New Directions

I last posted on this blog in October, 2009. Since then a number of irresistable new opportunities have appeared which have competed for my time. For one thing, thanks to the initiative of Bob Scott at the Digital Humanities Center of the Columbia University Libraries there is a real possibility that a critical component of the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry data base will be published online. I have been part of the effort to accomplish this.
A new research opportunity has also appeared with the development of inexpensive and widely available genomic testing since 2008. The potential for using genomic information as a source for Ashkenazic history has long been recognized but pioneers have had, until recently, to base their research on the limited data provided first by classical markers and later by mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosome haplogroups. Extensive newly available autosomal data is now being added to provide a much richer and firmer basis for historical inferences.
My research on the history of Yiddish has also taken on some new directions thanks to hints provided by teachers, Marvin Herzog and Mordtkhe Schaechter.
Herzog called attention to the fact that when groups migrate they tend to lose cultural and linguistic traits. This observation which goes back his mentor Uriel Weinreich is now becoming more widely appreciated as can be seen from a recent article by Quentin D. Atkinson in 'Science' which uses lose of phonetic features to trace the spread of human languages back to Africa.
Uriel discussed the loss of features in small settlements in his article on 'Western Traits of Transcarpathian Yiddish.' The specific example he gave was the development of Northeastern YIddish but in other parts of the same article he describes a much wider pattern of progressive trait loss. He describes a number o features unique to Transcarpathian Yiddish. A smaller set of these can be found in Central Yiddish. A still smaller set are shared by Central and Southeastern Yiddish but not found in the remaining the East Yiddish dialect, Northeastern Yiddish.
The global pattern is then one of maximum richness of traits in Transcarpathian Yiddish with a gradual falling off of traits towards the northeastern part of East Yiddish territory. Uriel does not specifically say as much but this pattern implies that the settlement of East Yiddish territory spread out from the broader Transcarpathian area (this area would include Austria and the Czech lands which are to the west of the Carpathians) to the northeast. We can infer from this that the common root of Transcarpathian and East Yiddish originated in the Transcarpathian area. This is consistent with other evidence that the ancestor of these dialects coalesced in Austria around the the 11th century.
The spread of East and Transcarpathian Yiddish from a focal area in early medieval Austria is also implied by a line of research that was suggested by the work of another of my teachers, Mordtkhe Schaechter. Schaechter identified a specific kind of linguistic borrowing in which a language borrows standards of correctness rather than specific items from another language. The borrowed standard is used to select preferred variants within the internal repertoire of the borrowing language.
As I have argued elsewhere in this blog, early Yiddish was an East Germanic language derived from Gothic. Modern Yiddish is, in comparison, much more similar to German. Yiddish has come to resemble German partly through the mechanism of ordinary linguistic borrowing but the mechanism described by Schaechter has actually played a greater role. Specifically, early Yiddish borrowed standards from a form of literary German. This form was the Middle High German used in Austria.
As to the question of how the original Gothic-derived Yiddish got to Austria, I currently favor the hypothesis that from at least 500 CE on, Gothic was spoken by the Jews of northwestern Balkan Jewry. Medieval Austria was settled by Jews from the Rhineland and East Franconia as well as other areas but I think that early Yiddish was brought there by settlers from the area of the Save River valley.

The Fourth Century Crimean Origin of the Ashkenazim

As is argued in other essays, on this blog, the Germanic component of Yiddish goes back to an East Germanic, probably Gothic, root. This raises the question of how Gothic material came to be found in a language, Yiddish, which is first attested in medieval Germany.

One school of historians (e. g. Simon Schwarzfuchs "L'opposition Tsarfat-Provence" in "Hommage a Georges Vajda" edited by Gerard Nahon and Charles Touati, Louvain, Peeter, 1980 and Israel M. Ta-Shma "Creativity and Diversity" Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 2006 ) maintains that Ashkenazic Jews migrated to Germany largely from northern Italy between the ninth and eleventh centuries. Historical records of Jews in northern Italy are sparse for the eighth and ninth centuries when northern Italy was under the domination of the Lombard but Jewish communities are mentioned in Lucca and Pavia. Jews were well-treated under Lombard rule.

