavarian), UG (Upper German), UpS (Upper Saxonian), 7 An example of inappropriate logic: Since (Yiddish variety Y exhibits – according to a feature F – a behavior similar to that of German dialect G1), one concludes that (Y is descending from / is related to G1) Actually, Y can, in principle, be descending from another German dialect G2 that also shares the same behavior   109 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  WCG (West Central German) Unless specified explicitly, the information about realizations found in different German dialects was directly taken from their corresponding dictionaries.8 Table lists varieties of modern Yiddish.9 Table 1: Modern Yiddish varieties English name Abbreviation Eastern Yiddish 1.1 Central Yiddish 1.2 Northeastern Yiddish EY CY NEY 1.3 Southeastern Yiddish Southwestern Yiddish Dutch Yiddish Czech Yiddish East German Yiddish SEY SWY DuY CzY EGY Modern country (historical province) Poland (main part) Lithuania, Belarus, northern Ukraine, northeastern Poland, Latvia southern Ukraine, Moldova (Bessarabia) France (Alsace), Switzerland Netherlands Czech Republic (Bohemia, Moravia) eastern Germany, Russia (East Prussia) 2 List of features taken into account A considerable number of dialectal variants concern the realizations of consonants See Table 2.10 8 Schmeller 1827–1837; Heilig 1898; Jelinek 1911; Martin and Lienhart 1899–1907; Müller 1928– 1971; Müller-Fraureuth 1911–1914; Krämer 1965–1997; Mitzka 1963–1965; Fischer 1904–1936; Staub and Tobler 1881–2000; Grimm and Grimm 1854–1960 Facts from historical German dia­ lectology were taken from Moser (1929, 1951), Paul (1998), Sauerbeck (1970) and Stopp (1973, 1978) 9 Only the names of the EY dialects appearing in Table are more or less standard in Yiddish linguistics The designations of other Yiddish varieties used in this paper are purely conven­ tional The information was mainly taken from the following sources: (1) for EY, from classical dictionaries of StY that is to a great extent based on NEY; (2) for EGY, from Friedrich (1784); (3) for DuY, from Beem (1959); (4) for SWY, from Weill (1921), Zivy (1966), Zuckerman (1969) and Guggenheim-Grünberg (1976); (5) for CzY, from Schnitzler (1966) and Beranek (1965) 10 All features taken into account in this paper are conventionally designated by a code that starts with a letter that identifies the category concerned (C = consonants, V = stressed vowels, U = unstressed vowels, M = morphology and grammar) and ends with a sequence number These codes are introduced to simplify making references to these elements in Sections 3–5   Alexander Beider 110  Table 2: Consonantal features Feature Description Possible phonetic realizations {C1} {C2} {C3} {C4} {C5} {C6} {C7} {C8} {C9} {C10} {C11} {C12} {C13} {C14} {C15} {C16} {C17} {C18} {C19} {C20} {C21} {C22} {C23} Old German p in various positions Old German k in various positions Initial MHG tw Initial and internal Old German d Initial Old German b German neutralization of consonants (stops) MHG b (intervocalic, between a liquid and a vowel) Final MHG p after a vowel or a liquid Final MHG we after a liquid MHG we after u or û Intervocalic MHG v Internal st MHG rs Intervocalic and initial prevocalic MHG s Final consonant of MHG –em MHG mp and mb Verbal prefix MHG erMHG ht MHG hs Introduction of /n/ between /j/ and /s/ or /š/ Shifts /g/ > /j/, /j/ > /g/, and /xt/ > /št/; elision of final /n/ Verbs with /j/ in infinitives and /g/ in past participles Phonetic shift [rš] > [rž] p, pf, f k, kx, x tv, tsv, kv, kw t, d b, p Yes11 or No b, w/v p/b, f b(e)/p, f zero, v/b v, f, b st, št rs, rš s, z m, n (or zero) mb/mp, m er, her, der ht, t, xt hs, s, xs, ks Yes or No Yes or No Yes or No Yes or No A significant number of dialectal variants concern the realizations of stressed vowels See Table Several major dialectal distinctions can be also observed for unstressed ­vowels See Table An important dialectal variation is found in several morphological and grammatical features See Table 11 With a special distribution in Bavarian (depending on the length of the preceding vowel)   Alexander Beider 122  related to Silesian.24 It is much more likely that the language of these urban Christians (and first of all, its consonantism) was determinant for the development of EY rather than the dialect spoken by Germans in Silesia For CzY, the closest dialects are also Bohemian and Silesian Incompatible elements – non-Silesian {V5, V9, U1, M3, M4} and non-Bohemian {C1, C6} – ­represent a subset of those listed above for EY For {V3} and {C16} – two features that distinguish CzY from EY – CzY simply follows local German dialect If we compare early Jewish sources discussed in the previous section to modern Yiddish varieties, we can observe that all those printed in Prague or