[lbo-talk] Saudi anti-Semitism

[andie nachgeborenen]

Not that I'm any sort of an expert on this, but I understand that the origin of Yiddish is not a matter of consensus among linguists, including whether it is a dialect of German as opposed to a creole or something like that with a lot of German mixed in along with Slavic languages and who knows what. 

It varied a lot. I recall my late MiL, who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking household originally from Ukraine and Galicia, remarking after she attended a Yiddish-language revival of a play from her childhood, They spoke beautiful Warsaw Yiddish. I didn't understand one word in ten.

(Btw my great-aunt was a successful Yiddish and mainstream theater and film actress from the 1920s through the 19809s. She played The Jazz Singer's mother on B-way in 1923, when she was herself about 30! She also understudied for Lillian Gish in Arsenic and Old Lace in 1940. But she also played Yiddish theater as long as it existed.)

--- On Fri, 7/18/08, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> From: Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Saudi anti-Semitism
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Friday, July 18, 2008, 10:22 AM
> Yeah. Yiddish-speaking Jews are not "indigenous"
> as it were to Eastern Europe, as opposed to the small
> population of Turkic Jews. That's part of the reason
> why the Russian Empire distinguished between the
> Yiddish-speaking Jews of the Pale (subject to all kinds of
> legal restrictions) and the various other, ethnically
> Turkic, small Jewish peoples of the Empire (which were
> not). Like I was mentioning before, AFAIK that's when
> the whole "descended from the Khazars" trope
> started to get important, because the Turkic Jewish groups
> argued that they were the descendants of the Khazars*, who
> were CONVERTS to Judaism, and so did not share ancestry
> with the Yiddish-speaking Jews who had killed Christ.
> 
> * and they quite possibly are.
> 
> --- On Fri, 7/18/08, moominek at aol.com
> <moominek at aol.com> wrote:
> >  
> > Truly not a myth: The language of East European
> Jewry, the
> > Yiddish, is more a german dialect out of the middle
> ages
> > than anything else: 
> > The big migration to the east started with the plague
> > progroms in the West around 1350. 
> >  
> > Sebastian
> >  
> 
> 
> 
>       
> 
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