What sort of Yiddish did Jews in Hungary speak?
This article originally appeared in Yiddish here.
When you hear Yiddish on the streets of Brooklyn these days, the likelihood is it’s Hungarian Yiddish. Even Galician, Polish, and Lithuanian Hasidim use the Hungarian dialect today. One reason could be that the Hungarian-descended Satmar Hasidim have been more successful at maintaining Yiddish as its daily vernacular. Most Hungarian-Hasidic women, for example, speak Yiddish among themselves, while women from other Hasidic groups tend to speak English.
But calling these Hasidim “Hungarian” doesn’t mean that they immigrated from present-day Hungary, a relatively small country (although it’s four times the size of Israel). The “Jewish” geography of Hungary is the once vast Hungarian kingdom that existed before World War I, which included large expanses of today’s Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Croatia and Austria. In this respect, when speaking of the pre-World War I Jewish community in Hungary, you can compare it with “Jewish Lithuania”, which is exponentially larger than the contemporary State of Lithuania, and also includes Belarus, large parts of Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, and Poland. “Jewish Lithuania” covers mostly the Grand Duchy of Lithuania from the Middle Ages, one of the largest nations in European history.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed and new nations emerged from former Hungarian territories, many ethnic Hungarians remained on the other side of the new borders, while Jews in the territory of modern Romania, Ukraine, and Slovakia continued living in a culturally Hungarian environment, which includes the historical centers of “Hungarian” Hasidism: Satmar and Klausenburg are both cities in present-day Romania (Satu Mare and Cluj-Napoca, respectively); Munkacs (Mukachevko) is in Ukraine; and Nyitra (Nitra) is in Slovakia.
There is a historical irony in the fact that Hungarian Hasidim speak more Yiddish today than other groups: in the old country, Hungarian Jews more often spoke Hungarian than Yiddish, and in western Hungary some even spoke German, or a mix of German and Yiddish. Among the generation of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants that arrived in the United States after World War II, and helped established the current Hasidic dynasties, many spoke Yiddish with a strong Hungarian accent. On the streets of Williamsburg many Jews of the older generation continued to speak Hungarian.
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