The story of a language is inseperable from the story of the people who speak it. The Yiddish language reflects the greatness and the glory of the Jewish experience as well as the blood-soaked, the tear-drenched and tragic. The Yiddish-speaking nation that enriched European civilization for over a thousand years was annihilated under the unprecedented inhuman brutality of the Holocaust, launched by the Germans with the aim of annihilating the world's Jewish population. With

The extent of these Jewish languages varied with time and migrations of populations. For more than a millenium, from about 500 B.C.E. to around 650 of the Christian Era, Jewish Aramaic was the language of the overwhelming majority of the Jewish People. Aramaic was the language that dominated the lands of the Fertile Crescent, including all of Babylonia, (Iraq), Syria and Israel. The Jews of Persia (Iran) and Egypt also spoke Jewish Aramaic in addition to the local vernacu

A Jewish Language, essentially, a Jewish dialect of the local language spoken by the non-Jewish inhabitants of that land developed as a result of two significant conditions. One is the separation of the Jewish community from the general population, either by compulsion or by choice. The other is the religious distinction between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors. Separation of the Jews from the non-Jewish inhabitants of the same polity by compulsion is, of course, a c

Introduction While each nation has its own distinctive characteristics which set it apart from others, the Jewish People is unique in many ways which are unlike those of all others, and Jewish History has features which are so distinctive that, in the words of the biblical poet, "Here is a people which dwells apart and cannot be numbered among the nations. " One of these features is the fact that, for most of our historical experience we have been a diaspora nation. Beginnin

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