This Lombard Jewish community can perhaps be derived from a significant Jewish community that lived in Ravenna in the sixth century (see Thomas Hodgkin "Theodoric the Goth" New York, G. P. Putnam, 1891 and Bernard S. Bachrach "Early medieval Jewish policy in western Europe", Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1977) This community lived under the Ostrogothic conquerors of Italy and enjoyed very close relations with them.

It is not known from whence the Jewish community of sixth century Ravenna came from but their closeness to the Ostrogothic elite suggests that they migrated with the Ostrogoths from their previous settlement around the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea. It is not known if the Danubian homeland of the Ostrogoths had a significant Jewish population but another Gothic settlement further east on the Black Sea, the Crimean Bosporus, had an old Jewish community which came under Gothic rule in about 362. (see Gibson, E. Leigh "The Jewish Manumission Inscriptions of the Bosporus Kingdom" Tubingen, Germany, Mohr Siebeck, 1999 for Jews on the Crimean Bosporus and Alexander Alexanderovich Vasiliev "The Goths in Crimea" Cambridge, Mass., Medieval Academy of America, 1936) for Goths in Crimea).

The Crimean Gothic community was separated from the Ostrogothic community from the late fourth century until the mid-fifth century by the Huns who dominated the intermediate area along the Black Sea. But the Huns lost control of this region after the death of Attila in 454 and Goths and Jews from Crimea were free to join the increasingly powerful and prosperous Danubian Ostrogoths on their march to the west.

To flesh out this hypothetical reconstruction; the Ashkenazim began as Jews of the Crimean Bosporus who allied themselves with the Goths who got control of the Bosporus in about 262 CE. These Gothicized Jews joined the Ostrogoths of the lower Danube on their migration to Italy under the leadership of Theodoric the Great in 493. They settled in northern Italy, particularly in Ravenna and remained in northern Italy after the Lombards, a West Germanic people, conquered Italy in 568.

Jewish life in northern Italy is sparsely documented but by about 800 Jews are reported at least as traders to the north of the Alps in Regensburg under the rule of Charlemagne. After the death of Charlemagne in 841, the German lands did not thrive. An economic revival began under the Saxon Empire between 919 and 1024 associated with the rise of eastern German cities like Erfurt, Merseburg, Halle and Magdeburg, all of which are thought to have had significant Jewish populations. This period was followed by that of the Salian Empire from 1024-1125 when Jews, some of whom moved from northern France, settled in Speyer, Worms and Mainz (SHUM).

The first written products of Ashkenaz come from the central Rhineland communities of SHUM in the eleventh century. From these earliest surviving writings, scholars like Abraham Grossman and Israel M. Ta-Shma have been able to build up a picture of medieval Ashkenazic culture. From this one gets the sense of a proud culture with a sense of great antiquity. It is a culture that adheres strongly to local customs which are seen as variants of a tradition directly passed from ancient Israel. Naturally, this culture puts a very high value on Hebrew literacy.

The development of Germanic short 'o'

