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70-674: Schmaltz is a noun derived from the German verb schmelzen , meaning "to melt". The verb can be traced back to the West Germanic root * smeltan , which survives in the Modern English verb smelt . The term entered English usage through Yiddish -speaking Ashkenazi Jews who used schmaltz to refer to kosher poultry fat; the Yiddish word שמאַלץ shmalts refers to rendered chicken fat . The English term schmaltz

140-473: A Jewish delicatessen , is a store that serves various traditional dishes of Jewish cuisine , mostly Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine . Known for their robust sandwiches, such as pastrami on rye , they also specialize in traditional Jewish diaspora soups and other ethnically rooted dishes. As retail delicatessens , most also sell a selection of their products such as sliced meats by the pound, prepared salads, pickles, and offer dine-in or take-out. The emergence of

210-529: A bridge between second-generation Jewish immigrants and their origins. They served as a cultural gathering place for the community. Merwin suggests that the Jewish deli became a secular equivalent of the synagogue for a generation of Jews who were no longer as interested in attending religious services. The second generation's increased access to deli meats was a sign of growing success, something their parents would not have been able to afford when first arriving to

280-545: A collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah . The advent of the printing press in the 16th century enabled the large-scale production of works, at a cheaper cost, some of which have survived. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita 's Bovo-Bukh ( בָּבָֿא-בּוך ), composed around 1507–08 and printed several times, beginning in 1541 (under the title Bovo d'Antona ). Levita,

350-407: A flavor enhancer. The manufacture of schmaltz involves cutting the fatty tissues of a bird (chicken or goose) into small pieces, melting the fat, and collecting the drippings. Schmaltz may be prepared by a dry process where the pieces are cooked under low heat and stirred, gradually yielding their fat. A wet process also exists whereby the fat is melted by direct steam injection. The rendered schmaltz

420-492: A lesser extent, the United Kingdom. This has resulted in some difficulty in communication between Yiddish speakers from Israel and those from other countries. There is significant phonological variation among the various Yiddish dialects . The description that follows is of a modern Standard Yiddish that was devised during the early 20th century and is frequently encountered in pedagogical contexts. Uvular As in

490-407: Is chelev and its consumption is forbidden. Thus Ashkenazi Jews turned to poultry fat as their cooking fat of choice. This fat, which they called schmaltz , became the most popular cooking fat used in the shtetls (Jewish villages) of central and eastern Europe. It was commonly used in a multitude of dishes served with, or containing, meat in accordance with kosher dietary laws . At the turn of

560-878: Is derived from Yiddish and is cognate with the German term Schmalz , which refers to any rendered fat of animal origin, including lard (more precisely Schweineschmalz ) and clarified butter ( Butterschmalz ). English use tends to follow Yiddish, which limits its meaning to rendered poultry fat. Historically, chicken and to a lesser extent other poultry have been the most popular meat in Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine due to restrictions on Jews who often were not allowed to own land in Europe, and thereby were not able to tend to any livestock requiring pasture. Among kosher domestic animals, only chickens and other fowl could be raised without pasturage. Schmaltz originated in

630-499: Is pareve , i.e. suitable for use with both milk and meat dishes) to the Jewish community of New York . Over time, schmaltz was replaced with what often were vegetarian alternatives that were perceived to be healthier, such as the aforementioned vegetable shortening , then readily available olive oil, and margarine . Despite this, schmaltz remained in common use at Jewish delicatessens and Jewish restaurants as well as among those in

700-644: Is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei, who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557. Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works, such as the Bovo-Bukh , and religious writing specifically for women, such as the צאנה וראינה Tseno Ureno and

770-475: Is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews . It originated in 9th century Central Europe , and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic ) and to some extent Aramaic . Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages . Yiddish has traditionally been written using

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840-586: Is a key ingredient in Jewish soups such as chicken soup , as well as in matzo ball soup and some cholent . Sometimes it is used as a bread spread, where it may be salted. Generally, this is consumed on Jewish rye or challah breads. It may be used to prepare foods served as part of fleishig (meat) meals such as latkes , matzah brei , or potato kugel , or instead of butter when pan-frying potatoes, onions, or other foods. Various vegetarian (and consequently pareve ) versions of schmaltz have been marketed, starting with Nyafat (U.S., Rokeach and Sons, 1924), which

