[lbo-talk] Re: We Need More Jews!

John Bizwas bizwas at lycos.com
Mon Sep 27 00:28:28 PDT 2004



> As for the actual, factual intellectual question, the sources you >cite seem to mainly come down to Brooks' book _The Jews of Khazaria_, >and afaict, his claims are extremely mild. <<
> He admits that the mass of Jews in Eastern Europe and Russia were >from Europe. He simply speculates that perhaps a tiny amount might >possibly have descended from migrants from Khazaria. >>

Actually the Brooks book and site stems largely from varied scholarship in Germany, Hungary, Turkey, Poland and Russia.

I myself am more interested in the linguistic issues, which fall largely outside of racialist nonsense or mythic national religions like zionism. For example, the development and spread of Yiddish as first a contact language, then a creole, and then a full-blown language with literary tradition. There are three theories competing to explain the development of Yiddish into a modern language, and the Khazar question might help understand which theory fits best. That is, the possibility that there was an eastern development of Yiddish which only later became 'Germanized' from migration of Jews from the Rhine region into Eastern Europe, where there already were large numbers of Jews descended, in part, from the Khazars, speaking a proto-form of Yiddish that was based on Semitic (Aramaic and Hebrew) and/or Turkic-Tatar-Khazar contact with Slavic. Germanic, Slavic, Magyar and Turkic studies are being revised. (BTW, what evidence do you have, Michael, that the Khazars just disappear

ed. Russian, Turkic and Magyar studies would lead me think something completely different.)

For example, the Wexler thesis:

http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-2533.html#1

excerpt of review only>>The fifth chapter, ''Future Challenges'', is, as expected, the conclusion. Here Wexler states that he has indeed used the relexification hypothesis to show that Yiddish is the most reliable indicator that Khazar Jews were instrumental in the ethnic development of the Ashkenazic Jews. As the title suggests, he also devotes the majority of this chapter to future avenues for study. One of the most exciting aspects of this book were the constant suggestions for future research in the history of Yiddish and the origins/development of Modern Hebrew. Most of these suggestions were avenues of research that would further not only work on the relexification hypothesis, but that would likely add to any study of the history of these languages. For the most part, these suggestions could be applied to any number of theoretical approaches to the study of these languages.>>end of excerpt

Understanding how Yiddish developed seems quite recoverable using the methods of historic and comparative linguistics, and this could reveal how contact pidgins lead to full-blown creoles lead to modern languages with literatures. The hope is that the explanatory processes are sociolinguistically universal. By the way, in this sense, English, Japanese, Ryukuan and Korean would appear to be quite like Yiddish.

Regards, F

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