Re: Where and how developed die Jiddische Sproch

From: t0lgsoo1
Message: 66590
Date: 2010-09-13

>I get the impression that they are there 'in situ' from the earliest
>sources.

(If "in situ" means all "Scythia" or pan-"Türkistan", i.e. the relevant
territory includes all Ukraine, almost all Russia, Western Siberia,
Xingjiang... Otherwise it means that most of the relevant popula-
tion, once the overlords in the territories North & North-East of
the Black Sea and around the Caspian Sea, which in Turkish is
still called "Khazar Sea": *Hazar Deniz*, gradually migrated to the
North-East, after their power vanished in the 9th-10th c.)

>For that theory to be true, there would have had to be an eastern >Yiddish speaking 'homeland'

A good introduction into this stuff is the popularisation prose by
Art Köstler (a Hungarian-Austrian Ashkenaz):

key words:

mathias mieses; casimir the great; abraham nahum nachum nakhum poliak poljak polyak; hugo freiherr von kutschera; douglas m. dunlop

Köstler, Arthur ("The 13th tribe"):

<<As H. Smith>>

(Smith, H., in: Proc. Glasgow University Oriental Society, V, pp. 65-66)

<<remarked: "Little attention has been paid to Yiddish by scholars. Apart from a few articles in periodicals, the first really scientific study of the language was Mieses's Historical Grammar published in 1924. It is significant that the latest edition of the standard historical grammar of German, which treats German from the point of view of its dialects, dismisses Yiddish in twelve lines.">>

MATHIAS MIESES:

(Mieses, Mathias: /Die Entstehungsursache der jüdischen Dialekte/, Berlin & Wien, 1915
(Mieses, Mathias: /Die Jiddische Sprache/, Berlin & Wien, 1924)

<<At first glance the prevalence of German loanwords in Yiddish seems to contradict our main thesis on the origins of Eastern Jewry; we shall see presently that the opposite is true, but the argument involves several steps. The first is to inquire what particular kind of regional German dialect went into the Yiddish vocabulary. Nobody before Mieses seems to have paid serious attention to this question; it is to his lasting merit to have done so, and to have come up with a conclusive answer.>>

<<Based on the study of the vocabulary, phonetics and syntax of Yiddish as compared with the main German dialects in the Middle Ages, he concludes:>>

<<*No linguistic components derived from the parts of Germany bordering on France are found in the Yiddish language. Not a single word from the entire list of specifically Moselle-Franconian origin* compiled by J. A. Ballas (/Beiträge zur Kenntnis der trierischen Volkssprache/, 1903, 28ff.) has found its way into the Yiddish vocabulary. *Even the more central regions of Western Germany, around Frankfurt, have not contributed to the Yiddish language… Insofar as the origins of Yiddish are concerned, Western Germany can be written off…* Could it be that the generally accepted view, according to which the German Jews once upon a time immigrated from France across the Rhine, is misconceived? The history of the German Jews, of Ashkenazi Jewry, must be revised. The errors of history are often rectified by linguistic research. The conventional view of the erstwhile immigration of Ashkenazi Jews from France belongs to the category of historic errors which are awaiting correction.>>

(!!!)

<<*Having disposed of the alleged Western origin of the Germanic element in Yiddish, /Mieses/ went on to show that the dominant influence in it are the so-called "East-Middle German" dialects which were spoken in the Alpine regions of Austria and Bavaria roughly up to the fifteenth century.* In other words, the German component which went into the hybrid Jewish language originated in the eastern regions of Germany, adjacent to the Slavonic belt of Eastern Europe.>>

<<Thus the evidence from linguistics supports the historical record in refuting the misconception of the Franco-Rhenish origins of Eastern Jewry. But this negative evidence does not answer the question how an East-Middle German dialect combined with Hebrew and Slavonic elements became the common language of that Eastern Jewry, the majority of which we assume to have been of Khazar origin. ---- In attempting to answer this question, several factors have to be taken into consideration. First, the evolution of Yiddish was a long and complex process, which presumably started in the fifteenth century or even earlier; yet it remained for a long time a spoken language, a kind of lingua franca, and appears in print only in the nineteenth century. Before that, it had no established grammar, and "it was left to the individual to introduce foreign words as he desires. There is no established form of pronunciation or spelling.… The chaos in spelling may be illustrated by the rules laid down by the *Jüdische Volks-Bibliothek*: (1) Write as you speak, (2) write so that both Polish and Lithuanian Jews may understand you, and (3) spell differently words of the same sound which have a different signification.">>