910-487: Is also used in the adjectival sense, synonymously with "Ashkenazi Jewish", to designate attributes of Yiddishkeit ("Ashkenazi culture"; for example, Yiddish cooking and "Yiddish music" – klezmer ). Hebrew Judeo-Aramaic Judeo-Arabic Other Jewish diaspora languages Jewish folklore Jewish poetry By the 10th century, a distinctive Jewish culture had formed in Central Europe. By

980-412: Is as a by-product of the making of chicken soup. After the chicken is simmered in the pot or crock-pot, the broth is chilled so the fat rises to the top. Then the fat can be skimmed off, at once providing schmaltz to set aside for other uses and a lower-fat soup that is heated before serving. Schmaltz typically has a strong aroma, and therefore, often is used for hearty recipes such as stews or roasts. It

1050-601: Is largely coconut oil with some onion flavoring and color. Vegetable shortening also is used as a substitute. Vegetarian schmaltz was manufactured in South Africa from July 1951 under the brand Debra's Schmalz, with Debra referring to Debora Bregman, who founded Debras Manufacturers. Production began in Debora's kitchen at her home in Norwood before moving to a dedicated manufacturing facility and office. The slogan "Even

1120-447: Is printed in Hebrew script.) According to a study by the German media association Internationale Medienhilfe (IMH), more than 40 printed Yiddish newspapers and magazines were published worldwide in 2024, and the trend is rising. The Western Yiddish dialect—sometimes pejoratively labeled Mauscheldeutsch , i. e. "Moses German" —declined in the 18th century, as the Age of Enlightenment and

1190-511: Is pronounced [haɡˈdɔmɜ] . The vowel phonemes of Standard Yiddish are: In addition, the sonorants /l/ and /n/ can function as syllable nuclei : [m] and [ŋ] appear as syllable nuclei as well, but only as allophones of /n/ , after bilabial consonants and dorsal consonants , respectively. The syllabic sonorants are always unstressed. Stressed vowels in the Yiddish dialects may be understood by considering their common origins in

1260-588: Is reflected in some Ashkenazi personal names (e.g., Kalonymos and Yiddish Todres ). Hebrew, on the other hand, was regarded as a holy language reserved for ritual and spiritual purposes and not for common use. The established view is that, as with other Jewish languages , Jews speaking distinct languages learned new co-territorial vernaculars, which they then Judaized. In the case of Yiddish, this scenario sees it as emerging when speakers of Zarphatic (Judeo-French) and other Judeo-Romance languages began to acquire varieties of Middle High German , and from these groups

1330-436: Is then filtered and clarified. Homemade Jewish-style schmaltz is made by cutting chicken or goose fat into small pieces and melting in a pan over low-to-moderate heat, generally with onions. After the majority of the fat has been extracted, the melted fat is strained through a cheesecloth into a storage container. The remaining dark brown, crispy bits of skin and onion are known in Yiddish as gribenes . Another simple method

1400-498: Is uncertain). An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish appear on the same page. This is commonly termed Rashi script , from the name of the most renowned early author, whose commentary is usually printed using this script. (Rashi is also the typeface normally used when the Sephardic counterpart to Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish or Ladino ,

1470-567: The Haskalah led to a view of Yiddish as a corrupt dialect. The 19th century Prussian-Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz , for example, wrote that "the language of the Jews [in Poland] ... degenerat[ed] into a ridiculous jargon, a mixture of German, Polish, and Talmudical elements, an unpleasant stammering, rendered still more repulsive by forced attempts at wit." A Maskil (one who takes part in

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1540-544: The Haredi community . Beginning in the twenty-first century, however, schmaltz regained much of its former popularity as various celebrity chefs such as Anthony Bourdain , Alon Shaya, Michael Solomonov , Joan Nathan , and others began to incorporate it into various dishes and recipes as part of emerging food trends popularizing long-forgotten Jewish foods . Schmaltz also began being used in various non-traditional ways, such as cornbread , chicken pot pie , and other foods as

1610-660: The Haskalah ) would write about and promote acclimatization to the outside world. Jewish children began attending secular schools where the primary language spoken and taught was German, not Yiddish. Yiddish grates on our ears and distorts. This jargon is incapable in fact of expressing sublime thoughts. It is our obligation to cast off these old rags, a heritage of the dark Middle Ages. –  Osip Aronovich Rabinovich , in an article titled "Russia – Our Native Land: Just as We Breathe Its Air, We Must Speak Its Language" in

1680-600: The Hebrew alphabet . Prior to World War II , there were 11–13 million speakers. Eighty-five percent of the approximately six million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, leading to a massive decline in the use of the language. Assimilation following World War II and aliyah (immigration to Israel) further decreased the use of Yiddish among survivors after adapting to Hebrew in Israel. However,

