From Yiddish to English: How the bagel came to America
Over time, the English language has acquired quite a few Yiddish words, such as bagel. Some are now no longer even recognizable as such. Linguist Julia Landmann from the University of Basel has collected these terms and classified them according to their social history.
31 October 2024 | Olivia Fischer
During the Second World War, many European Jews fleeing antisemitism and persecution came to the United States. The refugees brought a lot with them to their new home: their culture, their religion, their food – and their language, Yiddish.
Dr. Julia Landmann from the Department of Languages and Literature at the University of Basel has now investigated which Yiddish words successfully made their way into the English language. A scholar of English, she has published her findings in an article in the anthology Keys to the History of English.
Landmann searched through the extensive Oxford English Dictionary for Yiddish terms and was able to locate a total of 248 words and expressions of Yiddish origin. From A for arba kanfot (a rectangular undergarment worn by religious Jews) to Z for zaftig (a word used to describe a woman with a full, round figure), there are Yiddish-English terms for every area of life.
The central role of food, religion and people
Many of the Yiddish expressions that have become established in English describe certain foods, religion, or are terms for people and their everyday life. Landmann explains: “Terms from these categories were adopted particularly often, as there were simply no words for these things in the English language before.”
In the category of food, for example, we find gefilte fish, denoting a popular cold fish dish that is eaten particularly by Ashkenazi Jews on holidays. Within the topic of religion, there is the verb daven, a Yiddish term for reciting Jewish prayers. This word has become so developed in English that it also means “to pray” in a non-Jewish context. In the category of people and everyday life, widely used terms such as shiksa (a non-Jewish woman) are joined by many humorous expressions for a fool or idiot. Examples include klutz, putz or schlump.
Many of these terms become part of the English language because they describe new things. But this is not the only reason. “Some people like to use Yiddish terms in everyday life to show their belonging to Jewish culture. For example, they use the word shul for church or synagogue, even though the English words church and synagogue exist for that,” explains Julia Landmann.
From bejgl to bagel
There are also English terms whose Yiddish origin has been completely forgotten over time. One of these is bagel. At the beginning of the 20th century, Jewish-Polish immigrants first brought the bread known as the bejgl to the United States, where, starting in New York, it became increasingly popular. By the end of the century, it had become a commercial bestseller and a popular “typically American” dish.
American tennis player Harold Solomon, who had an active career in the 1970s and 1980s, added another chapter to the history of the bagel: he gave the word a new meaning by calling a 6–0 victory in a tennis set a bagel due to the zero’s resemblance to its shape. Today, “bagel” is a common term in tennis.
Linguistic researcher Landmann is fascinated by stories such as these. She says: “What makes the interplay between Yiddish and English so interesting is its complexity. English contains many more loan words from French, for example. The number of Yiddish terms is much smaller, but the stories behind them are all the more exciting.”
Original publication
Julia Landmann
Investigating the dynamics of the lexicon. A socio-historical perspective of the borrowing of Yiddish words into English
Keys to the History of English (2024), doi: 10.1075/cilt.363
