Wholesome Yiddish and Language Ideologies
A little while ago, a linguist friend of mine sent me a video of Mayim Bialik talking about Yiddish. The video has since gone viral. In it, she explains “why Yiddish has two words for penis.” Aside from the laughably low-ball (pun not intended) number of penis words in Yiddish, there were a few factual errors. But, more than the factual errors, the assumptions that underpinned the whole endeavor were a little, shall we say, unsavory. It ultimately inspired me to create a weekly series on wholesome Yiddish words. I should explain the content first, and then my qualms with the underlying assumptions.
Before I continue, Mayim Bialik, for those who don’t know, is a super-smart actress, made famous by her role on the Big Bang Theory. She holds a PhD in neuroscience, and is the new host of Jeopardy, having endured a tremendous amount of misogynist and antisemitic abuse on social media after filling Alex Trebek’s shoes. She’s also Jewish, having become Modern Orthodox after a reform upbringing, and her grandparents were Yiddish speakers from the heym (Wikipedia claims Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, but those countries’ borders and relationship to Jews are not always easily projected clearly into the past). She knows enough Yiddish to have acted in it, in a fantastic episode of the web series "YidLife Crisis.” I don’t always agree with her — especially her takes on vaccines that she later walked back — but I respect her tremendously. That’s why I was saddened when she used her enormous platform to repeat clichés about Yiddish that are common tropes (pun not intended), but that are not fully correct, and that can be harmful. She was attempting to educate, and to be self-deprecating, but her attempt at language valorization fell flat.
The video she posted sought to explain why there’s the word “schmuck” and also the word “putz” and, additionally, to inform people using them cavalierly that they’re calling people a penis. This is genuinely funny, and a great way to get people to engage with a stigmatized language. She explained that Yiddish is a “conglomerate language” (linguists use the term “fusional language” sometimes, or “contact language,” instead), and that 30 percent is Hebrew, and the rest is “German, with German grammar, and also a bunch of slavic languages.” She elaborates that that means that “sometimes we have more than one word for something like the penis.” She explains that calling someone either of those is equivalent to calling them a dick (true!) and then relates that she went to school with a gentile named Schmuckler, and that it was awkward.
So here’s the thing: that all sounds perfectly truthy, but it isn’t completely accurate. And there’s a deeper issue to tackle, once we get the facts straight. Let’s get the facts first. So, first: the origin of Yiddish words is approximately 30% Hebrew and Aramaic (sometimes “HA” as a shorthand). That “and” is doing some heavy lifting. But also, notice, I didn’t say it’s 30% HA, I said that 30% has that origin. The words themselves are not pronounced the same, sometimes mean different things than in Hebrew and Aramaic, and are more often than not subjected to Yiddish (that is, Germanic) declension and inflection. Even the parts that are all from Hebrew get combined differently in Yiddish: the plural of shabbat in Hebrew takes the feminine Hebrew plural suffix: shabbatot. The plural of its reflex in Yiddish, shabes, takes the reflex of the masculine Hebrew plural suffix: Shabosim. Second: just as it isn’t Hebrew per se, the rest isn’t German. It’s a language that is a descendant of a dialect of Middle High German, so Yiddish is about as German as French is Italiian. They’re cousins, not, you know, the same person. Yiddish does not have German grammar. A simple example to prove the point: In German, in subordinate clauses, all the verbs go at the end. In Yiddish, they do not. But there’s tons of other examples. Yiddish doesn’t decline nouns in the same way (especially not contemporary Hasidish Yiddish). Yiddish doesn’t retain a distinction between accusative and dative case marking. Yiddish has words descendant from MHG that are different than the words in German for the same concept (for instance, instead of heute for ‘today’ Yiddish has haynt, which does not have a living descendant in modern German, and historically meant ‘tonight.’ Because Judaism). Third, and most egregiously: Neither of the words she mentioned is from Hebrew. There was no reason to mention the HA component of Yiddish. Putz is neither of Hebrew nor of Germanic origin, it’s from Romance language origin, either through Judeo-romance, or through contact with Romanian. (Shmok, coincidentally, is cognate with German schmuck, meaning ‘jewel’ so that poor Schmuckler’s name just meant “jeweler.” Though note that while cognate, this does not mean that the Yiddish word originally meant “jewel” see here for more.).
