Conservation of Yiddish

Saving a diminishing language

If such an egregious effort was made to destroy Yiddish and its culture, shouldn’t we have an equally strong, or even stronger, response to conserving Yiddish? In just four years, a shocking five million one hundred thousand native Yiddish speakers were killed during the Holocaust. The atrocity that happened in the Holocaust helped us learn the importance of conserving threatened languages like Yiddish and the culture. But after learning of the significance, what are we doing to conserve it? Yiddish is a diminishing language rich in culture and history and therefore it deserves to be conserved through a modern approach.

 Yiddish as a language is rich in history and culture. It is primarily spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. The language evolved over time, being influenced by the geological location of the speakers. Due to this, it allowed for Yiddish to have a unique use of vocabulary and grammar. This adaptability “led to a kaleidoscope of Jewish history” (YIVO).  Yiddish utilizes various languages, including “Latin, German, Turkish, Ukrainian, Polish, Hebrew, Aramaic, and many more.” The first recorded sentence of Yiddish was in 1272 in the Worms Mahzor, but the language as a whole is widely believed to have started in the 10th century, although it cannot be confirmed. “It was believed to have been formed when Jews from France and Italy migrated to the German Rhine Valley. There, they combined the languages they brought with them” (myjewishlearning.com). Yiddish as a language has been diminished over the past decades. Before the Holocaust Started there were approximately thirteen million native Yiddish speakers. During the Holocaust, of the six million Jews murdered, 85% of them were native Yiddish speakers. For clarification, that is five million and one hundred thousand Native Speakers of Yiddish that were killed in just 4 years. Due to these horrific historical events, families living in places like America “were often hesitant to speak Yiddish with their children,” due to the safety risks within using this language as well as the past generation of Yiddish speakers passing away at a consistent rate due to old age (myjewishlearning.com). The lack of new speakers greatly impacted the stability of the language. Making the language have fewer speakers every day. This creates a significant impact on an already struggling language. The combination of the Holocaust and residual fear is also a contributing factor. 

Since WWII, the Yiddish language continued to diminish. “Within the world of secular Yiddish, many native speakers of the language are slowly passing away, which brings a particular urgency to preserve and protect the language. While many do learn the language, those who don’t are unable to access the many untranslated Yiddish [texts]” (YIVO). Individuals who are native speakers are slowly passing away and the people who are learning the language are not very proficient, especially in a thing like translating older works including but not limited to “many of the letters, journals, texts, and manuscripts documenting the one-thousand-year history of Ashkenazi Jews would be lost”(YIVO). At present, the majority of Yiddish speakers are Haredi and Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Due to the geography of these two groups, modern language has started to integrate into Yiddish, creating a dialect or version of Yiddish called, Hasidic Yiddish. Hasidic Jews often learn to speak Yiddish orally and through tradition. The lack of documentation of Yiddish has contributed to the dissipation.

So what can be done to conserve the Yiddish language? There are many options for helping conserve the language from online classes to language learning apps like Duolingo But conserving a language is not about only learning it. It is also about recording work to be more accessible to others. One thing we can do to help preserve the culture of the language is to translate works like books and letters, as well as having a storage place or archive for all the work to be available to the public with translation. Doing this will help us conserve the culture around the  Yiddish language. And therefore keep the culture alive.

You could argue that Yiddish is no longer relevant and that cultures that surround it inevitably evolve and change. Yiddish as a language may be diminishing but there are still children, adults, and the elderly who actively speak it in their everyday lives, homes, and communities. If Yiddish culture was so unimportant and irrelevant why is Yiddish still around today? And who should decide the value of a culture? Are they not all equal?

Yiddish is a diminishing language rich in culture and history therefore, it deserves to be conserved through a modern approach by archiving, documenting, and celebrating this historic culture. It holds many years of history being a kaleidoscope of the speaker's history. So what are we doing to conserve it?

 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1o-Abs_3819VrE7PHCxMDwCUerM2qKATdbq-XYu0osUk/edit?usp=sharing