[gothic-l] Gothic is not like Yiddish, Goths did not adopt Judaism

[kbrook at PI.PAIR.COM]

Leon Labkovsky has been making some incorrect statements about the
origins of Yiddish and of East European Jews.  For those of you who
wish to learn the truth about these subjects, feel free to read my
book "The Jews of Khazaria" (1st edition, Jason Aronson Inc., 1999)
or visit www.khazaria.com on the Web.  In brief, as demonstrated by
Hirsh Dovid Katz, Robert King, Alice Faber, Matthias Mieses, and
other gifted linguists, Yiddish derives from a Bavarian dialect of
German and not from Gothic.  This means that the East European Jews
descend in part from German Jews who once lived in Central Europe
(Bavaria, Austria, Bohemia) and before that had been part of the
Roman Empire.  While in Europe, these German Jews intermarried with
European women and subsequently moved eastward into Poland and
Hungary.  There were several tens of thousands of these German Jews.
Meanwhile, in what are now Ukraine and Russia there lived Jews with
roots in Babylonia, Byzantium, and Persia, who had intermarried with
Khazarian Jews, and these Jews became known as the "Canaanite-
speaking" Jews because their language was a form of Slavic.  The
Christian Goths are not the slightest bit involved in this story.
The Goths never intermarried with the Khazars to any significant
extent, and Goths never became Jewish, but the Khazars DID intermarry
with Israelites.  The number of Khazarian Jews may have approximated
that of the German Jews, meaning around 20000 to 30000.  The merging
of Yiddish-speaking Bavarian Jews with Slavic-speaking Khazarian Jews
led to the formation of the modern Ashkenazic Jewish populations.

Alfred Posselt of Austria gathered together many Yiddish and German
dialect words to prove that Yiddish is closer to Viennese/Eastern
German dialects rather than the standard northern and western German
varieties.  Here are excerpts from his chart on pages 92-93 in his
unusual 1982 German book on Khazars:

Jiddisch              Osterr. Dialekt          Hochdeutsch
--------              ---------------          -----------
alz                   als                      alles
gich                  gach                     ja"h
umetum                umadum                   rundherum
Beigl                 Beigl                    Kipferl
hoben                 hoben                    haben
manen                 manen                    meinen
kummen                kummen                   kommen
Tog                   Tog                      tag
vargessen             vargessen                vergessen

It is obvious from the above examples that the first two columns are
nearly identical while the third column (Hochdeutsch, which means
Standard High German) is distinctive.

Jiddisch              Weinerisch               Hochdeutsch
--------              ----------               -----------
Kafar                 Kaff                     Dorf
Gesindel              Gesindel                 Familie
Zores                 Zorres                   Streit
Mischpoche            Mischpoche               Clique
Koran                 Krone                    Strahlen
plejderen             pledern                  schnell laufen
darchenen             dachinieren              faulenzen

And there are lots more examples both in Posselt's book and in
research by the linguists I mentioned above.

And if you compare Yiddish with the traces of Gothic that survive,
you will find hardly any similarity at all.  Yiddish came from Jews
who lived in areas like Austria, Bavaria, and Bohemia.

Feel free to discuss.


You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>.

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/