4

Name

Naming Yiddish exemplifies both the attractions and the challenges of likening a language to a human being. Whereas people are usually named close to the time of their birth, languages can be spoken and even written for generations before being given names. And yet a language, like a person, can have more than one name. The terms used to refer to what is thought of as “the same language” can change with time, and it can be identified with multiple names concurrently by different users of the language as well as by speakers of other languages. Each name that people give to a language embodies their understanding of how it is used and what its value is.

The range of names that a language acquires over time reflects changes in the attention paid to it. New names may arise from a perceived need to distinguish the language from others or to examine the interrelation of the language and its speakers. In the case of the language now generally called Yiddish, both concerns are key to understanding the long, varied history of its naming. Indeed, widespread use of the term yidish in the language itself and of “Yiddish” (spelled Jiddisch, yídish, jidysz, идиш, etc.) in other languages is a relatively recent phenomenon. Therefore, literature scholar Jerold Frakes notes, it is “almost de rigueur” that a book on the language’s history “devote a section or chapter to the names of Yiddish.”¹

As Yiddish was initially used primarily for oral communication, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know how early speakers of the language might have referred to it. What may be the oldest references to Yiddish appear in an eleventh-century text written in Hebrew, a language that Jews had long since ceased to use as a vernacular but maintained for worship and devotional scholarship. Rashi’s commentaries on the Bible and Talmud render a small number of obscure, ancient Hebrew and Aramaic words bilshon Ashkenaz (“in the language of Ashkenaz”), in keeping with a longstanding practice of studying Scripture by translating it into the vernacular. For example, Rashi offers raytvogn (“chariot”) to gloss risfak (Aramaic: “sedan chair”) and vindlshteyn for lulim (Hebrew: “winding stairs”).²

At the time, Ashkenaz was the term local Jews used to identify what would come to be referred to as German lands—that is, a region of northwestern and central Europe where speakers of different variants of medieval German resided. The name Ashkenaz appears in the Bible, first mentioned among the descendants of Noah (Genesis 10:3).³ Using this name to identify German lands exemplifies a wider diaspora Jewish practice of assigning ancient Hebrew names to territories in which Jews settled, including Sefarad for Iberia, Tsarfat for France, and Knaan for eastern Europe. This practice acknowledged the distinctiveness of both the regions’ local non-Jewish populations and, later, the Jewish communities established in these places. The terminology is idiomatic; mapping the diaspora with names from Hebrew Scripture locates these territories in a panhistoric landscape of the Jewish imaginary.

Subsequently, the meaning of Ashkenaz changed, designating a distinct Jewish diaspora community within the region. The plural noun Ashkenazim referred to Jews of this locale, not their Christian neighbors. By the late Middle Ages, the Hebrew term minhag ashkenaz (“the customs of Ashkenaz”) identified this Jewish population’s particular practices of worship and ritual. Eventually, this term referenced the distinctive customs of Ashkenazim who settled beyond German lands.

Ashkenazim were also distinguished from other diaspora Jewish populations by their vernacular language. However, Rashi’s term bilshon ashkenaz does not necessarily identify Yiddish as a language different from the German spoken by neighboring Christians. Rather, the term references a local vernacular that was intelligible to Rashi and his Jewish readership, for whom the modern distinction between Yiddish and German may not have been applicable. But by the early modern period, the meaning of Ashkenaz had come to identify this diaspora Jewish population with its own vernacular. Thus, the title page of Mirkeves ha-mishne (The second chariot)—the earliest extant Yiddish printed book, issued in Cracow in 1534—explains, in Hebrew, that this Bible concordance renders the original biblical text “into the language of Ashkenaz that is customary among us Ashkenazim.”⁴

