Western Yiddish was spoken among communities in the Palatinate (incl. historical communities such as the city of Worms) in Germany, Alsace in France, Bavaria, and even spoken up in the Netherlands!
Yep. If you ever encounter somebody speaking Alsatian (although those are vanishing) or somebody from the Northern Swiss cantons you'll hear them speak in a very similar manner...
It comes from here but spread across Germany, Elsass, the Netherlands and Western Poland; Eastern Yiddish being the Yiddish variety spoken in Eastern Slavic Europe, it is the dialect which survives the most, mostly due to the Haradim Jews, a conservative Jewish people.
I knew an elderly Jewish couple in the late 60s who were from a small town in Baden and one expression of theirs was die schnee hort keinen lecho dodi, meaning the snow will not last till Friday (Erev Shabbat) or the snow is not going to stick,melt fast. This expression is a remnant of Western Yiddish. Another term for Yiddish could be Judeo-German or Ivri-Teitch. Karl Marx's mother so I've read never mastered German, likewise Heinrich Heine's mother and their sons conversed with them in...Yiddish, Western Yiddish.
It seems to me that Western Yiddish was closest to the dialects of south west Germany and also similar to Penn. German. The Yiddish of western Hungary also had similarities to western Yiddish. Jews of Alsace France and Switzerland were the last speakers of West Yiddish.
I think there are still some who might speak it. There are some ultra orthodox communities in Switzerland as far as I know... (and the Northern Swiss dialects seem to be very similar to western Yiddish to begin with...)
Western Yiddish is said to be dying as only a handful of Ashkenazi Jews of Western Europe are able to speak it. During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century, Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe became more integrated into Western societies and began to drop Yiddish in favor of German. The most famous Askenazi Jew of Western Europe is Albert Einstein and he did not know Yiddish as he or his family never speak the language and instead speak German. The predominant form of Yiddish is the Eastern European Yiddish. The language is distinct from Western Yiddish as it has Slavic loanwords which are absent in the former.
Western Yiddish did not come from the east. It grew out of what became western dialect as early Yiddish spread eastward from the Rhine area. Western Yiddish was still used in the 18th century (e.g. in the autobiography of Gitl of Hameln). It came to be replaced by German, except, until recently, in a few places in Alsace and northeaster Switzerland.
18th century? Ach, the last (Western) Yiddish drash given in the Netherlands was not earlier than 1886, which is the end of the 19th, and still it wasn't dead!
Western Yiddish are technically the original dialects of Yiddish. The Eastern dialects occurred when Yiddish speakers went to Eastern Europe, adopting many Slavic words into their vocabulary and building a unique Eastern European blended cultures like the fur hats of many Hasidic Jews.
I thought one of the main differences between Western and Eastern Yiddish was the i/u difference in pronunciation. For example, you would say git, di and shil in eastern Yiddish, whereas it is gut, du and shul in Western Yiddish. Is that correct?
@@paweldembowski +TC Jacobi Hello. Basically Western Yiddish (or German Yiddish) is Palatinate with the Hebrew words which exist in Yiddish. By the way I'm wondering if they say "ikh" too and not "esh" as in Palatinate. "Ikh" having been loaned to Swiss German.
My mother's (Ashkenazi) side is Hungarian, but we were doing some research into her family history and apparently much of her family is from what's today Slovakia and and town near Sopron, Hungary, which is close ot the border with the Burgenland region in Austria, and most of the Jews of Sopron so they probably spoke Western Yiddish at some point. I asked her if the yspoke Western Yiddish and gave shrug, she doesn't know, she's 81. All she knows is that by her generation and her parents' generation they spoke Hungarian. She says her grandparents and greatgrandparents spoke Yiddish, but preferred German though.
