Yiddish Wasn’t Widely Spoken Until the 1800s
In “A Real Mensch” (July 28), Elizabeth Mehren paraphrases Aaron Lansky as saying “for the last 1,000 years, 80% of the world’s Jews spoke Yiddish.” This is a fanciful and fallacious figure causing one to wonder where Lansky finds his facts.
According to a study by Arthur Ruppin, quoted in Daniel J. Elazar’s book “The Other Jews: The Sephardim Today” (Basic Books), in the 11th century the Jews of Spain, or Sephardim, represented 94% of world Jewry; they assuredly did not speak Yiddish. By 1300, Sephardim still represented 85% of an estimated 2 million Jews in the world.
The demographics slowly changed as a result of the Spanish Inquisition and expulsion. The Ashkenazi (Yiddish speaking) population did not pass the 50% mark until the early 1700s. As it happens, Yiddish became the largest Jewish language only by the early 1800s.
Nonetheless, we applaud Aaron Lansky’s success in safeguarding Yiddish culture through the National Yiddish Book Center, and we hope to see similar efforts to save the Sephardic languages of Ladino and Judeo-Arabic, currently threatened with extinction.
JORDAN ELGRABY,
Founder
National Assn. of Sephardic
Artists, Writers and Intellectuals
Los Angeles)
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