The ambiguity inherent in “the language of Askhenaz” also pertains to a term frequently used in the early modern period to refer, possibly, to Yiddish: taytsh. Related to the modern German word Deutsch (which was sometimes spelled Teutsch), a term derived from Old German diutisk and Latin theodiscus,⁵ taytsh is mentioned frequently in works of what has come to be identified as early Yiddish literature. At times, taytsh appears to refer unambiguously to the vernacular of Ashkenazic Jews. For example, when discussing the customary practice of weekly readings of the Torah, Yiddish renderings of the Hebrew book of morals Sefer ha-yirah (Book of awe), published in the mid-1500s, advise that one should read the biblical text twice in Hebrew and once in translation; if one doesn’t read the traditional targem (“translation of the Bible into Aramaic”), then it should be read in taytsh.⁶ But in other instances, taytsh might refer to German—that is, the language, or at least the literature, of the Christian neighbors of Ashkenazim. Thus, the introduction to a Yiddish translation of the Torah published in Constance in 1544 touts the book as providing a virtuous alternative for Jewish women and girls who know how to read taytsh and therefore “spend their time with foolish books”—specifically, German epics about legendary medieval heroes such as “Dietrich von Bern, Hildebrant, and the like”—that were also published in the alef-beys (Yiddish: “Jewish alphabet”).⁷

Compared to modern notions of what differentiates Yiddish from German, this ambiguity is telling. During the early modern period, it appears that Ashkenazim did not consistently regard their internal demotic as discrete from the language spoken and written by their Christian neighbors. To the extent that Jews did perceive this difference, they regarded the boundary between Christian and Jewish vernacular language as permeable. Thus, in his 1660 quadrilingual glossary of words in Hebrew, Italian, Latin, and Yiddish, Nathan Note Hannover explains, in Hebrew, “I have selected the loshn ashkenaz from the easy language current among us, and very little from the loshn ashkenaz of the Gentiles that is not found in our language.”⁸ The meaning of loshn ashkenaz or taytsh was fluid; these terms reflected Ashkenazic Jews’ contingent understanding of vernacular language, whether in oral, written, or printed form, and whether among Ashkenazim or their neighbors. At the same time, Hannover’s explanation distinguishes between Jewish and Christian usage of the “same” language.

Taytsh is not the only term used to reference the Ashkenazic vernacular in this ambiguous manner. The publication of Dietrich von Bern in the alef-beys (Cracow, 1597) is described as “taken from galkhes [Yiddish: ‘the Latin alphabet’] and rendered into Yiddish.” As Max Weinreich notes, the word yidish (which can mean either “Jewish” or “Yiddish”) here may reference a difference in alphabet, rather than language.⁹ An early eighteenth-century text, described as taken “from galkhes into our language,”¹⁰ similarly distinguishes between alien (i.e., Christian) writing and a familiar idiom. Context is key; the term yidish marks the first text in question as somehow especially for Jewish readers, though what distinguishes the text may not be a separate language as this is understood today. Rather, the distinction appears to be a particularly Jewish practice of engaging the text, which renders its language, per the second example, as “ours.” Conversely, referring to Yiddish with the term loshenenu (Hebrew: “our language”) or, in modern times, mame-loshn (Yiddish: “mother tongue”) implies a closeness between speaker (or writer) and the language. However, these terms do not reference Yiddish specifically, but could be used to identify a bond between any population and its language.

The contingent, ambiguous nature of defining the vernacular of Ashkenaz before the modern period is borne out by Yiddish terms that reflect an earlier understanding of taytsh as signifying neither a Jewish nor a gentile language per se, but rather a demotic used by Jews in relation to loshn-koydesh. Ivre-taytsh refers to a form of Yiddish used to facilitate ivre—reading the Hebrew of the Bible and other sacred texts, such as the prayer book—by rendering it in the Ashkenazic vernacular. In his Yiddish thesaurus, lexicographer Nahum Stutchkoff lists tkhine-taytsh and Tsene-rene-taytsh as terms for a similar kind of Yiddish, referring specifically to core sacred texts encountered in the language: tkhines, supplicatory prayers written for women, and Tsene-rene (Go forth and see), the most widely read Yiddish rendering of the Bible.¹¹

Though no longer serving as a term for Yiddish (or the German language, which in Yiddish now is daytsh), taytsh is glossed as “meaning, sense.” It figures as the stem in several verbs—oystaytshn (“to analyze”), arayntaytshn (“to interpret, to read into”), (far)taytshn (“to translate”)—and in the idiom Staytsh?, a contraction of Vos taytsh? (“What does it mean? How come?”). In these various forms, taytsh remains a signifier of semantic accessibility, though not necessarily in Yiddish, German, or any other language.

