YIDDISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE. The word Yiddish is derived from the modern German Judisch Deutsch or Jewish German. It is the language spoken by the Polish and Russian Jews whose forbears, early in the middle ages, were invited to Poland from the Rhineland, to form a trading class in between the nobles and the serfs. They have kept their Low German tongue, writing and printing it in Hebrew characters to this day. Yiddish, though based on a Low German vocabulary and construction, was cut off from living German, whence its irregularities of grammar and spelling. It continued to absorb Hebrew and Aramaic words and expressions, together with Slav ones, Polish or Russian, and has a few of older Romance origin. The Hebrew and Aramaic came from the Hebrew Bible and its huge commentary the Talmud, which is largely Aramaic (q.v.). For the women, notably in the Tzenah Urenaht (Heb. "Come out and see !"), there were prayers and legends in Yiddish, or Mame loshen (class. Heb. /ashon="tongue") or Zhargon, in modern Hebrew: Yekudit="Jewish" (s. Judith), Yiddit, Zhargon. Yid dish is essentially a folk-tongue, it had no written grammar, it eludes all strict grammatical analysis, though efforts are now being made to bring about uniformity in its grammar and spelling in view of its continued existence among the Jews of east Europe Yiddish Literature is merely the reflection of the segre gated, intense Jewish world of Eastern Europe which has been broken up, never to be reconstructed. It enshrines a distinct phase of Jewish history, one which began when the first Jews migrated to Poland from the Rhinelands in the middle ages, and which lately closed in a darkness still hard to penetrate. It is a literature rich in folksongs and tales. A wealth of folk-lore, still in course of discovery, gathered on the long road from Ur of the Chaldees to Pinsk and Minsk, passed into Yiddish from Talmudical and European sources. This legendary material re mained common to the Jews of Poland and Germany.
The literature of the latter differed at all times little from that of their Gentile neighbours except for the Hebrew lettering. The Oppenheim collection in the Bodleian library contains many publi cations of these earlier periods. Across the Polish frontier the literary cleavage between Jew and Gentile was complete. Inter
course with Germany grew ever less. Yiddish literature came to mean one or two chapbooks of legends and the still familiar de votional work for women, the Tzenah Urenah, delightful in its renderings of Talmudical traditions.
Early in the 19th century the Haskalah, a movement for the enlightenment of the Jewish masses, initiated in Berlin by Moses Mendelssohn, began to creep across the Russo-Polish frontiers. The young Talmud student deciphered his first German book, frequently the poems of Schiller, in secret and in fear—woe betide him were he found with a volume of secular recreation, and in the tongue spoken by so many heretic Jews ! Still he read and then came the wish to express his own feelings in Yiddish, to speak to the people in their every-day language. Lefin translated the Psalms and Ecclesiastes, Linetzki wrote his autobiography, the Polish Boy, J. L. Gordon his few powerful verses.
Revival in Russia.—Round the '6os and '7os, when Russian schools and culture were made accessible to Jewish youth, Yid dish literature suffered a decline. After the persecutions of the '8os it took on fresh life. The Jewish people, re-awakened to the fact that they were not Jewish Russians but. Russian Jews, said in the words of Peretz : "We also want to bring our sheaf to the universal harvest." The people needed comfort and guidance. Spektor wrote his tales, sweet and simple in style, priceless in observation; Frug, till then a Russian poet, his melodious verse; J. Dienensohn his pathetic Jossele. Abramovitch laid aside his fluent Hebrew pen and wrote novels in a rich Yiddish, dealing with evil inside as well as outside the community; I. L. Peretz and "Sholem Alechem," both now dead, wrote abundantly. Peretz produced tales, poems and dramas. The two last have a spectral charm, but his Stories and Pictures is his great achieve ment. "Sholem Alechem," the humourist, is even more of a house hold word in the humblest home where Yiddish is spoken. His Tovie der Milchiger (Tobias the Milkman) is an immortal type. David Frishman is a distinguished critic. Among other later and gifted story-tellers, much of whose work was published in New York, are Sholem Asch, A. Reisin, Libin and Peretz Hirschbein.