1750-577: The High Holy Days ) and בֵּיתֿ הַכְּנֶסֶתֿ , 'synagogue' (read in Yiddish as beis hakneses ) – had been included. The niqqud appears as though it might have been added by a second scribe, in which case it may need to be dated separately and may not be indicative of the pronunciation of the rhyme at the time of its initial annotation. Over the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in

1820-586: The Middle High German diphthong ei and long vowel î to /aɪ/ , Yiddish has maintained the distinction between them; and likewise, the Standard German /ɔʏ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong öu and the long vowel iu , which in Yiddish have merged with their unrounded counterparts ei and î , respectively. Lastly, the Standard German /aʊ/ corresponds to both the MHG diphthong ou and

1890-536: The Odessan journal Рассвет (dawn), 1861. Owing to both assimilation to German and the revival of Hebrew , Western Yiddish survived only as a language of "intimate family circles or of closely knit trade groups". In eastern Europe, the response to these forces took the opposite direction, with Yiddish becoming the cohesive force in a secular culture (see the Yiddishist movement ). Notable Yiddish writers of

1960-484: The Slavic languages with which Yiddish was long in contact (Russian, Belarusian , Polish , and Ukrainian ), but unlike German, voiceless stops have little to no aspiration ; unlike many such languages, voiced stops are not devoiced in final position. Moreover, Yiddish has regressive voicing assimilation , so that, for example, זאָגט /zɔɡt/ ('says') is pronounced [zɔkt] and הקדמה /hakˈdɔmɜ/ ('foreword')

2030-565: The high medieval period , their area of settlement, centered on the Rhineland ( Mainz ) and the Palatinate (notably Worms and Speyer ), came to be known as Ashkenaz , originally a term used of Scythia , and later of various areas of Eastern Europe and Anatolia. In the medieval Hebrew of Rashi (d. 1105), Ashkenaz becomes a term for Germany, and אשכּנזי Ashkenazi for the Jews settling in this area. Ashkenaz bordered on

2100-729: The wave of German immigration to the United States in the mid-1800s . In the decade spanning from 1850 to 1860 nearly one million Germans immigrated to America, both Jews and non-Jews, with 215,000 Germans arriving in the United States in 1854 alone. Some of these immigrants opened storefronts to make a living, and to offer culturally familiar food to other immigrants. Many of the original establishments were inspired by German delikatessens , selling beef frankfurters , sauerkraut , cold cuts , dill pickles and liverwurst . According to American author and professor Ted Merwin ,

2170-431: The תחנות Tkhines . One of the best-known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln , whose memoirs are still in print. The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read מאַמע־לשון mame-loshn but not לשון־קדש loshn-koydesh , and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish

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2240-655: The 1925 founding of the Yiddish Scientific Institute, YIVO . In Vilnius , there was debate over which language should take primacy, Hebrew or Yiddish. Yiddish changed significantly during the 20th century. Michael Wex writes, "As increasing numbers of Yiddish speakers moved from the Slavic-speaking East to Western Europe and the Americas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they were so quick to jettison Slavic vocabulary that

2310-592: The Ashkenazi community took shape. Exactly what German substrate underlies the earliest form of Yiddish is disputed. The Jewish community in the Rhineland would have encountered the Middle High German dialects from which the Rhenish German dialects of the modern period would emerge. Jewish communities of the high medieval period would have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into

2380-875: The Jewish communities of north, west , and central Europe as it was an economical replacement for olive oil that typically was not available in these areas. Olive oil previously had an important role in Jewish culture . It had been used by the ancestors of the Ashkenazi Jews in their Ancient Israelite cuisine prior to the forced exile of Jews from Roman Israel , and it remained popular in Sephardic and Mizrahi cuisines. As olive oil and other vegetable oils (e.g. sesame oil , which Jews had used in Mesopotamia) were unavailable in northwestern Europe, Ashkenazi Jews turned to animal sources, like their Gentile neighbors. However, kashrut prohibited Jews from using

2450-673: The Jewish community as it dispersed into the city's outer boroughs, serving as a tangible emblem of its members enduring commitment to their cultural heritage. After the Holocaust , a new Jewish population within the United States would facilitate the reintroduction of these community staples. While upon their arrival many of the post-war Jewish immigrants would work in the meat industry, some business owners would transform their butcher shops into operational delicatessens, something that many modern Americans are likely to be familiar with. As Jewish delis rose in popularity in New York, they became

