Yiddish was the spoken language of roughly three-quarters of the world's Jews for the past thousand years. A Germanic language written in the Jewish alphabet (used for Hebrew and nearly every Jewish language), it is an elaborate fusion language that melds together the words and grammars of Hebrew, Aramaic, Middle High German, Old French and Italian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, and the languages of virtually any land where Yiddish-speaking Jews lived.

Even today yiddish is spoken in every corner of the globe.

Yiddish Language

The history of the Yiddish language is bound with the history of Jews who settled in Central and Eastern Europe, a region called by its traditional Jewish name Ashkenaz. Jews maintained their existence as a separate community in Europe, and their distinctness from and close contact with their neighbors gave birth to a unique Ashkenazi language, which was to become Yiddish. This language became the means of communication for Jews as far west as the Netherlands, as far east as the furthest extremes of Ukraine, as far north as the tip of the Baltic Sea and south to the Black Sea coast.

Yiddish, like all languages, changed vastly over time. Scholars identify four major periods of its evolution: Earliest Yiddish (from start of the first millennium to 1250); Old Yiddish (1250-1500); Middle Yiddish (1500-1750); and Modern Yiddish (1750-present). Yiddish also has two major variants: Western and Eastern. Western Yiddish developed in regions that were largely German speaking, eventually experiencing a fatal decline beginning in the eighteenth century. Eastern Yiddish, spoken in Poland, the Baltic region, Ukraine, Romania, and much of Hungary, emerged as the most prevalent type of Yiddish. The Yiddish of all the books at the Yiddish Book Center is Eastern Yiddish.

Throughout the modern period, the Yiddish language was denigrated and considered "bad German," and its literary usage was shunned by Jews and non-Jews alike. Though the sounds of Yiddish, its grammar, and its vocabulary diverge dramatically from German, Jews referred to their own language both taytsh (German) and zhargon (jargon).

The self-conscious use of Yiddish, as a language of the press, literature, and social organization began to grow stronger in the second half of the nineteenth century. The adoration and advocacy of Yiddish, known as Yiddishism, reached its peak in 1908 at the Yiddish Language Conference, held in Czernowitz (today Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Around this time, a thriving, vibrant literary Yiddish was also coming into full bloom.

By 1939, there were around eleven million Jews, well more than half of world Jewry, who claimed Yiddish as their first or only language. By 1945, more than half were dead, murdered in the Nazi genocide. In the Soviet Union, after a brief period of official support for Yiddish, Stalin's regime increasingly persecuted Yiddish writers and cultural figures, culminating on August 12, 1952, when the last major Yiddish writers and intellectuals were executed in Moscow's Lubyanka prison. In Israel, where many of Europe's Yiddish speakers sought refuge after the war, Yiddish was actively suppressed in favor of Israeli Hebrew. For most Jews outside traditionalist communities in the United States, the drive to success seemed to demand the use of English to the exclusion of Yiddish. Within a single generation, Yiddish -- a language which had prevailed for a thousand years -- was now the everyday language of a small fraction of the Jewish world.