I think the easiest definition of Western Yiddish is as the variants of Yiddish spoken by Jews who were surrounded by German speakers. I believe it had an intermediate position between German and Eastern Yiddish: Its speakers were in contact with both groups of speakers, so they both influenced it. So it was once spoken by all Jews in Germany as a cultural region, including Austria. Burgenland is a bit of a special case as it long belonged to Hungary. But it did have a lot of German speakers, so I am pretty sure it was Western Yiddish that was spoken there. Jewish emancipation ultimately killed Western Yiddish. Apart from the Hebrew and Aramaic words, Western Yiddish was no more different from Standard German than a German dialect, so once German Jews were integrated into German society, it was natural for them to switch to Standard German. In Austria, partial emancipation happened unusually early (1782) under the condition that children were sent to German-speaking schools. I don't know if this applied to the Burgenland as well. If so, (Western) Yiddish is likely to have disappeared there relatively early.
I think the jews of Burgenland spoke a mish. Why? Because the Burgenland was part of the Hungarian side of the empire, thus there were jews immigrating from the east very easily, speaking eastern, but also the immigrants or maybe even natives speaking western. The best to define such a territory is by calling it zone of transition I guess.
@@guywhousesapseudonymonyout4272 Sopron (Oedenburg) was the capital of Burgenland until it was transferred to Hungary after WW1. It's now a Hungarian town. I had friends in Austrian Burgenland in the 1990s who said "Oedenburg,oder Sopron wie man es heutzutag nennen solln"
True, and most of Germanic Jews (a lot migrated back to Israel) weren't conservatives and so did kind of abandon Western Yiddish. Eastern Yiddish is the variety of Yiddish originally spoken in Slavic Eastern Europe that we all know today and remains alive by conservative Haradim Jews.
You're kinda right. There were no Upper Class Jews relative to what the rest of Europe considered Aristocracy. There were Upper middle Class assimilated Jews like Theodor Herzl's family who spoke the languages of the places they were like German, Hungarian etc. This is contrasted to the poorer and usually more Eastern(although before the Holocaust, many, many Western Jews were also Yiddish speaking) Jews isolated in the Shtetls that spoke Yiddish while in the more Western regions, especially in Germany,(with Yiddish being a language that descended from Old High German and countries creating artificial "standard" languages based on one dialect that everyone is taught to speak) Yiddish was vernacular of the "traditional" unassimilated Jew while German, French and Hungarian were what Modern, successful, highly educated Jews were supposed to speak as part of the self-blaming ideology for anti-Semitism which the Dreyfuss affair showed was a flawed mindset. In Germany, some Yiddish regarded it as a local dialect and just "slang/not proper German" and to be real Germans, Yiddish speakers had to speak "proper" standard German.
@@AllanLimosin That's somewhat right. A lot of German speaking Jews went to Israel(Although they faced some discrimination for being foreigners and being German speaking), but a lot of Dutch, Swiss, French and some German Jews did speak Western Yiddish, but Israel's strict language policies at the time stopped a revival of it
@@AllanLimosineastern Yiddish remained so similar to the original German precisely because it’s modern users descended from and continue to be predominantly conservative Jews who are less likely to interact deeply with non-Jews. This insularity slowed the evolution of the language. Western Yiddish’s biggest problem was almost certainly the pressure to conform and engage in language assimilation in the 19th century due to the strong antisemitism during the period.
Western Yiddish was spoken among communities in the Palatinate (incl. historical communities such as the city of Worms) in Germany, Alsace in France, Bavaria, and even spoken up in the Netherlands!
Yep. If you ever encounter somebody speaking Alsatian (although those are vanishing) or somebody from the Northern Swiss cantons you'll hear them speak in a very similar manner...
It comes from here but spread across Germany, Elsass, the Netherlands and Western Poland; Eastern Yiddish being the Yiddish variety spoken in Eastern Slavic Europe, it is the dialect which survives the most, mostly due to the Haradim Jews, a conservative Jewish people.
