History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

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. Old Yiddish (1250-1500) marked the first contact of German-speaking Jews with Slavic Jews speaking a dialect called Knaanic. During the 200 years 1500-1700, Middle Yiddish emerged, becoming progressively more Slavic and dialectic. Finally, modern Yiddish developed during the eighteenth century. Its literary form was completely transformed in the half-century 1810-60, in the cities of the east European diaspora, as Yiddish newspapers and magazines proliferated, and a secular Yiddish book-trade flourished. Philologists and grammarians tidied it up. By 1908 it was sophisticated enough for its proponents to hold a world Yiddish conference in Czernowitz. As the Jewish population of eastern Europe grew, more people spoke, read and wrote it. By the end of the 1930s it was the primary tongue of about eleven million people.