Kraków (and only they) are much closer to CzY than to any other modern Yiddish variety including EY, and, as discussed in the previous section, all of them are close to Bohemian dialect of German This should not be interpreted to say that at the start of the 17th century EY was not yet existent In principle, our sample of early Jewish sources can simply be non-representative for analyzing early stages of EY Indeed, the only sources from the area that during the last centuries was a part of the EY territory are those from Kraków, that is, a city in the southwestern end of this territory whose Jewish community included a large number of Jews whose families came here from the Czech lands The authors of the books in question could simply be of Czech origin Since Kraków Jewish typography was wellknown, the authors of the books in question were not necessarily local Jews In principle, they could also be, for example, from Bohemia or Moravia In some works, we can also face an attempt made by their authors to follow certain norms of Jewish speech peculiar to Central Europe For more insight into the genesis of features of EY, it would be important to find early Jewish sources from other ­places in the Polish Kingdom or the Grand Duchy of Lithuania: Poznań, Lublin, Lwów and especially Brest and other northeastern communities It is also worth noting that, as it could be expected, in comparison to other early Jewish sources, Kr, that is the most recent source from Kraków studied in this paper, shows the smallest number of features that distance it from modern EY25 and conforms to EY in a large number of other traits The list of German dialects that are largely incompatible with both EGY and DuY encompasses CF, Bavarian, HA, and LA EGY also shows important contrasts to EF, Swabian, and Hessian, and, to a lesser extent, PG, while the differences between DuY and these four German dialects are less significant For both Yiddish varieties in question, Bohemian and ECG appear as the least remote dialects 24 Blosen (1986) shares the opinion about the important role that the Silesian dialect of German urban population in Polish towns played for the development of EY 25 This list encompasses the /en/-reflex of MHG –em {C15} and one innovation (prefix um­instead of un-)   123 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  Among their differences in comparison to these German dialects one distin­ guishes several groups: (1) those enumerated above for CzY: non-Bohemian {C6, V3}, non-ECG {V3, V5, U1, M4}, and non-Silesian {V9}; (2) the diminutive suffix –khen {M1} that contradicts to both Bohemian and Silesian, but is compatible with two other ECG dialects, Thuringian and UpS; (3) {C7} that for both DuY and EGY contrasts to both Thuringian and UpS; (4) {C1} that for EGY is compatible with Bohemian and Silesian only, while for DuY it is non-Bohemian; (5) {C15} that for EGY contrasts to both Thuringian and UpS; (6) {C12} that for DuY contrasts to both Bohemian and ECG being a feature peculiar to westernmost German dialects only Globally speaking, one can observe that: (1) EGY is clearly related to eastern German dialects; and (2) DuY results from a fusion of elements that arose in distant areas, one part coming – as for EGY – from the East, but another part being of western origin The information in the table presented at the beginning of this section shows that SWY is very close to EF, the only significant difference being /e/ before /š/ {V12}, a feature that is peculiar to all westernmost German dialects, that is, Alemannic and WCG It could be due to the influence of neighboring Swabian, the dialect to which SWY is also close enough but for a few important features (especially vocalic) Moreover, such fundamental family terms as SWY fra:le ‘grandmother’ and harle ‘grandfather’ are doubtlessly related to EF On the other hand, SWY has significant differences in comparison to LA (including basic vocalic characteristics {V1–V3}), Bohemian and PG (for both, in consonantism, vocalism, and morphology), and striking differences with Bavarian, HA and all of CG dialects other than PG Note that – as discussed in the previous section – the same link to EF and, to a lesser extent, Swabian was found in early western Jewish sources from the 16th century Among them, the language of works by Elia Levita, Mel and BZR are particularly close to modern SWY.26 Yet, for Ox and H96 links to modern Yiddish varieties are less evident to be established If we count only the most significant features, SWY appears to be closer to these two documents than other modern dialects However, if we add to our comparison less important characteristics that still concern series of words and not individual words, the “distance” between H96 and DuY appears to be slightly smaller than