Yiddish

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Yiddish, historically referred to as Judeo-German or Jewish German, is a West Germanic language and Jewish ethnolect historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German, fused with many elements taken from Hebrew (notably Mishnaic Hebrew) and to some extent Aramaic. Most varieties of Yiddish include elements of Slavic languages and the vocabulary contains traces of Romance languages. Yiddish has traditionally been written using the Hebrew alphabet. For centuries, Yiddish was the vernacular of Ashkenazi communities. Starting in the late 18th century, under the sway of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the language suffered decreasing prestige, being stigmatized by assimilationists and later also by Zionists, in favor of national languages and Hebrew. Efforts by the Yiddishist movement to counter that trend had limited success. Nevertheless, before World...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Joseph Herz (Autor), Moses Zirndorfer (Typograph), Public domain