[gothic-l] Re: Jiddish

Sat Feb 14 15:27:39 UTC 2015

I understand where the confusion of Tore comes from. Tore is right about the fact that there were indeed Khazars which were jewish, but this was a big minority. There is a very well series at YouTube in which Dr. Abramson explains jewish history and he also covers the Khazar theory (for anyone interested, take a look here: The Jewish Kingdom of Khazaria (Essential Lectures in Jewish History) Dr. Henry Abramson http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b4Vn_-jYWA 

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b4Vn_-jYWA 

 The Jewish Kingdom of Khazaria (Essential Lecture... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b4Vn_-jYWA This video briefly discusses the conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in the 8th century, and is part of HIS 155: History of the Jewish People I by Dr. H...

 View on www.youtube.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b4Vn_-jYWA 
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). In fact, when the Khazar kingdom was threatened by christianity in the west and islam in the south, they had to make a decision and they thought that they were safe by choosing judaism, as it was an abrahamic religion and they wouldn't be attacked by christians for being muslim or by muslims for being christians. So, that is why the Khazar kingdom gets associated with judaism. In fact, only among the elite there were real jews and Hebrew-speaking people (and people converted to the jewish religion), there isn't real evidence that the general population were really jewish like people are jewish nowadays or spoke Hebrew, most likely, they continued speaking their Turkic language and although it might be possible that some jewish rituals were practiced by the population, they stayed Turkic.  

 There are theories that the Khazars, when their kingdom was destroyed, went to the west, but the problems with the theory that Yiddish is in fact Turkic due to the Khazar influence is that the language is too Germanic to be Turkic and it should have at least some Turkic elements, also, like can be seen with Anglo-Saxon and modern English maintaining a Germanic core vocabulary, it is essential that a Turkic core is maintained in order to prove that Yiddish is in it's origin a Turkic language, the problem is that even if this was the case, that wouldn't prove them to be Khazars, they could also have been from another Turkic tribe, from, if those already existed back then, Kyrgyz people or Turkmens for example. Secondly, there have to be words of Turkic origin but those can't really be found. As for the Goths, there are indeed a few words in Yiddish which were possibly (maybe by trade with Visigoths in western Europe?) taken over, there is a blog about a possible connection between Yiddish and Gothic and although it's surprising how similar skohsl in Gothic and skotsl in Yiddish are, it is possible that the word was loaned from Gothic to Slavic to Yiddish too, instead of a direct borrowing. 

 Anyway, only the elite of the Khazars were really jewish and it's amazing how there is a letter, which you can see in the video, from the Khazar kingdom which is written in Hebrew, but the general population wouldn't have been able to understand that letter.

 I recommend Torre, if he knows Germanic languages well and to take a look at Yiddish, when he has found a core vocabulary of Turkic or a lot of Gothic words, he can come here again to talk, but if he hasn't found that, I recommend him to look at the facts and of course, speculation can always turn out to be true in the end, but please, don't claim that speculations are either nonsense or the absolute truth, always keep speculation in your mind as possibilities.

 Roel

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