History

The Ashkenazi culture that was taking root in 10th-century Central Europe derived its name from Ashkenaz, the medieval Hebrew name for Germany (Genesis 10:3). Its geographic extent did not coincide with the German Christian principalities, and Ashkenaz included Northern France. It also bordered on the area inhabited by the Sephardi, or Spanish Jews, which ranged into southern France. Later, the Ashkenazi territory would spread into Eastern Europe as well.

Nothing is known about the vernacular of the earliest Jews in Germany, but several theories have been put forward. It is generally accepted that it was likely to have contained elements from other languages of the Near East and Europe absorbed through dispersion. Since many settlers came via northern France, it is also likely that the Romance-based Jewish language of that region was represented. Traces of this remain in the modern Yiddish vocabulary, particularly in Western Yiddish; for example, בענטשן (bentshn, to bless), from the Latin benedicere, and the Western Yiddish orn (to pray), from the Latin orare.

The first language of European Jews may also have been Aramaic (Katz 2004), the vernacular of the Jews in Roman era Palestine, and ancient and early medieval Mesopotamia. The widespread use of Aramaic among the large non-Jewish Syrian trading population of the Roman provinces, including those in Europe, would have reinforced the use of Aramaic among Jews engaged in trade.

Members of the young Ashkenazi community would have encountered the myriad dialects from which standard German was destined to emerge many centuries later. They would soon have been speaking their own versions of these German dialects, mixed with linguistic elements that they themselves brought into the region. These dialects would have adapted to the needs of the burgeoning Ashkenazi culture and may, as characterizes many such developments, have included the deliberate cultivation of linguistic differences to assert cultural autonomy. The Ashkenazi community also had its own geography, with a pattern of relationships among settlements that was somewhat independent of its non-Jewish neighbors. This led to the consolidation of Yiddish dialects, the borders of which did not coincide with the borders of German dialects.

The further development of the Eastern Yiddish dialects involved the absorption of many words from Slavic languages.

Written evidence

The oldest surviving literary document in Yiddish is a blessing in a Hebrew prayer book from 1272 (described extensively in Frakes 2004 and Baumgarten/Frakes 2005):

This brief rhyme is decoratively embedded in a purely Hebrew text (a reproduction of which is in Katz 2004). Nonetheless, it indicates that the Yiddish of that day was a more or less regular Middle High German into which Hebrew words — makhazor (prayer book for the High Holy Days) and beis hakneses (synagogue) — had been included.

In the course of the 14th and 15th centuries, songs and poems in Yiddish, and also macaronic pieces in Hebrew and German, began to appear. These were collected in the late 15th century by Menahem ben Naphtali Oldendorf. During the same period, a tradition seems to have emerged of the Jewish community adapting its own versions of German secular literature. The earliest Yiddish epic poem of this sort is the Dukus Horant which survives in the famous Cambridge Codex T.-S.10.K.22. This 14th-century manuscript was discovered in the geniza of a Cairo synagogue in 1896, and also contains a collection of narrative poems on themes from the Hebrew Bible and the Haggadah.

Apart from the obvious use of Hebrew words for specifically Jewish artifacts, it is very difficult to decide how far 15th century written Yiddish differed from the German of that period. A lot depends on the interpretation of the phonetic properties of Hebrew characters, especially the vowels. There is a rough consensus that by this period, Yiddish would have sounded distinctive to the average German even when no Hebrew lexemes were used.

Printing

The advent of the printing press resulted in an increase in the amount of material produced and surviving from the 16th century and onwards. One particularly popular work was Elia Levita's Bovo-Bukh, composed 1507–1508 and printed in at least forty editions beginning in 1541. Levita, the earliest named Yiddish author, may also have written Pariz un Viene (Paris and Vienna). Another Yiddish retelling of a chivalric romance, Vidvilt (often referred to as "Widuwilt" by Germanizing scholars), presumably also dates from the 15th century, although the manuscripts are from the 16th. It is also known as Kinig Artus Hof, an adaptation of the Middle High German romance Wigalois by Wirnt von Gravenberg. Another significant writer is Avroham ben Schemuel Pikartei who published a paraphrase on the Book of Job in 1557.

Women in the Ashkenazi community were traditionally not literate in Hebrew, but did read and write Yiddish. A body of literature therefore developed for which women were a primary audience. This included secular works such as the Bovo-Bukh and religious writing specifically for women, such as the Tseno-Ureno and the Tkhines. One of the best known early woman authors was Glückel of Hameln, whose memoirs are still in print.

A page from the Shemot Devarim, a Yiddish-Hebrew-Latin-German dictionary and thesaurus, published by Elia Levita in 1542

The segmentation of the Yiddish readership, between women who read mame-loshn but not loshn-koydesh, and men who read both, was significant enough that distinctive typefaces were used for each. The name commonly given to the semicursive form used exclusively for Yiddish was ווײַבערטײַטש (vaybertaytsh = "women's taytsh"; shown in the heading and fourth column in the adjacent illustration), with square Hebrew letters (shown in the third column) being reserved for text in that language and Aramaic. This distinction was retained in general typographic practice through to the early 19th century, with Yiddish books being set in vaybertaytsh (also termed מאַשייט Masheyt).

An additional distinctive semicursive typeface was, and still is, used for rabbinical commentary on religious texts when Hebrew and Yiddish both appear on the same page. This is commonly termed 'Rashi script' from the name of the most renowned early author whose commentary is usually printed using this script. ('Rashi script' is also the typeface normally used when the Sefardi counterpart to Yiddish, Ladino, is printed in Hebrew script.)