<< Thus Yiddish grew, through the centuries, by a kind of untrammelled proliferation, avidly absorbing from its social environments such words, phrases, idiomatic expressions as best served its purpose as a lingua franca. But the culturally and socially dominant element in the environment of mediaeval Poland were the Germans. They alone, among the immigrant populations, were economically and intellectually more influential than the Jews. We have seen that from the early days of the Piast dynasty, and particularly under *Casimir the Great*, everything was done to attract immigrants to colonize the land and build "modern" cities. Casimir was said to have "found a country of wood and left a country of stone". But these new cities of stone, such as Krakau (Cracow) or Lemberg (Lwow) were built and ruled by German immigrants, living under *the so-called Magdeburg law*, i.e., enjoying a high degree of municipal self-government. Altogether not less than /four million Germans/ are said to have immigrated into Poland, providing it with an urban middleclass that it had not possessed before. As *Poliak* has put it, comparing the German to the Khazar immigration into Poland: /"the rulers of the country imported these masses of much-needed enterprising foreigners, and facilitated their settling down according to the way of life they had been used to in their countries of origin: the German town and the Jewish shtetl"/. (However, this tidy separation became blurred when later Jewish arrivals from the West also settled in the towns and formed urban ghettoes.)>>

ABRAHAM NAHUM POLIAK

(Poliak, Abraham Nahum: /The Khazar conversion to Judaism/. in: "Zion" (a periodical), Jerusalem, 1941 (Hebrew))

(Poliak, Abraham Nahum: /Kazariya: toldot mamlakha yehudit/ (Khazaria - The history of a Jewish kingdom in Europe), Tel Aviv, 1951 (Hebrew))

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_N._Poliak
http://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/Абрахам_Поляк

<<Not only the educated bourgeoisie, but the clergy too, was predominantly German - a natural consequence of Poland opting for Roman Catholicism and turning toward Western civilization, just as the Russian clergy after Vladimir's conversion to Greek orthodoxy was predominantly Byzantine. Secular culture followed along the same lines, in the footsteps of the older Western neighbour. The first Polish university was founded in 1364 in Cracow, then a predominantly German city. As Kutschera, the Austrian, has put it, rather smugly: /"The German colonists were at first regarded by the people with suspicion and distrust; yet they succeeded in gaining an increasingly firm foothold, and even in introducing the German educational system. The Poles learnt to appreciate the advantages of the higher culture introduced by the Germans and to imitate their foreign ways. The Polish aristocracy, too, grew fond of German customs and found beauty and pleasure in whatever came from Germany."/>>

(Kutschera, Hugo Freiherr von : Die Chasaren. Wien, 1910)

[…] It is easy to see why Khazar immigrants pouring into mediaeval Poland had to learn German if they wanted to get on. Those who had close dealings with the native populace no doubt also had to learn some pidgin Polish (or Lithuanian, or Ukrainian or Slovene); German, however, was a prime necessity in any contact with the towns. But there was also the synagogue and the study of the Hebrew thorah. One can visualize a shtetl craftsman, a cobbler perhaps, or a timber merchant, speaking broken German to his clients, broken Polish to the serfs on the estate next door; and at home mixing the most expressive bits of both with Hebrew into a kind of intimate private language. How this hotchpotch became communalized and standardized to the extent to which it did, is any linguist's guess; but at least one can discern some further factors which facilitated the process.>>

<<Among the later immigrants to Poland there were also, as we have seen, a certain number of "real" Jews from the Alpine countries, Bohemia and eastern Germany. Even if their number was relatively small, these German-speaking Jews were superior in culture and learning to the Khazars, just as the German Gentiles were culturally superior to the Poles. And just as the Catholic clergy was German, so the Jewish rabbis from the West were a powerful factor in the Germanization of the Khazars, whose Judaism was fervent but primitive. To quote *Poliak* again:

/"Those German Jews who reached the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania had an enormous influence on their brethren from the east. The reason why the [Khazar] Jews were so strongly attracted to them was that they admired their religious learning and their efficiency in doing business with the predominantly German cities.… The language spoken at the Heder, the school for religious teaching, and at the house of the Ghevir [notable, rich man] would influence the language of the whole community."/ A rabbinical tract from seventeenth-century Poland contains the pious wish: /"May God will that the country be filled with wisdom and that all Jews speak German."/>>

