Re: Question

From: Torsten
Message: 66588
Date: 2010-09-12

> > 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).

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

> 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.

For that theory to be true, there would have had to be an eastern Yiddish speaking 'homeland' where the newly arrived could have learned that particular Yiddish dialect. Where would you place that? And how and why and from whom would those people have learned a Middle German dialect? I think an origin with the trade on the river system with the cities on the North shore of the Black Sea is much more likely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerch
The only problem with that theory is how to explain why that particular Germanic dialect ended up being spoken exclusively by Jews.


> 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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caraite
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaim_language


Torsten