it is between H96 and SWY, while for Ox the closest dialect becomes (maybe, fortuitously) CzY The earliest Jewish sources – such as CC, R9, Le, R8 and Be – all have significant differences in comparison to all modern Yiddish, still they are much closer to SWY than to other Yiddish varieties SAB, the oldest and the northwestern most 26 If we exclude the unrounding {V10} that seems to be an innovation, the only important features that contradict to SWY are {C10} for Elia Levita’s works, {V7, U4} for Mel   Alexander Beider 124  of them, shows the larger number of elements contrasting to all dialects than other early sources Its language is still closer to DuY than to any other modern Yiddish variety 5 Classification of Yiddish varieties Today the classification generally used in works on Yiddish distinguishes two ­major subdivisions of modern Yiddish: EY and WY The latter encompasses (among others) dialects for which in this paper the abbreviations SWY, DuY, EGY, and CzY were used This classification was initially introduced by the founder of modern Yiddish linguistics, Landau (1895) and later regularly used in Weinreich (1973) Landau based it on the reflexes for MHG ei and ou that in what he defined as Western Yiddish appear as /a:/ In this paper, this feature is designated {V3} Without any additional analysis about genetic links that can exist between Yiddish varieties, this classification sounds purely conventional: it is not clear in which way the isogloss associated with these vowels is so significant that it can serve as an appropriate criterion for separating dialects Table lists linguistic elements that distance Yiddish varieties from each ­other Table 7: Yiddish varieties: incompatible features EY CzY EGY DuY CzY EGY C16, V3 C1, V3, U4, M1 XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXXXX DuY C11, C12, V3, V8, U4, M1 C1, C6, C7, C11, C12, C21, V3, V4, V6, V12, U2, U4, M1, M6 XXXXX C1, C16, U4, M1, M10 C11, C12, C16, V8, U4, M1, M10 C6, C7, C11, C12, C16, C21, V4, V6, V12, U4, M1, M10 C1, C11, V8, XXXXX C1, C6, C7, C11, C21, V4, V6, V12, M1 C1, C6, C7, C11, V4, V6, V12, M1 SWY These data can be represented by the following linear chain: SWY – DuY – EGY – CzY – EY This chain illustrates the links that exist between various dialects: the closer are elements within this chain, the closer are the corresponding dialects It is worth noting that the “distance” between neighboring members of this chain varies It   125 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  is the shortest between CzY and EY It is, by far, the longest between SWY and DuY: here the “distance” is similar to that between DuY and EY, the latter being situated on the other end of the chain! This information shows that the standard classification is at least doubtful: CzY and EGY appear to be much closer to EY than to SWY, while DuY is significantly better correlated with EGY than with SWY Moreover, as discussed in the previous section, SWY stays apart from other four dialects studied in this paper because of its close relationship to EF, while other dialects show kinship with Bohemian and ECG A link between EGY and EY also follows from the earliest classification of Yiddish varieties known to us, that by Friedrich (1784: 48–50) The author says that his own dialect (named EGY in this article) characterizes not only Jews from the main part of the Kingdom of Prussia, but also those from Great Poland.27 Additional arguments come from the consideration of the lexicon Only a few words of Romance origin are shared by all Yiddish varieties: StY bentshn ‘to bless’, leyenen ‘to read’, tsholnt ‘a kind of Sabbath dish’ and a few others Yet, a number of Romance lexical elements integrated to SWY are unknown or marginal not only in EY, but also in EGY and, to a lesser extent, CzY Among them: or(e)n ‘to pray’, pülts(e)l / pilts(e)l ‘maiden’, brayen / prayen ‘to invite’ (all discussed in Section 3), memern ‘to commemorate the dead’, sargenes ‘shrouds’, porshen ‘to remove the forbidden fat and veins from meat, ‘to porge’, dormen ‘to sleep’, baven ‘to drink’, tetshen ‘to blow the Shofar in a synagogue’ and frimzelikh ‘noodle’ (compare Beranek 1965: 24–27, 80, 86, 92, 93).28 Their semantics and phonology imply that here we are dealing not with borrowings from French and/or Italian that could take place rather recently when Yiddish varieties from Central and Eastern Europe were formed already Many of them belong to the substratum of SWY In contrast to this Romance substratum of SWY, in EY, EGY and often in CzY too, we find a small number of old words of (mainly western) Slavic origin that are likely to be a part of the substratum of these dialects: treybern ‘to porge (meat)’ in contrast to western porshen, CzY ­deyde / EY and EGY zeyde/zayde ‘grandfather’ and