Yiddish Language - Tumblr Posts

ISRAEL had actually placed a ban on Yiddish— the Judeo-Germanic langauge that uses Hebrew script, and was once spoken widely by Ashkenazi Jewry across Europe— after the States establishment in 1948. So let’s talk about Palestinian Jewish languages, and the regions linguistic developments that were influenced by pre-Zionist migrating European Jewry.

The Vilna-born Yiddish scholar Mordechai Kosover wrote about the history of the Old Yishuv, Jews who had immigrated to Palestine before 1880, and its particular dialect of Yiddish in a book called Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish. The scholar discusses a dialect known as Palestinian Yiddish that integrated elements of the widely spoken Arabic language in the region; Palestinian slang and idioms became apart of a Palestinian Yiddish lexicon in the growing Palestinian Jewish communities.

For example, Allah karim, meaning “God is generous” in Arabic, is used more earnestly in Yiddish as Allah karim, got vet helfn! (God will help!) Ottoman Turkish words that had entered Arabic, also made it into Yiddish: kalabalık (pronounced “kalabaluk”), meaning “crowd,” was used in the Yiddish phrase es iz a gantzer kalbelik, meaning “a whole crowd is there.”

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