2520-413: The Jewish deli developed in accordance with local culture. Jewish delis differed from their German deli counterparts mostly by being Kosher. These days, while some delis have full kosher -certification, others operate in a kosher-style , refraining from mixing meat and dairy in the same dish. Other Jewish delis serve non-kosher animal products such as bacon or shell-fish and non-kosher dishes such as

2590-555: The Proto-Yiddish sound system. Yiddish linguistic scholarship uses a system developed by Max Weinreich in 1960 to indicate the descendent diaphonemes of the Proto-Yiddish stressed vowels. Each Proto-Yiddish vowel is given a unique two-digit identifier, and its reflexes use it as a subscript, for example Southeastern o 11 is the vowel /o/, descended from Proto-Yiddish */a/. The first digit indicates Proto-Yiddish quality (1-=*[a], 2-=*[e], 3-=*[i], 4-=*[o], 5-=*[u]), and

2660-721: The Reuben sandwich. Jewish delis feature prominently in Jewish culture , as well as in general American popular culture , particularly in the cities of New York , Chicago and Los Angeles as well as in Canada , especially in Montreal and Toronto . The United Kingdom has also historically been a home to many Jewish delis, especially in the London area. The origins of the American Jewish delicatessen can be traced to

2730-530: The United States. From their roots as an extension of kosher butcher shops, delis often have a long counter and glass cases showing the meats and takeaway food offerings. Delis expanded to have tables and chairs, that being at the center of a case before the New York Supreme Court in 1910 questioning if this made a deli a restaurant. The ruling was that it did not, and that delicatessens come in all shapes and offerings without narrowing them to

2800-598: The area inhabited by another distinctive Jewish cultural group, the Sephardi Jews , who ranged into southern France . Ashkenazi culture later spread into Eastern Europe with large-scale population migrations. Nothing is known with certainty about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. As noted above, the first language of the Ashkenazim may have been Aramaic ,

2870-697: The chicken can't tell the difference" was added soon after production began. Debra's Schmalz was eventually distributed across Southern Africa. The business was sold by the Bregman family in 1976, and Debra's Schmalz continued to be manufactured and distributed. Chef Oded Schwartz discusses Debra's Schmalz in his book In Search of Plenty — A History of Jewish Food . Yiddish language Yiddish ( ייִדיש , יידיש or אידיש , yidish or idish , pronounced [ˈ(j)ɪdɪʃ] , lit.   ' Jewish ' ; ייִדיש-טײַטש , historically also Yidish-Taytsh , lit.   ' Judeo-German ' )

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2940-412: The definition of a restaurant. As more Jewish delis opened, there started to be an increase in "Kosher-style" delicatessens, expanding the offerings to strike a balance of the familiar of the cultural foods and the new American tastes and society; some delis going as far as offering the non-kosher foods on separate silverware and on separate dishes. Some "kosher-style" delis would serve Jewish food, but

3010-476: The deli experienced its most significant growth not during the initial wave of immigration, as commonly assumed, but rather during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s. It was during this time that the offspring of Jewish immigrants began to mark their achievements in America by frequenting delis in the theater district, where they indulged in sandwiches and cheesecake . It was the kosher deli that trailed

3080-556: The earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written פּאַריז און װיענע Pariz un Viene ( Paris and Vienna ). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, װידװילט Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof , an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Grafenberg . Another significant writer

3150-532: The end of the high medieval period. It is first recorded in 1272, with the oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish, a blessing found in the Worms machzor (a Hebrew prayer book). This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in an otherwise purely Hebrew text. Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German written in the Hebrew alphabet into which Hebrew words – מַחֲזוֹר , makhazor (prayerbook for

3220-445: The extensive inclusion of words of Slavic origin. Western Yiddish is divided into Southwestern (Swiss–Alsatian–Southern German), Midwestern (Central German), and Northwestern (Netherlandic–Northern German) dialects. Yiddish is used in a number of Haredi Jewish communities worldwide; it is the first language of the home, school, and in many social settings among many Haredi Jews, and is used in most Hasidic yeshivas . The term "Yiddish"

3290-431: The language's origins, with points of contention being the characterization of its Germanic base, the source of its Hebrew/Aramaic adstrata , and the means and location of this fusion. Some theorists argue that the fusion occurred with a Bavarian dialect base. The two main candidates for the germinal matrix of Yiddish, the Rhineland and Bavaria, are not necessarily incompatible. There may have been parallel developments in

3360-537: The late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community's adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant , which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the Cairo Geniza in 1896, and also contains