bobe ‘grandmother’ (contrasting to SWY harle and frale, Beranek [1965: 100–101]), and, most likely, also StY beylik ‘white meat (of fowl)’, preydik ‘fore-quarter (of animal)’, srovetke ‘whey’ 27 He also distinguishes (1) “Swabian” Yiddish, also spoken in the Halberstadt area of Prussia, (2) Yiddish of the “Roman Emperor” provinces (that is, the Habsburg Empire), (3) Yiddish from Little Poland and Lithuania In this article, they roughly correspond to SWY, CzY and EY, respectively 28 Certain modern maps show the presence of these western forms in Prague contrasting to typical eastern forms found in Moravia (Beranek 1965: 92) Such geography implies that Prague, the largest community of this area, underwent during the last centuries an influence from the West, while the language in Moravia kept more archaic variants   Alexander Beider 126  (Weinreich 1973: Vol 2, 202–203), hoyl ‘bare, pure’, and par(e)v(e) ‘neither dairy nor meat (food)’ (Beranek 1965: 79; Eggers 1998: 140) A large number of other lexical isoglosses related to various components of Yiddish also place SWY apart from EY, EGY, and CzY.29 Phonological peculiarities in certain words from the ­Hebrew component also unify EY and CzY and separate them from SWY (see, for example, Beranek 1965: 36, 63–65) DuY appears to be a transitional dialect that underwent influences from, on the one side, the East (principally, Bohemia and Poland) and, on the other side, the Jewish speech from the south-western German-­speaking provinces.30 This intermediate position is closely related to the history of the Ashkenazic community of Amsterdam formed after migrations of Jews from various parts of Europe: western Germany, Prague and Eastern Europe In general linguistics, genetic links between various dialects or languages are often established according to the criterion of shared innovations If we take into account phonological features of Yiddish varieties that appear to be unrelated to those of surrounding German dialects, only one innovation seems to be pan-­ Yiddish: the merging of short reflexes of MHG ä, ë and e, but the absence of merging of long reflexes for, on the one hand, MHG ä and ë and, on the other hand, MHG e {V7} However, it is isolated from other phonological developments and its exact reasons and sources are obscure enough As a result, it can not be taken for a doubtless example of innovation that took place among Jews of one particular region before spreading out to various parts of Europe At any case, even if such common proto-development indeed took place, it concerned only one part of the system of the stressed vowels As a whole, such systems – as discussed in Beider (2010) – were different for Proto-WY (the ancestor of SWY) and Proto-EY These systems represent main phonetic innovations of Yiddish in comparison to German dialects The Proto-EY system implies such important feature as merging of the reflexes of MHG ei and ê in one phoneme and those for MHG ou and ô in another phoneme Other innovations not concern all Yiddish varieties as well All of them are relatively recent dating from the period when Yiddish varieties seem to be formed already The change of the negative prefix un- to um- is shared by CzY and EY and is partly known in Alsace too However, it is not found in DuY, EGY and the main part of SWY and, moreover, is unknown before the 17th cen­ 29 See, for example, Beranek (1965: 23, 46, 74, 77, 78, 86, 89–91) Manaster Ramer (1997: 209– 210) makes a similar observation In order to avoid misunderstanding provoked by inappropriate standard classification, he uses the terms “Westerly Yiddish” and “Easterly Yiddish.” The former covers (among others) SWY and DuY The latter encompasses (among others) EY, CzY and EGY 30 Note that DuY uses, for example, the same words as SWY for ‘daddy’ and ‘mummy’, while a word from EY for ‘grandfather’   127 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  tury For a number of other innovations known in modern EY we find references in Jewish sources from Prague (17th to 18th centuries) and no references in EGY, DuY and SWY.31 The fronting /u/ > /y/ (> /i/) concerned only CzY, a part of EY (namely, CY and SEY), and is known from Jewish sources written in the 16th century in northern Italy and central Germany To summarize the information presented above in this paragraph, one can say that the consideration of innovations realized by Jews in the domain of phonology demonstrates that there is no set of phonetic innovations that could be assigned to putative Proto-Yiddish from which all modern Yiddish varieties would be descendants It also allows showing additional links between EY and CzY No shared innovations are common to SWY, DuY and EGY In morphology, the situation is slightly different Yiddish varieties include a large