• • •

The terms by which non-Jews have referred to Yiddish reflect their varied recognition that Ashkenazim have a distinct vernacular. Here, too, identifying Yiddish, compared to how it is understood today, could be ambiguous. For example, without further modification, the Russian adjective evreiskii can mean “Jewish,” “Hebrew,” or “Yiddish.” Thus, the sentence On evreiskii pisatel′ could be translated as “He is a Jewish author,” “He is a Hebrew author,” or “He is a Yiddish author.” To disambiguate the term, Russian has sometimes distinguished Hebrew as the ancient (drevne-evreiskii) and Yiddish as the new (novoevreiskii) or colloquial (raziovorno-evreiskii) Jewish language; in the Soviet era, the term idish also appears.¹²

German speakers’ efforts to name the Ashkenazic vernacular proved especially consequential for their Jewish neighbors. In pioneering scholarly efforts to study the language, published in the eighteenth century, German authors variously refer to it as die jüdischteutsche Sprache (“the Judeo-German language”), Jüdisch-Teutsch (“Judeo-German”), or die Judensprache (“the Jews’ language”).¹³ These terms are ambivalent, perhaps deliberately, as to whether they identify a language in its own right or a Jewish variant of the language in which these terms are situated. Weinreich argued that calling Yiddish Judeo-German and other diaspora Jewish languages Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Spanish, and the like not only minimizes their integrity as independent languages; these terms also constrain how these languages might be studied, implying that they should be analyzed in relation to their non-Jewish counterpart rather than in their own right.¹⁴

As this scholarly scrutiny of Yiddish was under way, Jews in German states gradually forsook it for German as their language of daily life. The transition did not go unnoticed by some of their Christian neighbors, who detected in these efforts at linguistic assimilation the remnants of something ineluctably Jewish. (Of course, this shift, even if executed flawlessly, was itself a Jewish endeavor.) These Christian observers insisted that if German Jews no longer spoke Yiddish, they nevertheless spoke German “like Jews”—that is, with traces of Yiddish idioms or intonation—and named this practice jüdeln or mauscheln. The latter word, a derogative for displaying recognizably Jewish behavior, is generally explained as derived from Moshe—that is, Moses.¹⁵ (Similarly, Poles disparaged the way Jews spoke Polish, inflected by their native Yiddish, as żydłaczć.) Though not terms for Yiddish per se, they named an Ashkenazic way of speaking understood as tainted by Yiddish.

Such disparagement notwithstanding, the transition from Yiddish to German figured prominently in the efforts by maskilim in German states to embrace modern Western culture and thereby forge a new way of being Jewish. The effects of the Haskalah would eventually be felt by all Ashkenazim, even those who opposed it. As maskilim generally considered Yiddish emblematic of its speakers’ failure to integrate into the Western cultural mainstream, abandoning—and, moreover, repudiating—the language was a central tenet of the Haskalah.¹⁶ Yet at first some maskilim continued to speak and write the language, even while they disparaged it. Indeed, their derogation of Yiddish engendered its own Yiddish vocabulary for naming the object of their contempt: hiltserne taytsh (“flawed [literally, ‘wooden’] German”), kugl-loshn (“pudding language”), shulhoyf-loshn (“the language of the synagogue courtyard”).¹⁷ These last two terms deride Yiddish by its association with mores (traditional food, the commotion made by Jews congregating outside a synagogue) emblematic of the Ashkenazic culture that maskilim wished to leave behind. The most enduring maskilic term of opprobrium for Yiddish was zhargon (“jargon”). Derived from an Old French word for the jabbering of birds, the term has come to mean either the inscrutable language of a closed group or a debased, uncivilized form of speech—in either case, something less than a full, proper language.