I knew an elderly Jewish couple in the late 60s who were from a small town in Baden and one expression of theirs was
die schnee hort keinen lecho dodi, meaning the snow will not last till Friday (Erev Shabbat) or the snow is not going to stick,melt fast. This expression is a remnant of Western Yiddish. Another term for Yiddish could be Judeo-German or Ivri-Teitch. Karl Marx's mother so I've read never mastered German, likewise Heinrich Heine's mother and their sons conversed with them in...Yiddish, Western Yiddish.
uy, de shney wert gaynen leykhe dorthi? uf moylwirflerish plonter... wet nemen faykhtkayt / hot genumen faykhtkayt biz 'dortn in tsukunft' ... dokh oyb ikh fashtey mamesh rikhtik, ikh weys nit... ken oykh zayn epes andersh...
I’ve also seen the expression:” Deutschmer “
I am not an Ashkenazic Jew, but a fractional minority of my ancestry is Ashkenazic from Alsace, France.
It seems to me that Western Yiddish was closest to the dialects of south west Germany and also similar to Penn. German. The Yiddish of western Hungary also had similarities to western Yiddish. Jews of Alsace France and Switzerland were the last speakers of West Yiddish.
I think there are still some who might speak it. There are some ultra orthodox communities in Switzerland as far as I know... (and the Northern Swiss dialects seem to be very similar to western Yiddish to begin with...)
Western Yiddish is said to be dying as only a handful of Ashkenazi Jews of Western Europe are able to speak it. During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th Century, Ashkenazi Jews in Western Europe became more integrated into Western societies and began to drop Yiddish in favor of German. The most famous Askenazi Jew of Western Europe is Albert Einstein and he did not know Yiddish as he or his family never speak the language and instead speak German. The predominant form of Yiddish is the Eastern European Yiddish. The language is distinct from Western Yiddish as it has Slavic loanwords which are absent in the former.
Western Yiddish did not come from the east. It grew out of what became western dialect as early Yiddish spread eastward from the Rhine area. Western Yiddish was still used in the 18th century (e.g. in the autobiography of Gitl of Hameln). It came to be replaced by German, except, until recently, in a few places in Alsace and northeaster Switzerland.
18th century? Ach, the last (Western) Yiddish drash given in the Netherlands was not earlier than 1886, which is the end of the 19th, and still it wasn't dead!
Western Yiddish are technically the original dialects of Yiddish. The Eastern dialects occurred when Yiddish speakers went to Eastern Europe, adopting many Slavic words into their vocabulary and building a unique Eastern European blended cultures like the fur hats of many Hasidic Jews.
I thought one of the main differences between Western and Eastern Yiddish was the i/u difference in pronunciation. For example, you would say git, di and shil in eastern Yiddish, whereas it is gut, du and shul in Western Yiddish. Is that correct?
that's actually a difference between western and eastern dialects of Eastern Yiddish, Western Yiddish was much more different
@@paweldembowski +TC Jacobi Hello. Basically Western Yiddish (or German Yiddish) is Palatinate with the Hebrew words which exist in Yiddish. By the way I'm wondering if they say "ikh" too and not "esh" as in Palatinate. "Ikh" having been loaned to Swiss German.
Did i understood correct: go-ihm-nach -es (go-him-after stuff) like go follow him stuff? I am just curious. Thank you!
Follow is Folgen or nachfarlign
The first word sounded a bit like "Goyem" to me (like the plural of "Goy"), but I couldn't work out the second word
"Goyim naches"
No. Both words are Hebrew. Goyim - gentiles, nations; naches - pleasure.
Why don't you speak Yiddish with the subtitles so that I and others could continue to learn?
was westren yiddish existed in burgenland?
certainly
My mother's (Ashkenazi) side is Hungarian, but we were doing some research into her family history and apparently much of her family is from what's today Slovakia and and town near Sopron, Hungary, which is close ot the border with the Burgenland region in Austria, and most of the Jews of Sopron so they probably spoke Western Yiddish at some point. I asked her if the yspoke Western Yiddish and gave shrug, she doesn't know, she's 81. All she knows is that by her generation and her parents' generation they spoke Hungarian. She says her grandparents and greatgrandparents spoke Yiddish, but preferred German though.
