Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 3.214 February 5, 1994 1) European Jewry (Ellen Prince) 2) Purim in Rome (Dan Kirschner) 3) Khazars (Mark Flumerfelt) 4) Strong Yiddish verbs (Khayim Bochner) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu Feb 3 15:50:44 1994 From: "Ellen F. Prince" Subject: European Jewry your question is far from elementary--in fact, it's very controversial! the official weinreichian story is that jews migrated from the northeast of france into the german rhineland, from where they spread throughout german-speaking territory and ultimately east to slavic/baltic-speaking territory. then there is a more recent (and, imho, more plausible) story argued by bob king that they came up into bavaria from the south, then moved east. (hopefully, bob will tell us the details himself and correct me if i'm wrong). oh, there's also a farkakte theory put forth by arthur koestler about mass conversions to judaism of the khazars, but, so far as i know, there is not one shred of linguistic evidence for it and all the linguistic evidence imaginable against it. re the 'european' genes in great evidence among european jews, my own personal hunch, which i have no direct evidence for, is that it was primarily men who did the migrating, taking local wives into their communities after migration. this would explain why such basic mother-child terms in eastern yiddish are from slavic, e.g. tate, bobe, zeyde. (max weinreich notices this with some embarrassment and suggests jewish children got them from slavic maids. this would be the world's first known instance of maids having an impact on their masters' language. besides, how many jews had maids?) furthermore, we know that it was entirely male migration in the case of the jews of india, and yet these communities have managed to keep a strictly jewish identity to the present day--so we know it's possible. furthermore, this is a very common pattern in many other groups, e.g. norsemen settling iceland, who apparently stopped off in ireland and took irish wives. furthermore, it would suggest a motivation for the word order changes in eastern yiddish (almost identical to the changes in icelandic!), but that's more than you want to know. finally, this would also show us that the well-attested exogamic inclinations of jewish men is not of recent vintage. (tee hee, just kidding. well, sorta kidding...) the only alternative hypothesis that comes to mind is much less plausible, imho, i.e. massive instances of rape of jewish women by non-jews. of course, this sort of thing is attested in the african-american community but what i know of the social structure of the european jewish community is totally different--jews were never slaves of europeans and did not typically live in their houses as servants and concubines. (free association: in the early '60s, when malcolm x visited brooklyn college, some fool in the audience asked why he persisted in calling himself black when in fact he was very light-skinned. malcolm x replied: 'just because your great-great-grandfather raped my great-great-grandmother, it doesn't make me any less black.') btw, note that, if it were jewish men impregnating weinreich's slavic maids in large numbers, the offspring would have been largely raised as slavs, not jews, and thus couldn't account for the genetic makeup of today's european jews. in any event, i personally find your questions fascinating and far from elementary! perhaps someday genetic studies will give us some answers... ellen prince 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 4 09:00:47 1994 From: dkirsch@amy.tch.harvard.edu (Dan Kirschner) Subject: Purim in Rome Can any mendeleniks suggest an interesting shul in Rome where Purim could be celebrated. I expect to be in Italy during the week of Feb 21, and would like to experience the Italo-Yiddishe way for Purim. If there are "better" shuls in Venice or Florence, please advise. Thank you. Dan Kirschner 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri Feb 4 13:25:40 1994 From: Mark Flumerfelt Subject: Khazars Ted Steinberg's question about the origins of East European Jewry reminds me of a dilemma I had after reading Arthur Koestler's book The Thirteenth Tribe. I re ad it while I was in high school and I thought Koestler presented an interesti ng case but I could not understand why the Jews of Eastern Europe spoke Yiddish instead of Khazarian (I assume that was the name of their language). Koestler never really addressed this issue. Upon further reflection, and after reading another book on the subject by Dunlop, I came to the conclusion that Koestler's entire theory was bunk. Mark Flumerfelt PS - I am no authority on Russian history but was there not also a "Judaizing" sect in Russian during the 16th or 17th century. 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat Feb 5 13:11:43 1994 From: bochner@das.harvard.edu Subject: Re: strong Yiddish verbs Steve Jacobson writes: > Does anyone know of a published (or unpublished) alphabetized list > of past participles of strong Yiddish verbs which have vowel changes > from the infinitives? Birnbaum's "Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar" has a pretty nice list, pages 276 - 281. It organized by type of vowel change, instead of alphabetically, but pages 284 - 286 have an alphabetical index of the sort you're looking for. > but the onlylist I > know of which seems to aim at comprehensiveness is in a Russian > Yiddish grammar published a couple of years ago. Birnbaum doesn't say anything explicitly about comprehensiveness, but he's got a lot of interesting dialect forms, as well as other forms that aren't familiar to me. His transliteration is rather hard to get used to, but if you look at the Yiddish rather than the transliteration, it's pretty clear. Khayim ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 3.214 To subscribe, send SUB MENDELE FIRSTNAME LASTNAME to: LISTSERV@YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Mendele has 2 rules: 1. Provide a Subject: line. 2. Sign your article. Send submissions/responses to: mendele@yalevm.ycc.yale.edu Other business: nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu Anonymous ftp archives available on: ftp.mendele.trincoll.edu in the directory pub/mendele/files