One time when I was in a small professional meeting where I was the only Jew present, the discussion briefly moved far away from the purpose of the meeting and somehow moved to the definition of Yiddish. I don’t remember how that came up. It happened that one of the men at the meeting, who was from Germany, said that Yiddish is “bastardized German.” I just could not let that stand without a reply from me. I said, “Maybe German is bastardized Yiddish.” The German’s reply was, “That is not likely.” Actually, I believe that no language is “bastardized” any other language. The word bastard implies illegitimacy and is therefore an insult to anyone associated with the language branded as illegitimate. Anyway, the conversation then quickly returned to the purpose of the meeting.
So, what is Yiddish and how did it come about? Yiddish is the language peculiar to Ashkenazic Jews. Ashkenaz is an ancient Hebrew word for the German speaking lands of North-Central Europe. Jews migrated to Ashkenaz, following the conquering Roman armies, to make a living in that undeveloped barbaric land. The Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity around the year 300 CE making it the predominant religion of the Roman Empire. Over time, the Jews in Ashkenaz took on German as the language with which they communicated with their neighbors, but they peppered it with Hebrew which was their language of religion, education, and culture (as Western European Christians used Latin).
During the Middle Ages until the Period of Enlightenment, Jews in each Central European town or city were confined to one street (called a ghetto) with an entrance which was locked at night but opened only during the day for business. During the early Middle Ages, Poland was an agricultural country consisting of estates owned by Polish nobility and worked by serfs. There was not much middle class. The Polish nobility looked west and saw the Germans. They looked east and saw the Russians. They feared that one day they might be squashed between those two groups. So, they came up with a two-part solution to their predicament. One part was the need for a middle class to modernize their economy. To solve that problem, they saw a ready-made unhappy middle class sitting in the German ghettos. So, they offered to take in those German Jews to a land where they could live free of ghettos with some limited self-government. The second part of the Polish nobility’s solution was to enlarge their country. To do that, they offered to make the Duke of Lithuania into the King of Poland. The Duke of Lithuania had acquired Ukraine and Belarus by that time. Adding Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus made Poland a large country. So medieval German peppered with Hebrew became the language of the Jews living in the Polish lands.