Why didn't Yiddish become Israel's Official Language?

Hebrew, extinct for over a thousand years, was brought back as the living language of Israel. But Yiddish had been a language of a majority of the world's Jews for centuries. what happened?

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#israel #yiddish #language

[SamAronow]

It’s worth noting that the vast majority of native Yiddish-speakers today are in the US, in Haredi communities mostly in New York.

[SamAronow]

Excellent work! Too often the revival of Hebrew, and particularly Eliezer Ben-Yehuda’s contributions to the language, tend to be treated as the totality of Modern Hebrew’s origins, when it’s roots are older and more widespread than that. Of course Hebrew had continued to be spoken and evolve naturally throughout the Early Modern Period, but the main thing was that while more _people_ spoke Yiddish, people spoke Hebrew _in more places, _ which made it a better lingua franca. See American Jewish soldiers during WWII trying to chat up Moroccan Jewish women in Yiddish.

It’s worth emphasizing that Herzl was opposed to Hebrew too; he wanted German to be the Jewish national language (and took a dim view to any kind of overt Jewish culture). Despite his success as an organizer, his actual ideas were very unpopular, and the Germanist movement in Zionism was always very fringe. By contrast, most first- and second- generation Zionists saw their movement as _primarily_ a cultural effort, with independent statehood not becoming a mainstream goal until the Second World War.

[quirkygreece]

As a Christian growing up in East London after WW2 Yiddish was widely spoken among the many Jewish immigrants who were my close neighbours and it was the first foreign language I learnt. I was never fluent, but understood much and I still use Yiddish words today . . . mostly with my old friends, as younger generations don’t understand it - indeed it’s surprising to them that the language exists.
As an addition to my native English, I think it’s a colourful and vibrant extension.

[slamwall]

Because Hebrew unites all Jews, while Yiddish is exclusive to Ashkenazi Jews

[kuroazrem]

I think Yiddish was not chosen so as to not antagonize Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews who didn't speak it.

[Anti-CornLawLeague]

It’s a shame such an effort to revive Irish as Ireland’s language wasn’t made after their independence in 1922.

[epg]

Please talk about Judeo-Persian and Ladino languages

[TheAmericanPrometheus]

Basically because Yiddish was a language largely spoken by European Jews, and a significant portion of Israel's Jewish population is Mizrahi (Middle Eastern).

[petrskupa]

I always thought that Hebrew was self explanatory choice. (choosing ancestral language, which survived due to religious texts just seems too tempting) What was rather new was, in contrast, how strong position Yiddish had. It’s history and division, interesting.

[yakov]

There were Hebrew schools in Jerusalem and Safed even in 1500s(and Jewish pilgrims spoke with local Jews in Hebrew)but yea by 1920s it was inevitable, you had entire generation of Hebrew speakers by then.Yiddish will probably not "die out" completely in the our lifetime or even in coming decades(mainly because of Ultra Orthodox people I think it will even grow), but Ultra Orthodox culture in Israel is already assimilating just slower so it is probably inevitable in the end, I think in larger context though like Ladino/Juhuri and all other Jewish dialects worldwide which are now more or less extinct, Yiddish will be aswell in the end, if this is good or bad I don't know.

[LanceAbrams]

It should be noted that prior to it's revival, in addition to religious uses, Hebrew was also used as a lingua franca between Jewish communities that spoke different languages, particularly as a trade language.

[Crabby]

Good to see Yiddish getting official support finally, it would be a terrible loss not to preserve it, but it totally made sense to chose Hebrew as the official language.

[edi]

It would have been nice to see a Yiddish sentence and its German and English counterpart...
You forgot to mention its impact on many Austrian dialects. Many Austrians use Yiddish expressions without even knowing it!

[AaronDaniels-ij]

The state of Israel was established in May 14, 1948, and not in 1949 as you state at the beginning of your video.

[theunholyburger]

One interesting thing is that Judeo-Arabic which is basically the Yiddish of Mizrachim (middle eastern jews) wasn't considered as an option for Israel language by the mostly Ashkenazi zionists.

[MalachiCo]

Hopefully Yiddish and Ladino gets preserved into the future, despite their lack of official usage. They're both such interesting languages.

[alanrosenthal]

Renaming modern Hebrew "Israeli" is as absurd as renaming modern English "American" because of how much it differs from Shakespearean English. Also, the upgrade that Hebrew needed to be a modern language was almost entirely several hundred years of vocabuary, because Hebrew, although nobody's native language, was a living language of scholarship and jurisprudence in autonomous Jewish communities right up until emancipation.

[Awakening_Sunshine]

Literally the first sentence of this is wrong. Israel was announced in 1947 and officially became independent in 1948

[TheZerech]

If one look Jewish Israeli's demographics this is inevitable. Most Israeli Jews are not Ashkenazi, but either Sephardi or Mizrahi, the descendents of Jews from Iberia and the Muslim world. Yemeni Jews especially have been in the Yishuv long before '48, alongside the Old Yishuv, that is the Jews who "never left" or returned centuries before modern zionism and their descendants.

If there was no Holocaust the proportion of Ashkenazim would be a lot higher, I suppose, but even then Hebrew is the only viable lingua franca. Despite being ""dead"" (Hebrew revival goes back centuries but got really going in the 19th century) Jews basically everywhere (Ethiopia is the major exception) knew Hebrew.

I think Yiddish was inevitably on the way out. With a choice between the two, Hebrew is certainly the choice, either for an individual to learn or for the state itself. No contest.

[yyyyyk]

Good video, but one important clarification is needed - this video makes it sound like Zionism was only the movement of Jews to the British mandate of Palestine after the first world war, while in fact Zionism started as a movement decades earlier, in the late 19th century, back when the territory was still under the rule of the Ottoman empire.