Date and Place of Birth

This chapter examines the various efforts to explain when, where, and how Yiddish emerged. These efforts variously draw on linguistic and extra-linguistic evidence, including the earliest textual traces of the Ashkenazic vernacular and the demotics used by these Jews’ neighbors, as well as information that testifies to early Jewish settlements in northern Europe and, more recently, DNA analysis. This inquiry responds to a broader modern interest in the origins of languages in relation to their speakers, and these explanations of the beginnings of Yiddish reflect their proponents’ ideological as well as intellectual agendas regarding the nature not only of the language but also of Ashkenazim.

Political Affiliation

This chapter examines the role that Yiddish played, beginning in the late nineteenth century, in many Jews’ participation in progressive politics, including trade unionism, socialism, anarchism, labor Zionism, and communism. The Yiddishism engendered by various political movements became, for some Jews, an ideological end in itself. Their commitment to maintaining and transforming the language has served as a definitional practice of Jewish solidarity. In the post–World War II era, Yiddish has been implicated in new political uses by Hasidim, by new generations of progressive Jews, and by non-Jews in Europe engaged in coming to terms with the destruction of European Jewry.

Occupation

This chapter examines the place of work in the development of the Yiddish language, including trades that generated their own argots. Because of its role in the Jewish labor movement of the modern period, Yiddish came to be regarded as emblematic of the Jewish proletariat. At this time, Yiddish itself became professionalized, with the emergence of journalists, belletrists, translators, and teachers who work in the language. The advent of language standardization prompted the need for experts in Yiddish as lexicographers and grammarians, while the growing interest in the diversity of Yiddish speech has become the work of linguists and folklorists.

Appearance

This chapter examines the visual presence of Yiddish. Rendering Yiddish in the Jewish alphabet, originally conceived for a Semitic language, has entailed shifting orthographic strategies. In both old manuscripts and early publications, Yiddish was written with distinct scribal conventions and often printed with a special typeface that differentiated it from Hebrew. Efforts to standardize Yiddish spelling are a late development, with competing standards that are honored more often in the breach. Though full Yiddish texts have only seldom been published in Romanized transcription, individual words and phrases are frequently Romanized according to a variety of conventions when Yiddishisms are integrated into a language spelled with Latin letters.

Gender

This chapter examines the multiple roles that gender plays in Yiddish, beginning with its grammar. Yiddish has often been conceptualized as a gendered language, whether in its instrumental use or in its symbolic value, given that Yiddish is always used in relation to other languages. In particular, women have figured strategically in the development of Yiddish literature, both in the early modern period and during the Haskalah. In the modern period, Yiddish has sometimes been characterized as essentially “feminine” in contrast with Hebrew as “masculine.” Yiddish has also been used to disrupt a heteronormative gender binary, whether articulating a third gender in traditional Jewish literacy or the recent phenomenon of Queer Yiddishkeit.

Name

This chapter examines the range and dynamics of the various names by which the language now called Yiddish has been identified. This examination reveals changing conceptualizations of the foundational vernacular of Ashkenazim in relation to other languages, both those used by Jews and those of their neighbors, signifying its distinctive usage or stature. Earlier terms reflect understandings of the demotic of Ashkenazic Jewry that are more mutable and contingent that modern notions of what constitutes a discrete, integral language. Widespread use of the term “Yiddish” to name the language is relatively recent and reflects modern extralinguistic concepts of Ashkenazic ethnicity and Jewish nationality.

Family Background

This chapter examines the classification of Yiddish as a member of two different families of languages: Germanic languages and Jewish languages. Each of these language families is founded on a different conceptualization of how languages are related to one another: genetic or cultural, respectively. These two distinct classifications of Yiddish can be integrated by considering it a fusion language, which situates the perceived hybrid nature of Yiddish as its defining essence. Discussions of the family background of Yiddish also reveal extralinguistic concerns reflecting ideologically shaped notions of about cultural legitimacy, demographic integrity, social and political status, and the construction of a Jewish authenticity.

Personality

This chapter examines the attention paid to the symbolic value of Yiddish, attributing an expressive character to the language, irrespective of semantic value. This attention becomes especially pronounced when Yiddish is engaged in the postvernacular mode—that is, when the fact that someone writes or speaks in Yiddish is deemed at least as meaningful as the content of what they have written or uttered. The attributions of a character to Yiddish range widely, from the pious to the carnivalesque, reflecting observers’ desires (or fears) as well as their self-consciousness about Yiddish in relation to other languages and to Jewish life.

Religion

The place of Yiddish in Jewish religiosity is complex, playing a distinct but integral role in the internal bilingualism of traditional Ashkenazi worship and devotional scholarship. Yiddish became an important vehicle of what might be termed “popular religion” in the early modern period in the form of instructional manuals, supplementary liturgy, and translations of sacred texts. The language has been imbued with a distinct spiritual significance by Hasidim, who currently make the most extensive use of Yiddish in religious life. Conversely, Yiddish has been an important language for ardently secular Jews, for some of whom the language has replaced religious observance as their defining rubric of Jewishness.

Health

This chapter examines how Yiddish has been repeatedly pathologized, both by people outside the Jewish community and by some Jews. The earliest efforts to study the language, undertaken by Christian humanists, viewed it as a deviant form of German and as emblematic of Jews’ social and moral unhealthiness. This perspective was shared by some Jews, who numbered among the most ardent opponents of Yiddish as advocates of the Haskalah, Hebraism, or Zionism. The derision of Yiddish as disabled also inspired Yiddishists’ efforts to standardize and legitimize the language in keeping with the normative model of mainstream European languages.