(Author: Gabriel A. Sivan, Vol. 63, #3, Chanukah 2008)
Like many others, no doubt, I enjoyed reading Maurice Skikne’s article on ‘Yiddish South Africanisms’ in your Rosh Hashanah 2008 issue.1 Most of the words and expressions that he quotes are definitely peculiar to South Africa, but almost a dozen are not. Before going into this subject in greater detail, however, some preliminary remarks would be in order.
Older members of the Jewish community (Liverpool) where I grew up spoke the North-Eastern ‘Litvishe’ Yiddish which they had brought with them from Bialystok, Shishlevits (Swyslocz) and Slonim – or, in the case of my paternal grandparents, from Zhetel (Dyatlovo) and Sokolka. Though raised in an English-speaking home, my younger brother and I soon grasped the meaning of Yiddish code words (e.g., shlissel) that parents did not wish their children to understand.
While studying Romance philology as part of my degree course in Modern Languages at Oxford way back in the 1950s, I came across a handful of Old French words that eventually provided Yiddish with terms like davnen, kreplach and tsholent. They may well have been familiar to Rashi, the ‘Prince of Commentators’, long before Jews expelled from France adopted Middle High German as their vernacular. This knowledge helped to spark my interest in our Mamme-loshen, an interest that has deepened in recent years.
Let us now turn to some of the words included in Maurice Skikne’s glossary. I suspect that kalakotke derives either from the Russian noun kolokol ‘(bell’) or from the verb klokotat (‘to gurgle’). Klutche is identical with the Russian klacha (‘a nag’), while kormenen is likewise of Russian origin, stemming from kormit (‘to feed’). The shape of a matzah-meal fritter would account for its presumably Russian name, latka, meaning ‘patch’. Now for the derivation of moss (properly mo’es in Yiddish): far from being unknown, it comes from the Hebrew ma’ot (‘money’ or ‘small change’), as used in the term me’ot chittim (‘wheat money’), referring to the cash needy folk receive for their Passover provisions, especially matzot. Putzeg derives, of course, from the German [sie] putzt sich (‘she dresses herself up’) while in Israel today, puch (from the Polish word meaning ‘duvet’) is used for the filling of a quilt.
One could add several more expressions to the list given by Mr. Skikne. Among those that I learned as a youth are Oyf dem ganev brent dos hittel (‘if the cap fits, wear it’), Hob ikh a zorg (‘I couldn’t care less’), Man dost oyf zayn arbet (‘His effort is worthless’) and the equally derisive quip, Nikolai ht gegangen in dr’erd fun dos. One proverbial expression that I found years ago in an old compendium (and which I won’t attempt to translate) crudely reflects the Jew’s defiance of Church-inspired antisemitism in Tsarist Russia: Az man pisht oyf a tzelem peygert a galokh.
There are several (mostly derogatory) terms for a non-Jew in Yiddish. Skikne lists two of them, shikse and yok, with the peculiarly South African chatez added for good measure. Other such terms, which (though still current in Britain) he does not mention, are beytz, sheygetz and yappe. Why did these pejorative words replace the neutral Hebrew – and Yiddish – term goy (‘Gentile’), and where did they originate? There is no straightforward explanation, but East European Jews lived in a mainly hostile environment where they were subjected to verbal as well as physical abuse. Deprived of civil rights in Tsarist Russia, they fell back on what might be called linguistic self-defence.
Only the origin of sheygetz, the masculine form of shikse, is indisputable. It derives from the Hebrew word sheketz, a ‘detestable thing’, on the basis of Deuteronomy 7:26. Shiktzah, its feminine equivalent, was modified to shikse in Yiddish, signifying ‘a prohibited [i.e., non-Jewish] girl’. Tracing the origin of beytz (feminine beytzke) is more problematic. Some years ago, it gave rise to an interesting correspondence in the Jerusalem Post. Meir Ronnen had stated, in a book review, that although he grew up among Yiddish-speaking Jews in Australia, his Liverpool-born mother was the only person he ever heard using the term beytzke. His appeal for more information brought a letter from Aryeh Newman, a veteran British oleh and native of Leeds, who suggested that beytz might derive from the Hebrew word betzah (‘egg’), which – when translated into Yiddish as ayer – came to denote an Irishman [Ayerland = Ireland. See Gwynne Schrire’s review of Jewish Ireland in the Age of Joyce: A Socio-Economic History, in the 2007 Rosh Hashanah issue – ed.]. What Ronnen and Newman had in common was a ‘Litvak” ancestry, which would explain their acquaintance with one rather unusual Yiddish term and probably dispose of Newman’s ‘Ayerish’ theory.
Maurice Skikne associates the word yok with an ‘English non-Jew’, but then derives it from ‘the Yiddish Yakke – jacket’. This seems very far-fetched to me. After all, Jacke is a German term and German Jews seeking refuge in Mandatory Palestine during the 1930s were first dubbed yekkes because they insisted on wearing a jacket and tie even in hot weather. Yok or yeykel originally meant ‘idiot’ or ‘blockhead’ and the resemblance to our English word yokel may be sheer coincidence. True, the ‘local yokel’ was a gullible country bumpkin, but this English term first denoted a species of woodpecker!
There were clearly social gradations, from goy to beytz in descending order. A goy might be anyone from a university professor to one’s business partner; a yok had had perhaps acquired a secondary education and his better half, the yeykelte, might be a saleswoman or just a housewife. Sheyygetz was reserved for a less educated, working-class man whose daughter (the shikse) was paid to do the housework or run messages. Beytzimer were the lowest of the low; their children were street urchins who often caused trouble.
Yosef Guri, whom I have known for many years and who still lives in our Jerusalem neighbourhood, has drawn my attention to some curious linguistic discrepancies. While most of these Yiddish terms exist in both genders (goy and goye or goyte, beytz and beytzke, sheygetz and shikse, yok and yeykelte), only some have a plural form (goyim, beytzimer, shgotzim). Yok, for example, does not. Yappi, equivalent to beytz, is a term I only heard when visiting relatives in Leeds. Dr. Guri maintains that it derives from the Germanic type of Yiddish spoken in Courland (western and southern Latvia), where some of those Yorkshire ‘Litvaks’ or their forbears originated.
Whatever their derivation may be and however they were employed, these pejorative terms have lost their sting. Nowadays, in fact, a non-observant Jew may be called a goy or a shikse, while any cheeky young devil may be described as a sheygetz. If more Jews outside the yeshivah world make Yiddish their second language, won’t new epithets be invented?
Gabriel Sivan is a regular contributor and long serving member of the editorial board of Jewish Affairs. He is associated with the World Jewish Bible Centre in Jerusalem.