But that’s not the real problem. English has way more words for penis than Yiddish. Think about it this way: English has all of the words for penis that Yiddish has, because it borrowed them all, and it has a ton of others. English borrowed putz, shmok, shmekl, shvantz, shlong, and so on, but also has penis, johnson, dick, cock, (a thought occurs — what am I doing to my search engine optimization?), sausage, kielbasa, knob, dong, pecker, and many, many others. But we tend to think of Yiddish as the language with all the dirty words that need explaining. English, by all appearances, is far more obsessed with the male organ than Yiddish could ever hope to be.
Yiddish was historically looked down on as a jargon, as broken German, as uncultured, backwards, and boorish. And it is still thought of that way by many people. Often, even, the descendants of Yiddish speakers who, whether reluctantly or enthusiastically, discarded Yiddish in the hopes that their children and their children’s children would be accepted. But Yiddish is a language with a rich, thousand year history. It’s the language of culture, literature, music, and devout religiosity. When we reduce Yiddish to words for one’s member, it does a disservice to those who lived full lives in the language, and it goes a long way toward implicitly justifying why ‘nobody’ speaks the language — it’s just a backwards relic of the old country. In reality, it’s not that people discarded Yiddish, it’s that six million native speakers were systematically murdered. We should not, even implicitly, reproduce the myth that it' was just discarded because it is in some way lacking (perhaps, lacking in culture?). There are other factors, too. Certainly, the fact that English has so many cognates may have made it seem redundant to teach the next generation Yiddish (why say “shvitz” when you can say the same word in English: sweat? What makes Yiddish truly distinct from other dialects of German is still the Hebrew and Aramaic, and if you have a Jewish education, you’ll know those words anyway). And of of course, plenty of Borsht Belt comedians got around FCC censorship by simply swapping out the English word for the Yiddish one, sometimes saying deeply offensive things, but playing off the goyish censors’ sentiment that Yiddish isn’t a real language worth worry about censoring in the first place. Hell, people even spell Yiddish as though it’s High German, dutifully adding letters to represent historical sounds that never existed in Yiddish (why are there two cs in “schmuck”?).
I have absolutely no doubt that Dr. Bialik was just having fun pointing out that both words mean “penis.” But it got me thinking about how Yiddish is portrayed. I have friends who are native speakers of Yiddish. And frankly, they almost never — maybe even never never — say those words. They study in Yiddish, shop in Yiddish, discuss religion in Yiddish, and when they sleep, they dream in Yiddish. To reduce that entire life, as is often done, to just ways to insult someone (meshugge, shlemiel), words for ‘penis’ (shvantz, shmekkie), or both (putz, schmuck), is deeply saddening to me. So I decided to launch a weekly series of wholesome Yiddish words. I’ve already got videos about naches ‘pride in the accomplishments of others,’ nafka mina ‘a practical difference,’ nign ‘a melody,’ shkoyakh ‘thank you' (with a very interesting history), zise khaloymes ‘sweet dreams,’ and more — with a focus on what makes Yiddish unique, and the history and significance of these words. Hopefully, this series leaves people wondering not “why does Yiddish have so many words for penis'“ — a question predicated on a false premise! — but “why does Yiddish have so many ways to express pride in the accomplishments of others?” Or “why does Yiddish have so many words for blessing, benediction, and study that are from Romance language roots, when it’s a Germanic language?” Or maybe, “why does Yiddish have so many words for special foods you eat one day a week?” Videos will be updated weekly. I’ve left a sample below.
Dr. B., I’m still a huge fan. If you ever want to talk Yiddish and linguistics, I’m at your service.
Happy learning, and yasher koakh.
