literature of the last fifty years.

All languages are subject to a continuous change, not only from within, through natural growth and decay, but also from without, through the influence of foreign languages as carriers of new ideas. The languages of Europe, one and all, owe their Latin elements to the universality of the Roman dominion, and, later, of the Catholic Church. With the Renaissance, and lately through the sciences, much Greek has been added to their vocabularies. When two nations have come into a close intellectual contact, the result has always been a mixture of languages. In the case of English, the original Germanic tongue has become almost unrecognizable under the heavy burden of foreign words. But more interesting than these cases, and more resembling the formation of the Judeo-German, are those non-Semitic languages that have come under the sway of Mohammedanism. Their religious literature being always written in the Arabic of the Koran, they were continually, for a long period of centuries, brought under the same influences, and these have caused them to borrow, not only many words, but even whole turns and sentences, from their religious lore. The Arabic has frequently become completely transformed under the pronunciation and grammatical treatment of the borrowing language, but nevertheless a thorough knowledge of such tongues as Turkish and Persian is not possible without a fair understanding of Arabic. The case is still more interesting with Hindustani, spoken by more than one hundred millions of people, where more than five-eighths of the language is not of Indian origin, but Persian and Arabic. With these preliminary facts it will not be difficult to see what has taken place in Judeo-German.

Previous to the sixteenth century the Jews in Germany spoke the dialects of their immediate surroundings; there is no evidence to prove any introduction of Hebrew words at that early period, although it must be supposed that words relating purely to the Mosaic ritual may have found their way into the spoken language even then. The sixteenth century finds a large number of German Jews resident in Bohemia, Poland, and Lithuania. As is frequently the case with immigrants, the Jews in those distant countries developed a greater intellectual activity than their brethren at home, and this is indicated by the prominence of the printing offices at Prague and Cracow, and the large number of natives of those countries who figure as authors of Judeo-German works up to the nineteenth century. But torn away from a vivifying intercourse with their mother-country, their vocabulary could not be increased from the living source of the language alone, for their interests began to diverge. Religious instruction being given entirely in Hebrew, it was natural for them to make use of all such Hebrew words as they thus became familiar with. Their close study of the Talmud furnished them from that source with a large number of words of argumentation, while the native Slavic languages naturally added their mite toward making the Judeo-German more and more unlike the mother-tongue. Since books printed in Bohemia were equally current in Poland, and vice versa, and Jews perused a great number of books, there was always a lively interchange of thoughts going on in these countries, causing some Bohemian words to migrate to Poland, and Polish words back to Bohemia. These books printed in Slavic countries were received with open hands also in Germany, and their preponderance over similar books at home was so great that the foreign corruption affected the spoken language of the German Jews, and they accepted also a number of Slavic words together with the Semitic infection. This was still further aided by the many Polish teachers who, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were almost the only instructors of Hebrew in Germany.[15]

We have, then, here an analogous case to the formation of Osmanli out of the Turkish, and Modern Persian out of the Old by means of the Arabic, and if the word Jargon is used to describe the condition of Judeo-German in the past three centuries, then Gibberish would be the only word that would fit as a designation of the corresponding compounds of the beautiful languages of Turkey, Persia, and India. A Jargon is the chaotic state of a speech-mixture at the moment when the foreign elements first enter into it. That mixture can never be entirely arbitrary, for it is subject to the spirit of one fundamental language which does not lose its identity. All the Romance elements in English have not stifled its Germanic basis, and Hindustani is neither Persian nor Arabic, in spite of the overwhelming foreign element in it, but an Indian language. Similarly Judeo-German has remained essentially a German dialect group.

Had the Judeo-German had for its basis some dialect which widely differs from the literary norm, such as Low German or Swiss, it would have long ago been claimed as a precious survival by German philologists. But it happens to follow so closely the structure of High German that its deviations have struck the superficial observer as a kind of careless corruption of the German. A closer scrutiny, however, convinces one that in its many dialectic variations it closely follows the High German dialects of the Middle Rhine with Frankfurt for its centre. There is not a peculiarity in its grammatical forms, in the changes of its vocalism, for which exact parallels are not found within a small radius of the old imperial city, the great centre of Jewish learning and life in the Middle Ages. No doubt, the emigration into Russia came mainly from the region of the Rhine. At any rate those who arrived from there brought with them traditions which were laid as the foundation of their written literature, whose influence has been very great on the Jews of the later Middle Ages. While men received their religious literature directly through the Hebrew, women could get their ethical instruction only by means of Judeo-German books. No house was without them, and through them a certain contact was kept up with the literary German towards which the authors have never ceased to lean. In the meanwhile the language could not remain uniform over the wide extent of the Slavic countries, and many distinct groups have developed there. The various subdialects of Poland differ considerably from the group which includes the northwest of Russia, while they resemble somewhat more closely the southern variety. But nothing of that appears in the printed literature previous to the beginning of this century. There a great uniformity prevails, and by giving the Hebrew vowels, or the consonants that are used as such, the values that they have in the mouths of German Jews, we obtain, in fact, what appears to be an apocopated, corrupted form of literary German. The spelling has remained more or less traditional, and though it becomes finally phonetic, it seems to ascribe to the vowels the values nearest to those of the mother-language and current in certain varieties of the Lithuanian group. From this it may be assumed that the Polish and southern Russian varieties have developed from the Lithuanian, which probably bears some relation to the historical migrations into those parts of the quondam Polish kingdom, and this is made the more plausible from the fact that the vowel changes are frequently in exact correspondence with the changes in the White Russian, Polish, and Little Russian. Such a phenomenon of parallelism is found also in other languages, and in our case may be explained by the unconscious changes of the Germanic vowels simultaneously with