am05@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
[...]
: On Jul 9, 12:40=A0pm, a...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Aaron Kuperman) wrote:
: > If there is no WWII (or at least, no holocaust),
: > there would have been more a higher percentage of orthodox Jews within
th=
: e
: > Jewish community (secular Jews were more likely to survive for a
: > combination of geographic, political and social reasons).
: This _could_ apply to no-WWII Poland but not to the SU. Besides,
: 'Yiddish-speaking' can mean 2 different things:
: 1. People who _know_ Yiddish but do not extensively use it in everyday
: life as the "1st language". This was, to a big degree, the case with
: the older Jewsih population of the SU (those born before or soon after
: Russian Revolution). Younger generations, in general, knew less, not
: more.
: 2. People who use it as the 1st language. The question is why would a
: number of the Orthodox predominantly Yiddish-speaking Jews in no-war
: Poland be increasing? Economically, they would be at disadvantage
: outside their communities.
If there is no WWII (or at least, no holocaust), the large
Yiddish-speaking populations in Eastern Europe, outside of the USSR,
survive intact. Absent a coercive policy of linguistic assimilation (as
per the USSR), the younger generations of the orthodox will stay
yiddish-speaking. Unlike secular Jews, whose fertility radically declines
as they become more secular and more affluent, Orthodox Jewish fertility
is both high and independent of external events (excluding something like
genocide or plague that directly reduces survival rates).
While Yiddish is a disadvantage economically in Polish, or Lithanian, or
Hungarian society (or in Israeli or in greater-Brooklyn society of OTL),
being Orthodox (looking funny, not working on Saturday, keeping kosher)
has such a greater impact that the negative impact of speaking Yiddish is
not a problem (in fact virtually all Eastern European Jews were always at
least bi-lingual in the local language, it wasn't language that held them
back but the fact they were orthodox Jews).
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