<<Characteristically, the only sector among the Khazarian Jews in Poland which resisted both the spiritual and worldly temptations offered by the German language were the *Karaites*, who rejected both rabbinical learning and material enrichment. Thus they never took to Yiddish. According to the first all-Russian census in 1897, there were 12894 Karaite Jews living in the Tsarist Empire (which, of course, included Poland). Of these 9666 gave Turkish as their mother tongue (i.e., presumably their original Khazar dialect), 2632 spoke Russian, and only 383 spoke Yiddish.>>

(http://www.turkiye.net/sota/karaim.html)
(http://www.karaite-korner.org/#outline)
(http://www.northamericanassociationofqaraim.com)
(Polish Karaimi: http://www.karaimi.org/)

<<The Karaite sect, however, represents the exception rather than the rule. In general, immigrant populations settling in a new country tend to shed their original language within two or three generations and adopt the language of their new country. The American grandchildren of immigrants from Eastern Europe never learn to speak Polish or Ukrainian, and find the jabber-wocky of their grandparents rather comic. It is difficult to see how historians could ignore the evidence for the Khazar migration into Poland on the grounds that more than half a millennium later they speak a different language. Incidentally, the descendants of the biblical tribes are the classic example of /linguistic adaptability/. First they spoke *Hebrew*; in the Babylonian exile, *Chaldean*; at the time of Jesus, *Aramaic*; in Alexandria, *Greek*; in Spain, *Arabic*, but later *Ladino* — a Spanish-Hebrew mixture, written in Hebrew characters, the Sephardi equivalent of Yiddish; and so it goes on. They preserved their religious identity, but changed languages at their convenience. The Khazars were not descended from the Tribes, but, as we have seen, they shared a certain cosmopolitanism and other social characteristics with their co-religionists.>>

[…] <<Earlier on, there had been massacres and other forms of persecution during the crusades, the Black Death, and under other pretexts; but these had been lawless outbreaks of massviolence, actively opposed or passively tolerated by the authorities. From the beginnings of the Counter-Reformation, however, the Jews were legally degraded to not-quite-human status, in many respects comparable to the Untouchables in the Hindu caste system.

"The few communities suffered to remain in Western Europe - i.e., in Italy, Germany, and the papal possessions in southern France - were subjected at last to all the restrictions which earlier ages had usually allowed to remain an ideal"- i.e., which had existed on ecclesiastical and other decrees, but had remained on paper (as, for instance, in Hungary, see above, V, 2). Now, however, these "ideal" ordinances were ruthlessly enforced: residential segregation, sexual apartheid, exclusion from all respected positions and occupations; wearing of distinctive clothes: yellow badge and conical headgear. In 1555 Pope Paul IV in his bull /cum nimis absurdum/ insisted on the strict and consistent enforcement of earlier edicts, confining Jews to closed *ghettoes*. A year later the Jews of Rome were forcibly transferred. All Catholic countries, where Jews still enjoyed relative freedom of movement, had to follow the example.

In Poland, the honeymoon period inaugurated by Casimir the Great had lasted longer than elsewhere, but by the end of the sixteenth century it had run its course. The Jewish communities, now confined to shtetl and ghetto, became overcrowded, and the refugees from the Cossack massacres in the Ukrainian villages under Chmelnicky (see above, V, 5) led to a rapid deterioration of the housing situation and economic conditions. The result was a new wave of massive emigration into Hungary, Bohemia, Rumania and Germany, where the Jews who had all but vanished with the Black Death were still thinly spread.

Thus the great trek to the West was resumed.>> […]

<<The evidence quoted in previous chapters adds up to a strong case in favour of those modern historians — whether Austrian, Israeli or Polish who, independently from each other, have argued that the bulk of modern Jewry is not of Palestinian, but of Caucasian origin. The mainstream of Jewish migrations did not flow from the Mediterranean across France and Germany to the east and then back again. The stream moved in a consistently westerly direction, from the Caucasus through the Ukraine into Poland and thence into Central Europe. When that unprecedented mass-settlement in Poland came into being, there were simply not enough Jews around in the west to account for it; while in the east a whole nation was on the move to new frontiers.>>

George