number of nouns with no equivalent in German dialects, in which several German suffixes are added to the root As it was demonstrated in Timm (2005: 84–94), numerous words of this group are due to the tradition of biblical translations internal to Jewish communities.32 The plural suffix –s (Timm 2005: 100–108) is also pan-Yiddish It is in lexicon and semantics that peculiarities of the German component of Yiddish in comparison to German appear to be most important In this domain, a large layer is due to the tradition of biblical translations internal to Jewish communities Many of these characteristic elements appeared in the Middle Ages within the Rhenish communities and during the following centuries spread out from West to East Other peculiar elements – some of which are also of medieval western origin – spread out inside of Jewish communities due to numerous migrations of rabbis and religious teachers However, the importance of the lexical layer common to Yiddish varieties should not be exaggerated Firstly, numerous dialectal lexical differences can be observed too In many cases, they are correlated with neighboring German dialects and, therefore, in principle, could correspond to relatively recent borrowings made by Jews from these German dialects Still, for elements from the common layer too we not find doubtless evidence about their old presence in the vernacular language of Jews from various parts of Europe References to some of them in biblical glossaries printed in Prague or Kraków during the 16th century are good testimonies to the propagation of the Ivri-taytsh tradition from West to 31 Among them: a regular change of sibilants /s/, /š/ and /z/ into affricates (/ts/, /tš/ and /dz/ respectively) after /n/ or /l/; the introduction of /d/ before /l/ when a diminutive suffix -l is added to a stem ending in /n/ 32 Many of them appear already in R9 and during the following centuries spread out from West to East   Alexander Beider 128  East Nevertheless, they are insufficient to draw a conclusion about these words being a part of the vernacular language already Moreover, as noted in Section 3, in some aspects, these early works are non-representative of the language spoken at that time by Jews who lived on territories of central and eastern Poland, as well as in Grand Duchy of Lithuania Secondly, a number of common elements in modern Yiddish varieties – ­unattested in early western sources – clearly result from mass migrations of Jews from Eastern Europe to the West that started after the Cossack wars of the mid17th century To them are likely to be due the presence in Yiddish varieties of Western Europe of such words as lokshn ‘noodle’, khotshe ‘at least’ and khape(n) ‘to catch’ Also note that we find in DuY not only individual words but also morphological patterns using such diminutive suffixes of Slavic origin as -nik, –tshik, –ke, and –enyu (Beem 1959: 23) The linguistic influence of eastern communities was also indirect For example, from a testimony written at the end of the 17th century, we know that Dutch Jews were regularly sending young men to Poland to learn, while numerous scholars and teachers from Poland were present in Western Europe (Landau 1901: 24) Thirdly, numerous features found in various modern Yiddish varieties and not present in standard literary NHG immediately cease to look as purely Jewish idiosyncrasies if we open German dialectal dictionaries As discussed above, SWY is closely related to EF, while EY with Bohemian and – apparently during a more recent stage of its development – Silesian These dialects are in many aspects intermediary between CG and UG Bohemian was formed after migrations of German colonists from the areas of Bavarian, EF and ECG (Schwarz 1962: map 59) Both EF and Silesian, in turn, were also influenced by Bavarian In this situation, often a feature common to SWY and EY can actually be due not to the putative Proto-Yiddish but to a simple fact that they are (or were) present in both EF and Bohemian Among the examples are {C17, U3, M3}.33 Fourthly, a large number of elements shared by modern Yiddish varieties that look peculiar if we compare them to modern NHG appear not to be innovations made by Jews: they rather reveal features that became archaic in the written language used by German Christians Disappearing of some of them from NHG is due to the natural development of the standardized literary German language from which many forms judged to be too dialectal were gradually withdrawn and cer- 33 To this, one can also add features that are present in numerous High German dialects but absent from standard literary NHG: final /x/ in the words cognate with NHG Höhe ‘height’ and Schuh ‘shoe’ (StY heykh and shukh); the variant nit ‘not’ (NHG nicht); un ‘and’ (NHG und); absence of final –t in the 3rd singular of the verb ‘to be’ (StY iz, NHG ist)   129 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  tain features of Low German were introduced Other elements disappeared due to the extremely important role that the language of Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible (1534) played in the development of modern German Numerous characteristics of his language were due to his native UpS dialect, while the spelling of certain words was due to his conscious efforts of retrieving forms that he considered to be etymologically correct (Timm 2005: 49–52) Until the late 18th century in Western Europe and the start of the 20th century in Eastern Europe Jews were not affected by these innovations in written German, and, as a result, many German archaisms are kept in modern Yiddish varieties They should not be erroneously taken as evidence of the existence of Proto-Yiddish Fifthly, considering features common to Yiddish varieties, one should not be mislead by the conventional classification of dialects used today in Yiddish linguistics Here an interesting example comes from two lists presented by Timm of twenty expressions combining [noun (mainly from the layer of religious terms) +  verb from the German component], one list in EY and another written in the vernacular language of a Jewish informant from Hamburg (Timm 2005: 8) Verbs used are the same in all but one of these expressions while, in principle, other verbs with a close meaning exist in Yiddish As a result, the selection of identical verbs can not be fortuitous: it is clearly related to a common tradition According to Timm, this comparison shows the unity of the German component of WY and EY and, therefore, of Yiddish as a whole From a synchronic point of view this argument is convincing However, it should not be extrapolated to draw such a general conclusion about the genesis of WY and EY Indeed, here we are dealing with expressions directly related to the religious sphere that is a domain in which a kind of uniformity obtained can be easily explained not via common roots but via gradual changes brought about due to mobility of Ashkenazic rabbis and religious scholars Moreover, the consideration of Hamburg as being representative for studying characteristics of WY appears to be inappropriate As DuY, the local dialect is transitional between EY and WY On the one hand, the variety of Yiddish spoken in that city exhibits such typical WY features as {V3, V12} (Beranek 1965: 2–3, 75) On the other hand, according to numerous other isoglosses, it appears closer to CzY and/or EY than to SWY (compare Beranek 1965: 12, 30, 58, 66, 67, 69, 80, 86,34 90, 95, 101), while for ‘daddy’ and ‘mummy’ in Hamburg (exactly as in EGY) one finds words from CzY and those from SWY too used as variants (Beranek 1965: 81–82) 34 This isogloss is particularly important for our discussion because it deals with one of expressions listed by Timm: ‘to blow Shofar’ The verb appearing in the testimony from Hamburg is cognate with StY blozn (also found in CzY) while the verb used in SWY is tetshen   Alexander Beider 130  6 Conclusions In general linguistics, modern German and Yiddish are usually considered to be descendants of one common ancestor This approach is quite natural: the German component of Yiddish is by far the most important, by the number of its elements and especially by its role in grammar, morphology, syntax, lexicon, and phonology of this language During the initial development of Yiddish linguistics, this consideration was also without doubt: it characterizes studies by Landau, Sainéan, Gerzon, as well as the work of the most brilliant representative of this early “Germanistic” school, Bin-Nun (Fischer) However, today’s Yiddish linguistics also uses a parallel classification that assigns Yiddish to a specific group of Jewish languages The elaboration of its linguistic aspects is mainly due to Weinreich (1973) who, without refusing the importance of the link between Yiddish and High German, insisted on deriving Yiddish from putative Romance-based specifically Jewish language(s) Laaz/Loez spoken by ancestors of Ashkenazic Jews in northern France and/or Italy According to his model, German Jews never spoke the same language as their Christian neighbors because their language, from the very beginning, was a fusion language that merged Hebrew-Aramaic, Romance and – gradually growing in numbers – High German elements Its immediate consequences were dramatic for Yiddish studies: (1) placement of the “birth” of Yiddish to the period – more than one thousand years before today – when the first Jewish communities appeared in German-speaking territories; (2) determination of the Rhineland as the “cradle” of Yiddish; (3) automatic assignment of the label “Yiddish” to