Jews in Ashkenaz

Leaving aside for the moment the question of whether or not Hebrew is a Jewish language, Yiddish is without question the premier Jewish language, as its name proclaims. While German scholars of the Enlightenment and Zionist Hebrew Israeli scholars denigrated it, modern students of Jewish varieties all see it as the prime example of an autonomous Jewish language. It may have started as a fusion language, but it gained standardization, vitality, and vernacular functionality, achieved a distinguished literary use, and still has surviving secular and religious supporters endeavoring to overcome the murder of most of its modern speakers. True, most secular speakers are old, and the religious are members of a few Hasidic sects. Other secular supporters now form the kind of “metalinguistic community” that is typical of many disappearing indigenous languages without vitality. But, because of its continuity among Hasidim, Yiddish is the best example of a surviving Jewish variety with natural intergenerational transmission.

Its birth, commonly assumed to be in the Rhineland area of the Loter-Ashkenaz Jewish culture area sometime around the end of the first millennium CE, with all the uncertainties of medieval Jewish life and society and with the controversies that have arisen about its Slavic environment and component, must be the center point of a study of the languages of the Jews. This gives added importance to studying the Jews who created it and the non-Jewish environment in which German first became a language of the Jews (see Map 8).