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Jiddisch : das Abenteuer einer Sprache

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Jiddisch : das Abenteuer einer Sprache

by Salcia Landmann

Includes Bibliographical References (pages 467-469).

Accession 9783809021445 ISBN 9783809021445 Publisher Limes-Verlag

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position_updated_at: 2026-05-05 17:12
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binding_type: Hard Back
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spine_text: Salcia Landmann JIDDISCH Das Abenteuer einer Sprache Limes

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Topics and Themes

1. **Origins & Historical Development of Yiddish**
Landmann traces how Yiddish emerged from a fusion of Middle High German, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic elements, evolving across centuries and geographies. The book examines how the language grew from medieval Jewish communities in the Rhineland and spread eastward into Poland and Russia.

The book's central argument is: a language is a living archive of a people's migrations, persecutions, and cultural negotiations.

Connect to books about: historical linguistics, Germanic language history, medieval Jewish communities, language contact and creolisation.

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2. **Language, Identity & Minority Communities**
Yiddish was the *mame-loshn* ("mother tongue") of Ashkenazi Jews for centuries — a language inseparable from an entire way of life, family structure, and communal identity. Landmann explores how a language can define and sustain a community even without a territorial homeland.

Connect to books about: sociolinguistics, minority languages, diaspora identity, linguistic nationalism, heritage language preservation.

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3. **Script, Orthography & Writing Systems**
A dedicated section addresses the Hebrew alphabet as used for Yiddish — its conventions, phonetic ambiguities, and the deep cultural meaning carried by a non-phonetic script. The book includes a practical guide to deciphering Yiddish texts in Hebrew characters.

Connect to books about: writing systems and scripts, Hebrew palaeography, literacy and reading history, comparative orthography.

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4. **Rotwelsch, Secret Languages & Underworld Argots**
One of the book's most distinctive sections covers Rotwelsch — the secret cant of German thieves, beggars, and vagabonds — and its relationship to Yiddish vocabulary. Landmann maps how words crossed between the Jewish street and the criminal underworld, and how Yiddish expressions entered mainstream German slang.

Connect to books about: argot and cant, criminal subcultures, sociolinguistics of taboo language, the history of German slang.

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5. **Yiddish Literature & Oral Tradition**
Landmann surveys Yiddish literary history from its earliest medieval texts through to the classical writers (Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, Mendele), as well as the rich oral tradition of proverbs, anecdotes, and folk humour that ran alongside written literature.

Connect to books about: Yiddish literature, Eastern European Jewish folklore, oral tradition and storytelling, comparative folk literature.

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6. **Jewish Humour as Cultural Resistance**
The book engages with the tradition of the Jewish joke (*jüdischer Witz*) — a form Sigmund Freud described as the "last weapon of the defenceless." Landmann shows how humour functioned as a coping mechanism, a mode of social critique, and a marker of in-group solidarity for a people under persistent pressure.

Connect to books about: humour theory, cultural resilience, Freud's *Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious*, the sociology of comedy.

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7. **Diaspora, Displacement & Language Endangerment**
Yiddish is also a language in mourning. The book implicitly confronts the near-total destruction of the Yiddish-speaking world through the Holocaust and emigration. Landmann documents a language and culture at the edge of survival, raising questions about what is lost when a language disappears.

Connect to books about: endangered languages, Holocaust and cultural destruction, diaspora studies, language death and revitalisation.

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8. **Language Borrowing & Cross-Cultural Influence**
Landmann examines the many Yiddish words and expressions that infiltrated High German and other European languages, showing how a marginalised language can nonetheless leave a deep imprint on dominant ones. The book includes a Yiddish lexicon documenting this cross-pollination.

Connect to books about: lexicology and etymology, loanwords in German, multilingualism, contact linguistics, cultural exchange in urban environments.

Jiddisch : das Abenteuer einer Sprache

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