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Yiddish

Roland Gruschka Marion Aptroot

The History and Culture of a Global Language

The Yiddish language with its German, Hebrew and Slavic elements is a fascinating reflection of the long history and culture of Jews in Europe. The book traces the history of Yiddish from the oldest medieval texts to the Yiddish cultures of Eastern Europe, and from the great Yiddish novels of the 19th and 20th centuries to the Holocaust and modern-day Yiddish in the USA and Israel.

For almost a thousand years, Yiddish was the mother tongue of the Ashkenazi Jews and, as such, was extremely widespread. Migrations of Jews to Eastern Europe and to the USA, encounters with other languages and cultures, and intra-Jewish developments led to the emergence of various Yiddish cultures. But despite this diversity, and although the language was once denigrated as a corrupted variant of German, Yiddish developed into a modern global language which has given us great writers like Sholem Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer. Yiddish is still a living language which means a lot to its speakers and those who love it – not least as a reminder of the Eastern European Jews killed during the Second World War.

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16.00 EUR

Published 2023-07-13T11:25:55.753Z by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406804069

ISBN: 9783406804069