Jewish Diapora: Language


Figure 1.--This Polish postcard has Yiddish text. Perhaps one of our Jewish readers will translate for us. It is a Rieznik postcard, meaning a postcard company which published scenes of Jewish life. We are not sure what is being depicted here.

An important aspect of the diaspora is language. The ancient language of the Jewish people was Hebrew. The language of the Old Testament was Hebrew. The Jews were conquered by many people, including the Egyptians, Assyrians, Bablyoniasns, Persians, Greeks, ans Romans. This of course affected language. Jesus spoke Aramaic which is a Semitic language belonging to the Afroasiatic language family. Aramaic belongs to the Semitic subfamily which includes includes Canaanite languages such as Hebrew and Phoenician. The Aramaic script was widely adopted for use in other languaes, including the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets. The New Testament was written in Greek, but by this time the Jewish Jesus movement had developed into the New Christin church. Wth the Romn supression of the Jewsish Revolt (1st century AD), Jews in the diaspora learned the language of the countries in whih they lived. Hebrew was preserved as a scholarly language ad for religious purposes. This varied somewhat depending on how tolerant the local community was. Spanish became very important because of the substantial Jewish community and the spirit of toleration in Spain. Sephardic Jews in Spain and other Mediterranean areas developed Ladino, a hybrid of Hebrew and Spanish. Jews became noted linguists They were attacked during the Crusades expelled from much of Western Europe (10-15th centuries). in both the Muslim and Christian worlds, able to bridge the gulf between the two religuous communities who wre often at war. Spain expelled theJews at the end of the Recoinquista (1492). With this and other expulsions, the Jewish communities in Eastern Rurope become increasingly important. It is at this time that Yidush becomes a major languge for evedryday life and commerce of Ashkenazic Jews. Yiddish was a hybrid of Hebrew and medieval German. Most of the wirds are German, but in addition to Hebrew, words are borrowed from the other lanugafes of Eastern Europe. It has a unique grammatical structure and uses Hebrew characters. This continued until the Holocaust which destroyed the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. After Workd War II, the new state of Isreal revived Hebrew as their national language. Engklish has become important in the 20th century as a result of ;large scale emigration from Eastern Europe beginning in the late-19th century.






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Created: 7:08 AM 5/26/2010
Last updated: 7:09 AM 5/26/2010