When eastern European Jews first encountered the Haskalah at the turn of the nineteenth century, its call for abandoning Yiddish did not meet with the same widespread compliance as had been the case among Ashkenazim further west. The perpetuation of Yiddish—and, moreover, its expansion—in eastern Europe reflects the very different sociolinguistic circumstances of the Ashkenazim living there compared to Jews in German states. This difference exemplifies a larger distinction between the culture of western and eastern Ashkenazim, which linguist Dovid Katz characterizes as an inward turn by the latter group, developing an “increasingly compact and intensive Jewish life,” in contrast to the integrationist turn of the former.¹⁸

Despite this difference, the linguistic self-consciousness emblematic of the Haskalah had a profound impact on the intellectual culture of eastern European Jews. This new way of thinking about language use as definitional for modern Jewish life eventually informed divergent language ideologies, which had in common their rejection of Yiddish. On one hand, maskilim developed a modern Hebrew that refashioned the language, traditionally used for sacred practices, into a secular vehicle for writing and, later, speaking. On the other hand, the Haskalah advocated mastering local languages of high culture and state power: German in the Habsburg Empire, Russian in the Romanov Empire. However, the great majority of eastern European Jews did not follow this maskilic agenda and maintained the use of Yiddish as their vernacular.

Moreover, toward the end of the nineteenth century a countermovement among eastern European Jewish intellectuals revalued Yiddish, championing it as a Jewish national language to be cultivated rather than condemned. This movement, known as Yiddishism, positioned what was then the vernacular of the great majority of eastern European Jewry at the center of a new, largely secular culture. Yiddishists argued that the language could support a Jewish national consciousness in the diaspora, thereby imbuing Yiddish with symbolic value beyond its longstanding use as a demotic. As a consequence of promoting the language for modern education, high culture, and political organizing, calling the language yidish—implying a tautological relationship among Jewish language, Jewish people (yidn), and Jewish mores (yidishkeyt)—became more widespread and ultimately prevailed over other names.

Nevertheless, zhargon endured as a familiar term for Yiddish, notwithstanding its pejorative implications, among those who spoke and wrote the language as well as among others. By the turn of the twentieth century, the use of zhargon ranged considerably in connotation, having become for some Jews, in effect, the name of the Ashkenazic vernacular. The term appears in titles of Yiddish textbooks (for example, Zhargon-lerer, [Jargon/Yiddish teacher], Warsaw, 1886) and dictionaries (Zhargonishes fremd-verter-bukh [Dictionary of foreign terms in Jargon/Yiddish], Vilna, 1907). The zhargon komitetn (“jargon/Yiddish committees”) established in the mid-1890s by Jewish revolutionaries in the Russian Empire translated works of fiction and nonfiction into Yiddish for the Jewish proletariat.¹⁹ Some nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Hebrew publications use zhargon, in parentheses, as a gloss for other terms referring to Yiddish: ha-safah ha-meduberet (“the spoken language”) or ha-lashon ha-medubar benenu (“the language spoken among us”).²⁰ Hebrew dictionaries of the early twentieth century also rendered Yiddish as zargoni or yahadut (“Jewishness”), reflecting other efforts to separate Modern Hebrew (and its attendant culture) from what then was, for many of its advocates, their native language.²¹

