A language from the Rhineland
Yiddish is not, as is often assumed, an Eastern language. Its roots lie in the medieval Rhineland — in the Jewish communities of Mainz, Worms and Speyer, the so-called ShUM cities, and in their reach into the smaller communities along the Rhine, the Moselle and the Main. From the Middle High German that Jewish residents shared with their Christian neighbours a distinct variety developed, supplemented by a stable stock of Hebrew-Aramaic words from religious life and by Romance elements that Jewish families had brought with them from the Mediterranean world. Carried eastward by migrating communities, the language reached Bohemia, Poland and Ukraine, where it developed into Eastern Yiddish with strong Slavic influence. In the West — in Germany, Alsace, Switzerland and the Netherlands — Western Yiddish remained, its vocabulary closer to modern German than the Yiddish that lived on in Eastern Europe.
Western Yiddish on the Moselle
On the Moselle, Western Yiddish was for centuries the everyday language of the Jewish communities — in Trier, in the rural communities of the Hunsrück, the Vordereifel, in Wittlich, Bernkastel, Beilstein, Cochem, Zell and Koblenz. It was spoken at home, in the synagogue (alongside liturgical Hebrew), and in commerce among Jews; in dealings with the Christian environment people used Moselle Franconian or High German. The language was not a “thieves’ cant” or “secret tongue”, but a fully developed, written language with its own religious literature, Bible translations and popular books.
With nineteenth-century civic emancipation, Western Yiddish disappeared rapidly. The Prussian authorities made High German the language of school and public life; the Jewish reform movement itself saw Yiddish as an obstacle to integration. By around 1900 it had nearly died out on the Moselle as an everyday language — preserved only in particular expressions, in religious use, and in those occupational milieus that conserved its vocabulary: above all the cattle trade.
Kinship with Moselle Franconian
The kinship between Western Yiddish and Moselle Franconian is not speculation but follows from their shared origin: both forms are rooted in Middle High German, and both carried out the Second (High German) Consonant Shift only in part. Characteristic is the preservation of initial /p/ where standard German has /pf/:
- Standard German Pferd — Western Yiddish ferd — Moselle Franconian Päärd (“horse”)
- Standard German Apfel — Western Yiddish epl — Moselle Franconian Appel (“apple”)
- Standard German Kopf — Western Yiddish kop — Moselle Franconian Kopp (“head”)
Parallels can be observed in the diphthongs, in the treatment of /t/, and in word formation. Speakers of Moselle Franconian often understand Western Yiddish texts more easily than do speakers of standard German — and vice versa. This closeness is no coincidence: for generations, Western Yiddish was the language of people who grew up in the same dialect area as their Christian neighbours and shared the same sounding-board.
The language of the cattle trade
One economic niche preserved Western Yiddish on the Moselle longer than the religious sphere did: the Jewish cattle and horse trade. Well into the twentieth century, the trade in cattle between the Eifel, the Hunsrück and the Moselle lay predominantly in Jewish hands. At the markets of Wittlich, Bernkastel and Trier, in farmers’ stables, at the closing of a deal with a handshake — everywhere a professional jargon was in use that knew Hebrew-Yiddish terms for numbers, animals, qualities and money. Christian cattle traders adopted this jargon, and so words such as Beis (two), Daled (four) or Schock (for a particular sum of money) made their way into common speech. A related secret language — “Lachoudisch” (from Hebrew loshen ha-kodesh, “holy tongue”) — is known from the Franconian village of Schopfloch; on the Moselle and in the Hunsrück, less dense but related variants existed and have left traces in the dialectal record.
Yiddish loanwords in today’s German and Moselle dialect
Even someone who has never heard a Yiddish sentence uses, every day, words that have migrated from Yiddish into German — in many cases through the cattle- and horse-traders’ jargon of rural areas. A small selection:
- Schlamassel — from schlim mazl, “bad luck”
- Reibach — from Hebrew rewach, “profit”
- Maloche — from Hebrew melacha, “work”
- Pleite — from Hebrew peleita, “flight, evasion”
- Knast — from Hebrew knas, “penalty”
- Tacheles reden — from Hebrew tachles, “purpose, point”
- Mischpoke — from Hebrew mishpacha, “family”
- Ganove — from Hebrew ganav, “thief”
- Stuss — from Hebrew shtus, “nonsense”
- Zoff — from Hebrew-Yiddish soof, “end, quarrel”
- meschugge — from Hebrew meshugga, “mad”
- koscher — from Hebrew kasher, “fit, pure”
- Chuzpe — from Hebrew chutzpa, “impudence”
- schmusen — from Hebrew schemu’ot, “rumours, flattering talk”
- Schmiere stehen — from Hebrew schmira, “watch”
On the Moselle and in the Hunsrück, many of these words are still an unselfconscious part of everyday speech. They are the quiet linguistic legacy of centuries of Jewish life in the region — often used by speakers who no longer know where they came from.
“Mauscheln” — a tainted word
Not all traces of Western Yiddish in German are innocent. The verb mauscheln — derived from the Jewish given name Mosche (Moses) — originally meant pejoratively “to talk like a Jew”, that is, to speak Western Yiddish, and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century antisemitic publications it became the stigma of an entire speech community. Today its meaning has been levelled to “to strike deals behind others’ backs”; the anti-Jewish origin is no longer present to most speakers. Historical awareness of the origins of such words is part of a responsible use of language.
Remembrance and research
The study of Western Yiddish in the Moselle-Eifel-Hunsrück area is a vital but small branch of scholarship. The Emil-Frank-Institut in Wittlich regularly hosts language courses, conferences and readings; its scholarly library (over 11,000 items, in cooperation with the Wittlich municipal library) gathers the most important works. The Arye-Maimon-Institut for the History of the Jews at the University of Trier documents the Jewish history of the region, including its linguistic record. For deeper study of Western Yiddish texts, the works of Florence Guggenheim-Grünberg, Werner Weinberg, Hans-Peter Althaus and Erika Timm offer sound introductions — see also the literature page.