Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v4.djvu/187

Yiddish Journalism 599 dwell only on those who have settled permanently in the United States and whose works reflect the life of the Jewish immigrants. Judseo-German, now known as Yiddish, branched out from the German during the latter half of the sixteenth century when German Jews settled in compact masses in the vSlavic countries. The vernacular developed by the Jews there gradually departed from the original dialect and became distinct from it, and to- day idiomatic Yiddish bears only a remote resemblance to the German. Many Hebrew words ingrained in the body of Yiddish, together with numerous words and expressions borrowed from contiguous Slavic vernaculars and thoroughly assimilated, make Yiddish a distinct linguistic unit. The Yiddish vernacular in America, retaining to a degree the char- acteristics of its several European sub-dialects, has also ab- sorbed a great number of English words and turns of speech, which either have no Yiddish equivalents common to all dia- lects or represent conceptions that are new to .the immigrant. Literary Yiddish in America is, however, relatively free from these Anglicisms. Yiddish literature in the United States is less than half a century old. The first Yiddish periodical in America, the Yiddische Neues, was founded in New York in 1 87 1 . But it was a decade or so later before Yiddish received a real impetus in this country from the arrival of large numbers of Russian Jews fleeing the wave of persecutions and massacres at home. The intellectual immigrants who came with the masses brought with them the radical doctrines and ideals of socialism, anarch- ism, and other political and social tendencies current among the enlightened Russian and Jewish classes of the time. The vernacular of the immigrants was the only medium of appeal which would reach them, and although many of the educated American Jewish pioneers were averse to the use of Yiddish as a literary instrument they resorted to it as a matter of expediency. The growth of Yiddish literature in this country has been com- mensurable and co-extensive with the growth of Jewish immi- gration to the New World. The widening out of the spiritual interests of the older immigrants as well as the ever-increasing number of the new immigrants naturally created a larger and more diversified demand for printed Yiddish. The undifferen-