>The whole Rhine Valley and border areas between Protestant and
>Catholic areas such as Lower Bavaria seem to have been especially
>turbulent.
But attention: while the Rhine valley had some important Jewish
centers (esp. up to the 13th-14th c.), Yiddish isn't a "Rheinland"
(i.e., Alemanian & Mosel Franconian) dialect (as some linguistst,
incl. Jewish linguists pointed out already in the 1st half of the
20th c.). OTOH, a major role must have played the Jewish presence
in Bohemia, which (for many centuries) was also a mixture of
Bavarian-Fraconian (High and Middle German) region, as far as
the German language spoken there was concerned.
>I have ancestors named Kissinger, originally from Bad Kissingen in >Bavaria, who were in Rhein Hesse
The German dialect spoken there is Franconian, almost the same as
the neighboring spoken in Hesse. Kissinger's own German (as a child)
was Nürnberg ("Nemberkh" :)) Franconian (he was from Fürth, a few
kilometers far). Those kinds of regional German spoken in Northern
Bavaria are not the Bavarian dialect (linguistically, the Bavarian-
dialect regions are only Oberbayern, Niederbayern, Oberpfalz and
most of Austria; the western region of Bavaria, with Augsburg,
Memmingen, Landsberg is Suebian, linguistically).
>in an area that went back and forth between Bavaria and
>other states.
Yes, but the political administrations are quite irrelevant for the
dialects we're discussing.
>Consequently they also switched back and forth between Catholicism
>and Protestantism whenever the borders changed.
But most of Northern Bavaria has stayed Protestant (up to day), in
contrast with the southern regions of it, with few Protestant "isles"
(such as the Suebian Augsburg = 2000 years ago: Augusta Vindelicorum).
>I'm sure that in such a cauldron of religious hatred that persecuted
>Jews got out as fast as they could unless they were under the >protection or sequestered by local rulers.
But most of those Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Bohemia etc. were
there and spoke more and more medieval Jewish much earlier
(esp. after the Crusades and the Plague in the 14th c., when, for
some periods, life for Jewish settlements were safer under
Charles IV. in Bohemia, as well as under Polish and Hungarian kings).
Of course the "official"/mainstream theory continues to maintain
the Ashkenasic population had its roots in West Germany, along
the Rhine, but this thesis seems to be wrong and that most of
Ashkenazim gradually learnt German in part from the Germans
colonists in Eastern Europe as well as from few Jews coming from
Germany, Switzerland, Austria. And it might have been highly
probable that Ashkenazim would today speak a dialect of Turkish
(as do those few Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, Ucrainian Jewish
communities of the so-called Karaim, who still today speak a
variant of Crimean Tatar-Turkish). The important difference is that
Caraite Jews don't acknowledge the Talmud, thus contrasting the
Yiddish-speaking Jews of E-Europe.
(Interesting, that sometimes east-european Ashkenasic Jews have
Turkish family names, such as Balaban. Or that there is onomastic
coincidence: e.g. Kogan/Kagan is related to Kohen < haKohen, but
from the Turkic point of view this could be the memory of the
kagan/khan. Or Kaplan: in German, this means "chaplain", and in
the case of E-Eur. Jews it is one of the highly numerous diminutives
or symbolic names for Jacob (Yaakov). In Turkish, it means "tiger".
NB: in medieval times, not only Khazars and Slavs converted to
Judaism, but also some Cumans and Tatars (actually, these two
populations were virtually the same, and both spoke, and both
modern Crimean and Kazan Tatars speak idioms that are so close
to Turkish, that, AFAIK, they don't need translators).
George