Aaron Kuperman wrote:
> Among secular Jews, Yiddish would die out, as it did in OTL. It wasn't
> really killed by the holocaust, but rather by linguistic assimilation.
No
> one was setting up colleges using Yiddish in the pre-war years. Among
> secular Jews, English would still end up as the "lingua franca" as in
OTL,
> perhaps with competition from German (especially if a philosemitic
Germany
> won the war).
I have to disagree here. The interwar period saw considerable
development of Yiddish speaking secular culture in eastern Europe, and
an effort toward Jewish/Yiddish cultural autonomy. More than that,
however, is the _mass_ of Yiddish. It's easy for a detached immigrant
minority to lose its hold on its linguistic roots, it's much harder if
you're still embedded in a culture where that language plays a major
role.
A Jewish child in Poland would be likely to grow up in a Yiddish
speaking household, play on the streets with other Yiddish speaking
kids, shop at Yiddish speaking stores, read Yiddish books, watch Yiddish
plays and movies, and quite possibly listen to Yiddish radio, watch
Yiddish TV, and even go to a Yiddish language school. He'll still
learn Polish, of course, but it would take a determined effort to lose
his Yiddish. Not only would Yiddish give him access to a number of
cultural and financial op****tunities, it would also let him talk to
his fellow Jews without worrying about what the goyim think, as well
as talk to Jews from other countries, who won't speak Polish.
You might point out that Yiddish was largely abandoned by German Jews,
but this is a vastly different situation. For one thing, the German
Jewish population was vastly smaller (less than 1%, vs. 10% of the
Polish population). For another, Yiddish is essentially a dialect of
German. For German Jews, abandoning Yiddish was less a matter of
giving up the language of their community, than of replacing the
vulgar street argot of their parents' generation with the upper-middle
class accent of their new neighbors.
Even Yiddish in America will probably be stronger in this TL. Compare
it to Italian: while many Italian-Americans are now monolingual, there
are still a good number of third+ generation Italian Americans who still
speak the old language: they have relatives in Italy, go back there on
vacation, etc. Without the Holocaust, American Jews are likely to
maintain similar connections with the old country.
Old Toby
Least Known Dog on the Net
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