As modern Yiddish literature coalesced in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the term zhargon figured in writers’ assessments of this phenomenon’s merits. In his 1888 anthology Di yidishe folksbiblyotek (The Jewish people’s library), a landmark work of advocacy for the artistic value of Yiddish literature, author Sholem Aleichem (né Sholem Rabinovitsh) refers to Yiddish writers, literature, and orthography as zhargonishe shrayber, literatur, and oysleygen, distinct from his use of the adjective yidish, meaning “Jewish.”²² By contrast, poet Shimen Frug disparaged the literary value of Yiddish as limited, compared to other languages, in his essay “Lider fun dem yidishn zhargon” (Poems in the Jewish jargon), written at the turn of the twentieth century.²³ A generation later, historian Simon Dubnow traced the development of modern Yiddish letters in his 1929 collection of essays Fun zhargon tsu yidish (From jargon to Yiddish). Dubnow juxtaposed these two terms as emblematic of the rapid advancement of this literature from the mid-nineteenth century, when zhargon was “considered the stepchild of culture,” to the 1920s, in which Yiddish “had become the language of literature, journalism, and scholarship,” rivaling “Hebrew and even the more sophisticated languages” in its achievements.²⁴ Though Yiddish is both the subject of discussion and the language in which these three texts were written, each author’s juxtaposition of the terms yidish and zhargon reveals a different understanding of the use of Yiddish in relation to its symbolic value.

As a consequence of growth in publishing and other activities in the language, the name yidish became more widespread during the nineteenth century, both among its speakers and in other languages, and ultimately prevailed in the next century. The establishment of this term reflects new valuations of Yiddish: its capacity to unite millions of Jews throughout eastern Europe and an international network of immigrant centers through a rapidly expanding print culture, and the increasing importance of Yiddish in facilitating new visions of Jewish political and cultural life. The consolidation of yidish as the language’s name did not, however, preclude other terms from arising in new engagements with the language.

Yiddishists’ assertion of the language’s defining role in realizing a secular Jewish culture and a national Jewish consciousness prompted their greater attention to the quality of Yiddish usage. As a result of this new kind of scrutiny, Yiddishists coined terms of opprobrium for what they deemed substandard forms of their language, reminiscent of how maskilim had previously mocked Yiddish as debased German. Once again, differentiating these two languages proved especially fraught. In eastern Europe the perceived overuse of terms from modern German for which there were more idiomatic equivalents in Yiddish was derided as daytshmerish or dizn-dazn-loshn, the latter term mocking the use of the German pronoun diese and article das. In America, Yiddishists sometimes ridiculed immigrant speech riddled with what they considered excessive Anglicisms as “potato-chicken-kitchen language.”²⁵ Like the maskilic term kugl-loshn, the use of common food terms to signify vulgarity implicitly disparaged this form of the language through associations with the traditional work of women, reflecting a more pervasive gendering of Yiddish that denigrated the language as feminine.

Weinreich argues that establishing Yiddish as the name of the language in English at the turn of the twentieth century influenced speakers of other languages to adopt similar terms that transliterate yidish and thereby distinguish the language from Jewish as a more general term.²⁶ However, many native speakers of Yiddish have often referred to the language, when speaking in English, as Jewish, preferring to translate, rather than transliterate, its name and thereby also maintain its tautological relationship with Jewish people and their culture. Anthropologist Jonathan Boyarin characterizes this usage as evincing the ambivalent nature of immigrant culture, an “attempt to display attachment and competence in an ancestral idiom on the one hand, while demonstrating an educated, responsible awareness of the new idiom on the other.”²⁷

Conversely, the term Yiddish has been used in English as an adjective to describe something pertaining to eastern European Jews or to Jews generally, without its necessarily having any connection to the language. This practice includes external applications, such as “Yiddish jokes” that are anti-Semitic jests in English, sometimes referencing Yiddish through derisive dialect humor (and that certainly do not have Yiddish sources).²⁸ Among examples internal to Jewish culture is the term “Yiddish dance,” used to refer to traditional eastern European Jewish folk dance, in which the Yiddish language plays a nominal role.²⁹ English-speaking Jews’ fluctuating use of Yiddish and Jewish disrupts the traditional tautological relationship equating the Yiddish language with its speakers and their culture. At the same time, the undoing of this tautology prompted the need to distinguish references in Yiddish to the language as opposed to Jewish people, literature, or other phenomena, resulting in a nuanced grammatical differentiation. Thus, yidishe limudim can mean either “Jewish studies” or “Yiddish studies”; to resolve this ambiguity, the latter is sometimes rendered yidish-limudim (in which yidish is not an adjective but a noun and therefore is not declined).³⁰

