Geneticists called Iran the birthplace of Yiddish
April 21, 2016
A comparison of the DNA of several hundred people and the genetic "GPS" system helped scientists determine that Yiddish - the language of Ashkenazi Jews - was born on the territory of modern Iran, and not in Germany, as previously believed, according to an article published in the journal Genome Biology and Evolution.
"Language, geography and genetics are closely intertwined. Using the genetic "GPS" to analyze the DNA of Yiddish speakers and other people, we managed to find the place where this adverb was born more than 1,000 years ago - to reveal what linguists have been arguing about for several decades," RIA Novosti reports the statement of Eran Elhaik from the University of Sheffield (UK).
Elhaik and his colleagues developed a method of "converting" genetic data into geographical coordinates, which they called GPS. It is based on three data sources at once - differences in the structure of DNA between representatives of different peoples, characteristic features in place names in those regions where they could live or where they live, as well as details in their geography that can prevent or promote migrations and cultural isolation.
Using this technique, scientists analyzed almost four hundred genomes of Ashkenazi Jews and six hundred genomes of people of other nationalities, using genetic similarities between Jews and non-Jewish peoples to restore the path of Ashkenazi migration and the search for their homeland.
As Elhaik notes, most linguists and historians believe, based on a large number of German words, that the homeland of this Jewish people was in Europe, in Germany or near it. Other researchers believe that Ashkenazi could have appeared on the territory of Turkey, migrating towards Europe through the territories inhabited by Slavic peoples, words from whose languages can be found in Yiddish.
"Genetic" GPS shows that in fact the homeland of Yiddish is in third place - on the territory of Iran, in the northern part of the Silk Road. Here, as scientists say, mountain Jews live, a number of villages have names similar to the word "Ashkenaz".
The authors of the article have two versions of what Yiddish is - according to one of them, it is a secret trading language based on Persian and Slavic words, which helped Ashkenazi to maintain a monopoly on the Silk Road. According to the second theory, this is a purely Slavic language, many of whose words were replaced by their German counterparts, but the grammar remained the same.
"The Ashkenazi could hold a monopoly on trade on the Silk Road by inventing Yiddish, a secret language that few people could understand and even fewer could speak it, except for the Jews themselves. Our discovery is quite consistent with the theory that Yiddish was built on the basis of Persian, Slavic and Turkic words, and it explains well why there are 251 synonyms for the words "buy and "sell" in Yiddish," Elhaik continues.
As researchers suggest, Yiddish speakers "forgot" their original language after they migrated to Khazaria, and then moved to Europe when the usual trade routes were destroyed as a result of wars in Central Asia. There, Slavic words began to be gradually replaced by expressions and analogues from the German language, and Yiddish has become what it is today, scientists conclude.