Proto-Germanic is commonly reconstructed as lacking a short 'o' phoneme. The subsequent development of short 'o' can be looked at by tracing developments in Gothic, German and Yiddish.
Biblical Gothic, attested from the 5th century, is close to the Proto-Germanic state. There is no 'o' phoneme in the native Germanic word stock although 'o' is found in loanwords.
Within the Germanic component, 'o' occurs as an allophone of short 'u' before the consonants 'r', 'kh' and 'khw'. This is part of a more general short vowel lowering rule that also lowers short 'i' to short 'e'.
German by comparison has a short 'o' phoneme which mostly developed from PG short 'u' and which is found in many contexts. Notable are occurences of 'o' derived from 'u' before nasal vowels, e. g. fromm, Sommer, Sonne, kommen, besonderer, gesponnen, geschwommen, genommen. (examples from Bin-Nun). This shift began in Old High German and continued through Middle High German and Early New High German.
The short vowel lowering rule survives in the German dialects but it is quite restricted geographically.
Yiddish occupies an intermediate position between Gothic and German. The short vowel lowering rule survives except in the Northeastern dialect (Litvish) which has lost the distinction between short and long vowels.
Words like vortsl, dorsht, shtorem, vorem, gorgl, vokher, etc. are universal in Yiddish and show that this rule operated at the earliest period in the history of the language.
On the other hand, there is well-established short 'o' phoneme in found in many word from the Germanic component such as groshn, holts, honik, shlos. gebot. etc. But 'u' before nasals was rarely lowered so that the listed German words above are represented in by Yiddish words that, historically, have short 'u' e. g. zumer, zun, kumen, etc.
I say 'historically' because in almost all the Yiddish dialects, the short 'u' has been transformed into another vowel. The excpeion is Alsation Yiddish. Alsation Yiddish is also exceptional in that while it has zumer, zun, kumen, etc. these are in free variation with forms that have 'o'
The picture that one gets is of an early Yiddish that had the short vowel lowering rule and lacked an 'o' phoneme but subsequently acquired it through contact with German, Hebrew and other languages that have it.
A particularly interesting set of words are fun, duner, and ful. The German cognates of these words have had 'o' since Old High Germanic times. It is possible that Yiddish preserves Old High German forms that are not attested in the literature. Alternately these forms may go back to an earlier Gemanic language such as Gothic or an earlier stage of the West Germanic language that developed into Old High German. Either way we are looking at a date for the origin of Yiddish that is earlier than 800 C E.

Yiddish gayes Gothic gauja

The Yiddish word 'gayes' was used in western Germany and Poland to mean 'people of the countryside, particularly non-Jewish'. It is commonly spelled as if it were of Semitic origin 'gimel-yod-vov-sof' but it is not a Semitic world. Meyer Wolf and Alexis Manaster Ramer have suggested that it is of ancient Germanic origin.
The word frequently appears in the form 's'gayes' where the 's' is a contraction of the neutral definite article 'dos' the word can also be masculine or feminine.
Related forms in Gothic and Old High German refer to a district or region but the closest form is Gothic 'gauja' (masculine) defined in Lehmann's Gothic dictionary as 'people of a land'.

Yiddish oyganes Old High German ougun Gothic augona

In Yiddish 'oy'ganes' means large protruding eyes as if in surprise. A form 'oy'genes' with stress on the first syllable exists and also a form 'oyga'nim'.
The Old High German word for 'eye' is 'ou'ga' in the nominative singular and 'ou'gun' or 'ougun' in the nominative plural. The Biblical Gothic (4th century) word is 'au'go' in the nominative singular and 'au'go:na' in the nominative plural. In Crimean Gothic from the 1500's the plural is 'oeghene.'
The Yiddish form resembles the Gothic form in having three syllables. However, the 'a' in the second syllable resembles the Old High German form. Both the Gothic and Old High German forms may have influenced Yiddish.

Yiddish klezmer Gothic klismo Hebrew kley-zemer

Yiddish 'klezmer' 'musician' is commonly derived from Hebrew 'kley-zemer'. Biblical Gothic has a word 'klismo' of unknown etymology meaning 'cymbal' used in the phrase 'klismo klismjandei' 'cymbal tinkling',
The two words are actually phonetically quite close in that Gothic lacked a short 'e'. Gothic 'i' would have been the closest approximation to this sound. Semantically, however the two words are pretty far apart. However, the literal meaning of 'kley-zemer' is 'musical instrument.' This word could have existed in Wulfila's time and been the basis both of Gothic 'klismo' and Yiddish 'klezmer.'

Yiddish 'skotsl' Gothic 'skohsl'

The Yiddish expression 'skotsl kumt' is uttered on the occassion of someone's unexpected arrival. Its etymology is unknown. The Biblical Gothic word for 'demon' is 'skohsl'. It is phonetically easy to go from 'skohsl' to 'skotsl'. The Gothic 'h' here designates a preconsonantal 'kh' sound. Such a sound was often lost in the history of Yiddish, compare 'shukh' with derived 'shuster.' The 'sl' cluster can, sometimes become a 'tsl' cluster as in 'pitsl' derived from 'bisl.'
Semantically, the Yiddish and Gothic words are also a good match in that the Yiddish expression can be compared to English 'speak of the Devil and he appears' also said of an unexpected arrival. It can be concluded that Yiddish 'skotsl' is likely descended from Gothic 'skohsl'.