Yiddish

Except It Isn’t

In the contemporary Chassidic world, Yiddish is unofficially a holy language – the “Mameh Loshon” (mother’s tongue). Speaking only Yiddish is the prescribed, preferred, and ideal mode of communication. In the US, a Chassid who speaks in English is announcing: I’m a little assimilated. A bad boy. Maybe even treasonous.

Having a unique language and making it a religious delineator, is a cunning form of social engineering. Keep your family Yiddish-only and you’ve secured them within your ecosystem. Where will they go and what can they do, unskilled and illiterate in the outside world? Blissfully dependent. A velvet cage with ghettoized people. Not necessarily evil or intentional harm. Quite the opposite, from certain perspectives. The world is out to get you. We got you. Stay close. Brotherhood. Protective. Survival. Pure love. But also, control.

Funny thing is, though, Yiddish is not Jewish in any deep sense.

While Yiddish translates to Jewish, its roots don’t go to the bedrock of Judaism. Not even close. It’s mostly German, cross-pollinated and seasoned with various European and Slavic dialects, sprinkled with some Hebrew and Aramaic. It’s about 1,000 years old. German predates it by centuries. Judaism predates them both by millennia. So, Yiddish isn’t truly Jewish. It’s a convert. It doesn’t root to Sinai or Israel. Bavaria, maybe.

I knew this intellectually. But it became visceral when I was once asleep on a bus in Switzerland. I dreamt I was hearing a Yiddish conversation between Chassidim and woke up to see the Swiss bus driver chatting with a local. Both clearly non–jews. Certainly not Chassidim. Their dialect – its cadence, texture music – nearly indistinguishable from the Yiddish in Chassidic Brooklyn.

This “holy Mameh Loshon” that Chassidim demand their family speak as The True Jewish Language? European wrapped in a Talis (prayer shawl). The Mameh Loshon wears lederhosen. That’s what die-hard Chassidim force-feed their society as mother’s secret sauce. But English? Treif! (non-kosher).

How many of those who hammer into their kids that English-is-non-kosher, and you-must-speak-only-Yiddish, know this?

Know what the real Jewish language is? Hebrew. The bible is Judaism’s first book and its language is Hebrew.

So, why do fundamentalist, extremely religious Jews not consider Hebrew their Mother Tongue? They don’t even use it socially.

Here’s where things might get uncomfortable.

Knowing Hebrew, not just reciting or chanting it, but knowing and using it as a communicative language, requires structured language education. Grammar. Syntax. Composition. Vocabulary. Rules. The same way most developed societies and countries teach and use their language.

This reveals an ugly underbelly of Chassidic culture. Formal language education is minimal or completely absent. Sure, there’s a language used. And there’s plenty of studied Hebrew text. But it’s studied like Latin text might be studied by academics; not as a way to communicate. If you want to understand the bible (in its original form) you’ve got to know Hebrew. So, they know Hebrew to the extent they can understand or even memorize the bible. Many are fluent in sacred passages. But it’s not used to communicate.

There’s no language educated as a communicative system.

If Hebrew was accepted as the Jewish language and not just the bible’s language, it would expose a fundamental education gap. Actually, a deep crack. Chassidim don’t consider language something that is to be structured and taught. Language – what most societies consider a basic skill structurally taught to every citizen – is like a dress code to a chossid. Oral culture. Instead of language being a fundamental tool for the human mind, and instead of it helping the person formulate thoughts and communicate, it’s treated as gang colors.

Yiddish is for most people a spoken language, with few rules. There are some Yiddishists – purists and linguists - who abide by spelling and grammar rules, but they are the exception. As used by the populace, it’s like today’s social media, with shorthand, spelling play, and constantly evolving. A crude, hybrid street talk, adopted on the streets of Europe while being chased by antisemites, with insufficient time and place for schooling, adopted as a mother tongue by refugees and brought to the new world of America as the language from Motherland (not Israel from thousands of years ago, but rather where Chassidism became a thing, in Europe, couple hundred years ago).

My Switzerland dream’s “Yiddish” was a surprising and humorous first-hand lesson that this holy language is neither Jewish nor holy. As far as language goes, Yiddish is like the blind leading the blind. Or, kindlier - survivors surviving. Descendants of survivors maintaining the ancestral code, consciously or subconsciously considering their current environment hostile.

It’s almost ironic. The language rooted in the religion’s foundations is reserved for study and prayer.

The language forged on the run in Europe is crowned as identity.

It works, though.

Chassidim from different countries feel like one family. Someone from Brooklyn communicates effortlessly with another in Israel, Canada, or Russia, highlighting the quiet perimeter of a virtual padded cage they experience as holy safety.

And nothing says holy safety like a medieval German dialect.