Changes in the use and significance of Yiddish after World War II engendered more new terms related to the language. Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish popularized the term Yinglish to identify Yiddish words that had become widely used in American English (for example, bagel, mish-mash). Rosten designates as Ameridish neologisms coined by Yiddish speakers in the United States, such as boychik (“boy, fellow”) and nextdoorekeh (“female next-door neighbor”).³¹ In his 1995 book Frumspeak, Chaim Weiser offers the term Yeshivish to name the speech of Orthodox yeshivas in communities of American haredim. Weiser argues that Yeshivish—which integrates elements of English, Yiddish, Israeli Hebrew, and loshn-koydesh—has since become an established vernacular among haredi men and boys beyond the confines of the classroom. To demonstrate its linguistic possibilities he offers playful translations of a variety of texts into Yeshivish, including the American Pledge of Allegiance: “I am meshabed myself, bli neder, to hold shtark to the simen of the United States of America and to the medina which is gufa its takhlis; one festa chevra, be-ezras Hashem, echad ve’yuchid, with simcha and erlichkeit for the gantza oilam.”³² More recently, Chaim Dalfin published a glossary of what he terms LubavitchSpeak—that is, “words, sayings, and colloquialisms” in Yiddish and loshn-koydesh used by contemporary Lubavitcher Hasidim in the course of devotional scholarship and worship as well as in their quotidian “street language,” exemplifying this community’s “lifestyle and its holiness.”³³ Yinglish, Ameridish, Yeshivish, and LubavitchSpeak all name linguistic phenomena perceived as indebted to Yiddish yet substantively different.

• • •

What does this inventory of more than a dozen terms for what has been (or might be considered) Yiddish reveal? In addition to evincing the contingency of naming the language, responsive to time, place, population, and ideology, these terms evince shifts in conceptualizations of the language. They range from a demotic shared to some degree with local Christians to a defining signifier of the essence of Jewishness; from a vehicle for rendering sacred texts intelligible to a degrading gibberish; from a complete, integral language to a fragment of one, which can be merged with other languages; from the epitome of Jewish disability to the foundation of a modern national Jewish culture. Indeed, it may be more useful to think of these names not as identifying “the same language” but as signs of the dynamics of Ashkenazic vernacularity, which entail varying notions of its speech community, scope of usage, distinctiveness, and symbolic worth.

In his landmark survey of the names of Yiddish, Weinreich asserts that “sociolinguistic and purely linguistic factors combine and force the conclusion that since the name Yiddish is accepted today that it be valid for all times since the beginning of the language.” This is common practice in modern scholarship and applies to this book as well. Yet terming the extensive dynamic of Ashkenazic vernacular language Yiddish both encapsulates and obscures shifting and, at times, incompatible notions of this phenomenon. Weinreich also acknowledges that, in general, “names of languages are fixed retrospectively,” thereby arguing, if tacitly, for thinking of Yiddish as having the same length, breadth, and depth as other languages readily recognized by a single, venerable name—especially those identified with modern national cultures and sovereign states.³⁴ Therefore, to speak of the foundational Ashkenazic vernacular as Yiddish is not merely exigent but polemical—as is calling it taytsh, Jüdisch-Deutsch, zhargon, mame-loshn, or Jewish. Each of its names embodies a partial truth about language use among Ashkenazim, simultaneously consolidating and constraining its protean character. The complex slippage among the signifiers and signifieds of its naming epitomizes the challenges, as well as the rewards, inherent in probing the story of the language now called Yiddish, behind which extends a long and at times contentious chronicle of efforts to give this phenomenon of Jewish language use a name.