History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Ironically enough, the Jewish language which made most, and entirely spontaneous, progress in the nineteenth century was Yiddish. It is a pity that the maskils, whose ability to speak and write German was the certificate of their enlightened status, knew so little about it. It was not just a criminal argot. It was much more than a corrupt form of German. To pious Jews it was a ‘temporary’ language in that it was non-divine, non-historical (in Jewish terms). Once history got going again, as the Messianic Age approached, Jews would presumably revert to Hebrew, the language of the Torah, in which in any case important matters such as ritual, scholarship and often communal administration were conducted. But for a temporary language, Yiddish was old, almost as old as some European tongues. Jews first began to develop it from the German dialects spoken in the cities when they pushed up from France and Italy into German-speaking Lotharingia.