Cristina Nilsson

Yiddish: origins and use Cristina Nilsson

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject English - Pedagogy, Didactics, Literature Studies, grade: sehr gut, University of Freiburg, 9 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: Origins: Yiddish is the historic language of Asheknazic (Central and East European) Jews, and is the third principal literary language in Jewish history, after classical Hebrew and (Jewish) Aramaic. The language is characterized by a synthesis of Germanic (the major component, derived from medieval German city dialects, themselves recombined) with Hebrew and Aramaic. Scholars tend to locate the origins of Yiddish in the Rhineland, where a handwritten prayer book from 1272 was found in the city of Worms containing the earliest known written Yiddish sentence. 2 Yiddish has a particular tradition: it took root and flowered in the ghettos (from Venetian gheto, a foundry on a small island where in XVI Jews were confined3), starting in walled juderías in Spain in the thirteenth century (according to the Lateran Councils of 1179 and 1215 it was forbidden to Jews to live close to Christians and in 1555 Paul IV ordered segregated quarters for Jews in the Papal States).