How Yiddish and Hebrew Connect

 Nadene Goldfoot                                         

      Some of Kalonymos family 

The Rhine Valley is the birthplace of the Yiddish speakers of Ashkenazi Judaism. From the 10th to 14th centuries, the "ShUM" cities of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz became a major cradle of European Jewish learning. Famous Jewish scholars, philosophers, and community leaders lived throughout the Rhine region.  Rashi (Solomon ben Isaac): Born in Troyes, France, the most prominent commentator on the Torah and Talmud studied at the yeshivas in Mainz and Worms before returning to France. The Kalonymos Family, of which I have traced my family from: An influential family of scholars and mystics who migrated from Italy to Mainz in the early Middle Ages, laying the foundations for early Ashkenazi Jewish mysticism (Hasidei Ashkenaz), are but a few well known Jews from this region  

Here are three common examples of Yiddish phrases written in Hebrew characters:

1. "What's up?" or "How are things?"

• Yiddish (Hebrew characters): וואָס הערט זיך
• Transliteration: Vos hertz zich? 

2. "Oh my gosh!" or "Woe is me!"

• Yiddish (Hebrew characters): אױ װײ
• Transliteration: Oy vey 

3. "You should live and be well!"

• Yiddish (Hebrew characters): זײַ געזונט
• Transliteration: Zay gezunt , can be used after one sneezes.

Yiddish originated in the 9th and 10th centuries in Central Europe when Ashkenazi Jews in the Rhine Valley adapted the local medieval High German dialects for their daily use. As a fusion language, it combined German grammar and vocabulary with a rich infusion of Hebrew, Aramaic, and various Slavic and Romance influences, all traditionally written using the Hebrew alphabet.  The Rhine Valley Origins (9th–12th Centuries): Following migrations from northern Italy and France, Jewish communities settled in the Rhineland of present-day Germany. They adopted the local Germanic dialects but naturally incorporated Hebrew and Aramaic terms. Because Hebrew was historically reserved strictly for prayer and holy texts, this new hybrid dialect became the vernacular for everyday business and social life.

The Eastern European Shift (13th–17th Centuries): Fleeing persecution in Central Europe, many Ashkenazi Jews migrated eastward into Slavic-speaking territories like Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine. During this phase, Yiddish absorbed a massive influx of Slavic vocabulary and grammatical structures, distancing it further from standard German.  My paternal ancestors came from Lithuania and Poland and the line married into many of the Ukraine area.  Their Yiddish pronunciation would have developed at this period.  Each country was a little different from each other, so if you were one of these Jews, you could tell where the other came from.  

Cultural Flourishing (19th–20th Centuries): Despite opposition from Enlightenment leaders who viewed it as merely a casual jargon, Yiddish became the foundation of a robust, secular cultural identity. The Jewish Enlightenment (known as the Haskalah) was an intellectual and social movement sweeping Europe from the 1770s to the 1880s. Leaders of the movement, known as maskilim (the wise), sought to combine traditional Jewish identity with secular education, European languages, and civic integration. Their work laid the groundwork for modern secular Jewish identity, Zionism, and Reform Judaism It supported a thriving ecosystem of literature, press, and theater, culminating in the 1908 Czernowitz Conference, which officially declared Yiddish a national language of the Jewish people.  Modern Era: The geographic dispersion caused by mass migrations and the devastating losses of the Holocaust drastically reduced the number of native Yiddish speakers globally. However, the language remains widely used today, particularly within Hasidic and ultra-Orthodox communities, while also being studied and preserved as a vital component of Jewish heritage. The Yiddish National Theater opened in New York City and consisted of plays done in Yiddish about the immigrants and their lives and other famous Yiddish literature.

