From: Torsten
Message: 66595
Date: 2010-09-14
>No, in that sentence of mine you are referring to it means "all the territories where Yiddish was spoken, as per that Russian map
> > 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
> population, 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 easternArthur Koestler was mentioned earlier in this thread, and as everybody knows, his views are obsolete
> >Yiddish speaking 'homeland'
>
> A good introduction into this stuff is the popularisation prose by
> Art Köstler (a Hungarian-Austrian Ashkenaz):
> key words:Told you so.
>
> 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 GermanicEtc, etc; as you can see, you're not the only one having trouble fitting square pegs into round holes.
> 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
>