3430-738: The late 19th and early 20th centuries are Sholem Yankev Abramovitch, writing as Mendele Mocher Sforim ; Sholem Rabinovitsh, widely known as Sholem Aleichem , whose stories about טבֿיה דער מילכיקער ( Tevye der milkhiker , " Tevye the Dairyman") inspired the Broadway musical and film Fiddler on the Roof ; and Isaac Leib Peretz . In the early 20th century, especially after the Socialist October Revolution in Russia, Yiddish

3500-522: The limitations of its origins. There were few Yiddish words for animals and birds. It had virtually no military vocabulary. Such voids were filled by borrowing from German , Polish and Russian . Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic , from Hebrew , from Aramaic and from anything with which it intersected. On the other hand, it contributed to English – American . [sic] Its chief virtue lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions. It

3570-518: The long vowel û , but in Yiddish, they have not merged. Although Standard Yiddish does not distinguish between those two diphthongs and renders both as /ɔɪ/ , the distinction becomes apparent when the two diphthongs undergo Germanic umlaut , such as in forming plurals: The vowel length distinctions of German do not exist in the Northeastern (Lithuanian) varieties of Yiddish, which form the phonetic basis for Standard Yiddish. In those varieties,

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3640-468: The meat would not be kosher. These delis helped appeal to both Jewish and non-Jewish Patrons for a variety of reasons, including those not wanting to be seen in Kosher establishments, and keeping costs down on product. Since their height in the 1930s, Jewish delis are on the decline. In New York (where there was the highest concentration of delis) there was an estimated 3,000 Jewish Delis, and as of 2021 in

3710-484: The mid-1950s. In Weinreich's view, this Old Yiddish substrate later bifurcated into two distinct versions of the language, Western and Eastern Yiddish. They retained the Semitic vocabulary and constructions needed for religious purposes and created a Judeo-German form of speech, sometimes not accepted as a fully autonomous language. Yiddish was a rich, living language, the chattering tongue of an urban population. It had

3780-452: The most common cooking fats in northern Europe, namely butter and lard . Butter, being derived from milk, cannot be used with meat under the Jewish prohibition on mixing meat and dairy , while lard is derived from pork, a meat not considered kosher. Furthermore, even among the less common fats available, tallow derived from beef or mutton would have been uneconomical, particularly given that virtually all suet (the raw material for tallow)

3850-586: The most frequently used designation in the literature until the 18th century. In the late 19th and into the 20th century, the language was more commonly called "Jewish", especially in non-Jewish contexts, but "Yiddish" is again the most common designation today. Modern Yiddish has two major forms : Eastern and Western. Eastern Yiddish is far more common today. It includes Southeastern (Ukrainian–Romanian), Mideastern (Polish–Galician–Eastern Hungarian) and Northeastern (Lithuanian–Belarusian) dialects. Eastern Yiddish differs from Western both by its far greater size and by

3920-533: The most prominent Yiddish writers of the time—the founders of modern Yiddish literature, who were still living in Slavic-speaking countries—revised the printed editions of their oeuvres to eliminate obsolete and 'unnecessary' Slavisms." The vocabulary used in Israel absorbed many Modern Hebrew words, and there was a similar but smaller increase in the English component of Yiddish in the United States and, to

3990-461: The number of Yiddish-speakers is increasing in Hasidic communities. In 2014, YIVO stated that "most people who speak Yiddish in their daily lives are Hasidim and other Haredim ", whose population was estimated at the time to be between 500,000 and 1 million. A 2021 estimate from Rutgers University was that there were 250,000 American speakers, 250,000 Israeli speakers, and 100,000 in the rest of

4060-665: The region, including many Hebrew and Aramaic words, but there is also Romance. In Max Weinreich 's model, Jewish speakers of Old French or Old Italian who were literate in either liturgical Hebrew or Aramaic , or both, migrated through Southern Europe to settle in the Rhine Valley in an area known as Lotharingia (later known in Yiddish as Loter ) extending over parts of Germany and France. There, they encountered and were influenced by Jewish speakers of High German languages and several other German dialects. Both Weinreich and Solomon Birnbaum developed this model further in

4130-468: The same area there are less than 30. This decline is presumed because the cost of running a deli yields increasingly lower returns, it is a labor-intensive job, and immigrant Jewish food being on the decline in cultural popularity. While on the decline, the Jewish deli is not dying out entirely as successful delis have opened in the past 15 years, well outside of previous heights in popularity. Food portions at Jewish Delis are known for being huge, and

