In this comprehensive study Paul Wexler demonstrates that Yiddish is a Slavic language largely
relexified to genuine and artificial German and Hebrew as a cryptic language of trade in the
Khazar Empire in the 9-10th centuries for the use of multilingual Jewish merchants who enjoyed
special privileges on the Afro-Eurasian Silk Roads until the 13th century. Other Judaized trade
languages (Turkic Chinese Arabic) were also coined at this time in the Khazar and Iranian
Empires. In both empires Yiddish absorbed over 5 000 overt influ-ences mainly from Judaized
Persian and secondarily from Judaized Turkic and Chinese. Yiddish mainly has Hebraisms
wherever Persian employs Arabisms (but has almost no overt Arabisms) and preserves Asianisms
with greater accuracy and volume than most Iranianized non-Jewish target languages. Until c.
1000 almost all Jews in the world resided in the Iranian Empire and were mainly of Iranian and
only partly of Palestinian Judaean descent. Conversion to Judaism was common among Iranians
Turks Slavs and Berbers (because of a desire to participate in the lucrative Silk Road trade
dominated by Jews and to escape the status of slavery often imposed on them) conversion led
to the rise of new diverse Jewish ethnicities and forms of Judaism. The book also examines the
Iranianization of other cryptic Jewish trade languages of Slavic and German and the common
Hebrew-like lexicon used by all Jewish merchants to overcome varied language backgrounds.
Yiddish can help to reconstruct the Iranian speech of mixed Irano-Slavic confederations (such
as the Galician White Croats).