any German-based language/dialect spoken by Jews During decades that followed after Weinreich work was published, his approach contributed to the oblivion of the results achieved by the “Germanistic” school and to the concentration on “Judeo-centric” models These new models mainly questioned some of the conclusions made by Weinreich,35 but not the ­essence of his approach The importance of ideas by Weinreich can also be measured by the fact that they were of great influence to the studies by two scholars who in many other aspects are really opposite to each other, Wexler (2002) and Timm The former showed how one can develop Weinreich’s idea about an intimate link between various Jewish languages in the worst way creating a theory of “relexification” whose arguments and methods of obtaining information contradict all major methodological principles elaborated by general linguistics during 35 For example, there was an attempt to displace the “cradle” for Yiddish from the Rhine to the Danube considering Yiddish to be unrelated to the language of Rhenish Jews (Faber and King 1984: King 1992, 1993; Katz 1993; Eggers 1998)   131 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  the last two centuries The latter took profit of innovative Weinreich’s ideas in the best way writing Timm (2005), a study, fundamental for Yiddish linguistics that shows the channel through which numerous specifically Jewish idiosyncrasies gradually became widespread in various Ashkenazic communities This channel corresponds to Ivri-taytsh, that is, the tradition of biblical translations whose first traces are found in medieval Rhenish communities Certain of these idiosyncrasies have been linked by Timm to the tradition of biblical translations developed previously by French Jews (Timm 2005: 33–40) In other words, thanks to her opus magnum, something that before could be considered just Weinreich’s intuitive guess received a strong corroboration In addition to elements that entered Yiddish through Ivri-taytsh, among other specifically Jewish pan-Yiddish elements one also counts: a layer of words related to the religion (at least, partly propagated thanks to the mobility of rabbis and religious scholars), a significant part of the Hebrew-Aramaic component, and numerous given names of Semitic, Romance or High German origin (Beider 2004: 233–237) It is important to stress that these elements of Yiddish often have their roots on the Rhine, exactly as suggested by Weinreich Are they really sufficient to follow his idea of the Rhenish origins of Yiddish? In part, the answer is con­ ventional because all depends on the definition used However, the question has substantive aspects too According to major principles of general linguistics, the elements from the above layers, lexical and to a lesser extent morphological, can never be considered to form the basis for a language This basis is typically High German in all fundamental aspects of the language In this context, it would be inappropriate to consider Yiddish to be also a descendant of a putative Romance-­ based specifically Jewish language Laaz/Loez In other words, the above elements could be of large importance for the gradual separation of Yiddish from German but in no case they form Yiddish as a language If during the period of this separation, High German would still be a totally uniform language, then Weinreich’s approach to origins of Yiddish could be valid However, the situation is not that simple Since the end of the First Millennium C.E., important dialectal differences existed already inside High German separating it into Central and Upper German During the first centuries of the Second Millennium C.E numerous subdivisions appeared inside Central and Upper German We had no single evidence that Jewish vernacular speech was different from that of surrounding Christians by that time (but for the presence in it of certain specifically Jewish elements) Quite on the contrary, Jewish sources compiled in Western Europe before the 16th century show a close relationship to peculiarities of local Christian dialects, and, most important, one finds no evidence about any kind of homogeneity of these sources In other terms, it would not be an exaggeration to say that to a great extent they represent German texts spelled using the Hebrew alphabet Jewish texts   Alexander Beider 132  compiled during the 16th century are different Firstly, Jewish documents from that time fall into one of two rather homogeneous groups: western and eastern The former covers documents from western German-speaking provinces and northern Italy and is closely related to East Franconian and, to a lesser extent, Swabian The latter comprises texts from Prague and Kraków that exhibit features showing their link to the colonial Bohemian