I think the easiest definition of Western Yiddish is as the variants of Yiddish spoken by Jews who were surrounded by German speakers. I believe it had an intermediate position between German and Eastern Yiddish: Its speakers were in contact with both groups of speakers, so they both influenced it.
So it was once spoken by all Jews in Germany as a cultural region, including Austria. Burgenland is a bit of a special case as it long belonged to Hungary. But it did have a lot of German speakers, so I am pretty sure it was Western Yiddish that was spoken there.
Jewish emancipation ultimately killed Western Yiddish. Apart from the Hebrew and Aramaic words, Western Yiddish was no more different from Standard German than a German dialect, so once German Jews were integrated into German society, it was natural for them to switch to Standard German. In Austria, partial emancipation happened unusually early (1782) under the condition that children were sent to German-speaking schools. I don't know if this applied to the Burgenland as well. If so, (Western) Yiddish is likely to have disappeared there relatively early.
I think the jews of Burgenland spoke a mish. Why? Because the Burgenland was part of the Hungarian side of the empire, thus there were jews immigrating from the east very easily, speaking eastern, but also the immigrants or maybe even natives speaking western. The best to define such a territory is by calling it zone of transition I guess.
@@guywhousesapseudonymonyout4272 Sopron (Oedenburg) was the capital of Burgenland until it was transferred to Hungary after WW1.
It's now a Hungarian town.
I had friends in Austrian Burgenland in the 1990s who said "Oedenburg,oder Sopron wie man es heutzutag nennen solln"
Ha haa very interesting!😁
Vos iz Mayrev Yidish ?? Vayzt undz etlekhe bajshpiln fun dem dialekt ?
Jewish of upper classes didn' t speak iddish in Germany or Áustria.
Bollocks
True, and most of Germanic Jews (a lot migrated back to Israel) weren't conservatives and so did kind of abandon Western Yiddish. Eastern Yiddish is the variety of Yiddish originally spoken in Slavic Eastern Europe that we all know today and remains alive by conservative Haradim Jews.
You're kinda right. There were no Upper Class Jews relative to what the rest of Europe considered Aristocracy. There were Upper middle Class assimilated Jews like Theodor Herzl's family who spoke the languages of the places they were like German, Hungarian etc. This is contrasted to the poorer and usually more Eastern(although before the Holocaust, many, many Western Jews were also Yiddish speaking) Jews isolated in the Shtetls that spoke Yiddish while in the more Western regions, especially in Germany,(with Yiddish being a language that descended from Old High German and countries creating artificial "standard" languages based on one dialect that everyone is taught to speak) Yiddish was vernacular of the "traditional" unassimilated Jew while German, French and Hungarian were what Modern, successful, highly educated Jews were supposed to speak as part of the self-blaming ideology for anti-Semitism which the Dreyfuss affair showed was a flawed mindset.
In Germany, some Yiddish regarded it as a local dialect and just
"slang/not proper German" and to be real Germans, Yiddish speakers had to speak "proper" standard German.
@@AllanLimosin That's somewhat right. A lot of German speaking Jews went to Israel(Although they faced some discrimination for being foreigners and being German speaking), but a lot of Dutch, Swiss, French and some German Jews did speak Western Yiddish, but Israel's strict language policies at the time stopped a revival of it
@@AllanLimosineastern Yiddish remained so similar to the original German precisely because it’s modern users descended from and continue to be predominantly conservative Jews who are less likely to interact deeply with non-Jews. This insularity slowed the evolution of the language. Western Yiddish’s biggest problem was almost certainly the pressure to conform and engage in language assimilation in the 19th century due to the strong antisemitism during the period.