Yiddish

A Germanic language written in the Hebrew alphabet, Yiddish was the mother tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews, a population scattered throughout eastern Europe and the Russian Empire; starting in the 1880s, 2 million of them migrated to the United States. In America, Yiddish thrived as a main vehicle of eastern European Jewish culture as it found expression in literature, theater, music, and cinema.

Before migration, the status of Yiddish was quite low; lacking a proper grammar and a standard written form, intellectuals dismissed it as zhargon (“jargon”) or, worse, mere gibberish. In the multilingual milieu of eastern European towns and shtetlack (“villages”), Jews used Hebrew in connection with religion and the national Christian languages spoken in the different areas of settlement (such as Russian, Polish, or Romanian) in their negotiations with bureaucracy and the outside world. Yiddish was restricted to the sphere of family and community. When new currents of thought influenced by the Enlightenment (known as Haskalah) spread from Germany into the Jewish settlements, intellectuals chose to publish their work in either German or Hebrew, languages with an established tradition of speculative thought and writing that Yiddish lacked.

The name Yiddish itself is a relatively recent denomination. First known as taytsh (a word that stresses its Germanic roots) or losh-askenaz (“the Ashkenazi's tongue”), starting in the Renaissance, several names appeared that underlined the language's Jewish element, such as Judish-teutsh or Judische sprache. The name Yiddish emerged only during the 19th century.