dialect of German Secondly, for the 16th century we can be sure to deal already with idioms that are distinctly different from those used by local Christians: the Hebrew component is fully incorporated; one can observe numerous other specifically Jewish peculiarities as well the first hints about the mixture of elements taken from different German dialects Properly speaking, it would be inappropriate to see western and eastern Jewish idioms as dialects of one Judeo-German language, the ancestor of modern Yiddish Such consideration would necessarily imply that both of them descend from the same common specifically Jewish ancestor (Proto-Yiddish) that in turn descends from one specific German dialect This is precisely false: German donor dialects were different for the two Jewish idioms in question However, due to the presence in both western and eastern Jewish languages of numerous common elements, either inherited from the time when these languages were not sepa­ rated from corresponding German dialects yet, or due to permanent exchanges between Jewish communities, as well as to closeness of High German dialects that served as basis for them, there certainly could be a feeling among Jews of the existence of a common Ashkenazic vernacular language Modern Yiddish varieties descend from these two early Jewish idioms, western and eastern As a result, it would be appropriate to speak about the existence  of an independent Proto-WY (formed after its separation from its East ­Franconian/Swabian German ancestor) and Proto-EY (formed after its separation from its Bohemian ancestor) These independent Jewish proto-languages were suggested in Beider (2010) taking into account only the systems of stressed vowels of modern Yiddish varieties The information presented in this paper after a much more detailed analysis – allowing for a large inventory of additional ­phonological and numerous other features and their realization in early Jewish texts – corroborates not only the general idea of the existence of these proto-­ languages, but also their suggested approximate temporary frames If in the sources of the 16th century these two subdivisions are already easily visible, it would be appropriate to place the creation of Proto-WY and Proto-EY to the 15th century, and at any case, after the Black Death The importance of Jews from ­Bohemia-Moravia for the development of Ashkenazic communities of Eastern ­Europe is relatively well corroborated by historical facts and therefore the Bohemian basis for Proto-EY is not a surprise More enigmatic appears to be the process of gradual unification of western Jewish communities under a Proto-WY with   133 Unity of the German component of Yiddish  East Franconian/Swabian basis Perhaps, a detailed historical study of the demography of medieval western communities could shed some light to this question It would also be appropriate to address the question of geographic sources of Ashkenazic Jews who populated northern Italy during the 14th to 16th centuries In these new territories on which local Christians spoke a different language, some kind of linguistic unification of Jews coming from different German dialectal areas was unavoidable Jews from northern Italy and their printing houses surely played an important role in the general cultural development of western Ashkenazic Jewry until the beginning of the 17th century They could be of importance for the development of modern WY too The classification of Yiddish varieties currently used in Yiddish linguistics is inappropriate Based on one conventionally chosen isogloss, it makes obscure the actual genetic links that exist between these Jewish idioms Yiddish varieties spoken in Alsace, Switzerland, and the Rhineland (SWY) descend from Proto-WY For all of them, the expression “WY dialects” is appropriate EY dialects spoken in Eastern Europe and Yiddish in Czech lands (currently often seen as a subdialect of WY) all descend from Proto-EY During its development, EY (and especially the system of its consonants) underwent an important influence of Silesian dialect spoken by German colonists in Polish towns Similar changes are also found in Yiddish in Czech lands, most likely, through the intermediary of EY Yiddish varieties spoken in East Germany and the Netherlands – that are usually also seen as subdialects of WY – actually are transitional idioms resulting from the fusion of elements coming from dialects descending from Proto-WY and Proto-EY, the latter being for East Germany clearly more important than the former References Althaus, Hans Peter 1971 Die Cambridger Löwenfabel von 1382 Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter Banitt, Menahem 2005 Le Glossaire de Leipzig Vols 1–4 Jerusalem: 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