4200-415: The second refers to quantity or diphthongization (−1=short, −2=long, −3=short but lengthened early in the history of Yiddish, −4=diphthong, −5=special length occurring only in Proto-Yiddish vowel 25). Vowels 23, 33, 43 and 53 have the same reflexes as 22, 32, 42 and 52 in all Yiddish dialects, but they developed distinct values in Middle High German ; Katz (1987) argues that they should be collapsed with

4270-630: The twentieth century, as the Ashkenazi Jews fled escalating antisemitism and persecution in Europe and sought refuge in the United States and other countries, they brought with them their traditional foods, including schmaltz. It remained popular in American Jewish cuisine until it fell out of common use over the course of the second half of the century due to the inconvenience involved in its preparation, health concerns regarding its saturated fat content, various diet trends, and aggressive marketing by Crisco of their vegetable shortening (which

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4340-636: The two regions, seeding the Western and Eastern dialects of Modern Yiddish. Dovid Katz proposes that Yiddish emerged from contact between speakers of High German and Aramaic-speaking Jews from the Middle East. The lines of development proposed by the different theories do not necessarily rule out the others (at least not entirely); an article in The Forward argues that "in the end, a new 'standard theory' of Yiddish's origins will probably be based on

4410-583: The vernacular of the Jews in Roman-era Judea and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia . The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade. In Roman times, many of the Jews living in Rome and Southern Italy appear to have been Greek -speakers, and this

4480-710: The vowel qualities in most long/short vowel pairs diverged and so the phonemic distinction has remained. There are consonantal differences between German and Yiddish. Yiddish deaffricates the Middle High German voiceless labiodental affricate /pf/ to /f/ initially (as in פֿונט funt , but this pronunciation is also quasi-standard throughout northern and central Germany); /pf/ surfaces as an unshifted /p/ medially or finally (as in עפּל /ɛpl/ and קאָפּ /kɔp/ ). Additionally, final voiced stops appear in Standard Yiddish but not Northern Standard German. Jewish delis A Jewish deli , also known as

4550-608: The work of Weinreich and his challengers alike." Paul Wexler proposed a model in 1991 that took Yiddish, by which he means primarily eastern Yiddish, not to be genetically grounded in a Germanic language at all, but rather as " Judeo-Sorbian " (a proposed West Slavic language ) that had been relexified by High German. In more recent work, Wexler has argued that Eastern Yiddish is unrelated genetically to Western Yiddish. Wexler's model has been met with little academic support, and strong critical challenges, especially among historical linguists. Yiddish orthography developed towards

4620-586: The world (for a total of 600,000). The earliest surviving references date from the 12th century and call the language לשון־אַשכּנז ‎ ( loshn-ashknaz , "language of Ashkenaz") or טײַטש ‎ ( taytsh ), a variant of tiutsch , the contemporary name for Middle High German . Colloquially, the language is sometimes called מאַמע־לשון ‎ ( mame-loshn , lit. "mother tongue"), distinguishing it from לשון־קודש ‎ ( loshn koydesh , "holy tongue"), meaning Hebrew and Aramaic. The term "Yiddish", short for Yidish Taitsh ("Jewish German"), did not become

4690-461: The −2 series, leaving only 13 in the −3 series. In vocabulary of Germanic origin, the differences between Standard German and Yiddish pronunciation are mainly in the vowels and diphthongs . All varieties of Yiddish lack the German front rounded vowels /œ, øː/ and /ʏ, yː/ , having merged them with /ɛ, e:/ and /ɪ, i:/ , respectively. Diphthongs have also undergone divergent developments in German and Yiddish. Where Standard German has merged

4760-520: Was ווײַבערטײַטש ( vaybertaytsh , 'women's taytsh ' , shown in the heading and fourth column in the Shemot Devarim ), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מעשייט mesheyt or מאַשקעט mashket —the construction

4830-470: Was emerging as a major Eastern European language. Its rich literature was more widely published than ever, Yiddish theatre and Yiddish cinema were booming, and for a time it achieved the status of one of the official languages of the short-lived Galician Soviet Socialist Republic . Educational autonomy for Jews in several countries (notably Poland ) after World War I led to an increase in formal Yiddish-language education, more uniform orthography, and to

4900-503: Was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog, of pathos, resignation and suffering, all of which it palliated by humor, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer , its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power. –  Paul Johnson , A History of the Jews (1988) Later linguistic research has refined the Weinreich model or provided alternative approaches to

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