However, when Jews started going back to Israel during the first Aliyah period (1880-1881), a pair, Deborah and Eliezer Ben Yehuda,  decided it was time to revive Hebrew as the national language once again.  Hebrew was revived as a spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, primarily through the efforts of lexicographer Eliezer Ben-Yehuda. By transitioning the language from a purely sacred, liturgical text into a modern, everyday tongue, it became the only successful large-scale linguistic revival in human history. So,  the couple responsible for reviving Hebrew and spreading its usage as a modern, everyday language in Israel was Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his first wife, Deborah (Devora) Ben-Yehuda. After immigrating to Jerusalem in 1881, the couple established the world's first modern Hebrew-speaking household and committed to communicating solely in the ancient language. To me, that must have been agonizing at certain times with the impulse to speak in your native language.  

The First Native Speaker: The couple famously raised their son, Ben-Zion (later Itamar), to be the first native Hebrew speaker in over 1,500 years. They shielded him from other languages so Hebrew would be his only mother tongue.  Since ancient Hebrew lacked terms for modern items, Eliezer invented hundreds of everyday words (like glida for ice cream and milon for dictionary) by adapting biblical roots. Eliezer's relentless drive—including editing Jerusalem's first Hebrew newspaper, HaZvi, and establishing the Committee of the Hebrew Language in 1890—paved the way for the language to be adopted by new immigrant settlements. 

Hebrew alphabet
Script type	Abjad primarily, alphabet
Period	2nd–1st century BCE to present
Direction	Right-to-left
Languages	Hebrew; derivations used for Yiddish, Ladino, Mozarabic, Levantine Arabic, Aramaic, Knaanic, other Jewish languages

Reading from right to left;  Alphabet evree(meaning Hebrew) The dots under the letters are for beginners needed help with vowel sound

Hebrew is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient Levant. Spanning over 3,000 years, its history is uniquely defined by a transition from a spoken vernacular to a sacred liturgical language, culminating in its modern revival as the national language of Israel. While Hebrew ceased to be a common spoken vernacular around 200 CE, it never fully "died". For roughly 1,700 years, Jews worldwide used it continuously for prayer, religious study, and as a written lingua franca to communicate across different countries. In fact, it was found that Columbus used it to write to his son, keeping his message personal. Hebrew print vs cursive script in writing

down below in cursive: a-b (aleph bet)-I forget the ph letter and here it is)

Hebrew Print is for is all printed works, newspapers , books , signs, billboards etc. But hand writing is in Hebrew Cursive Script letters.

 So, we find that the Haskalah was busy reviving Hebrew !  The revival began in the 18th century during the Jewish Enlightenment. Secular writers started publishing Hebrew newspapers and literature. They expanded the ancient vocabulary to describe modern, everyday topics, which slowly moved the language away from its exclusively religious context.   Ben-Yehuda must have been a part of this movemenat, as when he made a radical decision to speak only Hebrew at home. He raised his son, Ben-Zion, exclusively in Hebrew, making him the first native Hebrew speaker in nearly 2,000 years.  Eliezer ben Yehuda Invented Vocabulary: Ancient Hebrew had no words for modern inventions. Ben-Yehuda created thousands of new words (such as for "electricity" or "newspaper") by adapting ancient root words and borrowing from Arabic, French, and German.  He began compiling a massive, multi-volume dictionary that provided the standard vocabulary for the growing community.

The revival gained unstoppable momentum when early Zionist pioneers and educators in Ottoman Palestine made Hebrew the language of instruction in schools. By teaching children exclusively in Hebrew, it naturally became their mother tongue, passing rapidly from the classroom into the streets. Mass waves of Jewish immigrants began arriving from Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, speaking entirely different languages like Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic. Because no single diaspora language was universally shared, Hebrew was adopted as the shared national language, unifying the diverse population.  Today, Modern Hebrew is spoken by over 9 million people as the primary language of daily life, government, and culture in Israel. You can learn more about this unprecedented linguistic achievement on Wikipedia. 

My father spoke Yiddish in his home and learned English when he went to school. My bubba never did learn English !   I learned a few of his words, like botch 'n tuchus (spank your bottom) and then learned Hebrew in Sunday school at an early age but forgot much by aliyah time at age 37.  I had 9 months of school to learn a lot more in Haifa, but I got my teaching certificate.