ABSTRACT
Religious persecution in the late Middle Ages led fi rst to an eastwards extension of Yiddish culture, subsequently to its near total transfer to eastern Europe, especially to Poland and Russia; and Yiddish began to assimilate a Slavonic element, which did little, however, to alter its essentially German nature. Large members of Jews settled throughout eastern Europe, spreading into Hungary, Romania and Lithuania. Two or three hundred years later, faced with religious persecution and intolerance in the East, many Jews started out on the reverse migration to the West. But by then it was too late for Yiddish – particularly a slavicized Yiddish – to re-establish itself in western Europe.
