ABSTRACT
The circumstances which come into play in the history of Yiddish are inherently different from those of most documented languages. Yiddish is unique to the Jewish civilization known as Ashkenaz, which rose along the banks of the Rhine and the Danube. Until the eighteenth century, all Ashkenazim were by definition Yiddish speakers. The new vernacular, Yiddish, an intricate linguistic fusion of the Semitic elements with a uniquely modified Germanic component, was ‘just spoken’ and ‘just written’. Some modern scholars have seen ‘a movement for Yiddish’ in the various defenses of prayer in Yiddish. In Palestine, and later in Israel, a massive campaign was centrally coordinated to eradicate Yiddish, which became for Hebraists an object of hate vastly in excess of the German-Jewish antipathy. Sublimation of hate and love relationships vis-à-vis language is of course not unique to Yiddish, but Yiddish is an unusually salient example.
