Yekke

A Yekke (also Jecke, Jekke^[a]) is a humorous, mildly derogatory^[1] reference to a Jew of German-speaking origin.^[2] Its Central and Eastern European Jewish counterpart would be Ostjuden.

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Etymology

There are several suggestions on the etymology of the word, all of them being inconclusive.^[3]^[1] In the older Yiddish dictionaries the word was translated as "German", but this meaning was not preserved, neither in Yiddish, nor Hebrew.^[1] The word is productive in Yiddish and when borrowed into Hebrew it had become productive there as well, accepting Hebrew patterns of word formation. For example, in Yiddish the feminine for is yekete, feminine plural: yeketes, while in Hebrew it is yekit and yekiot, respectively.^[1]

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Demography and history

The wave of immigration to British Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s known as the Fifth Aliyah had a large proportion of Yekkes, around 25% (55,000 immigrants). Many of them settled in the vicinity of Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, leading to the nickname "Ben Yehuda Strasse". Their struggle to master Hebrew produced a dialect known as "Yekkish" (Yiddish: יעקיש, 'yekish'). The Ben Yehuda Strasse Dictionary: A Dictionary of Spoken Yekkish in the Land of Israel, published in 2012, documents this language.^[2]

A significant community escaped Frankfurt after Kristallnacht, and relocated to the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City, where they still have a synagogue, Khal Adath Jeshurun, which punctiliously adheres to the Yekkish liturgical text, rituals, and melodies.^[4]

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Notes

In German, 'Jecke' is pronounced basically in the same way as English 'Yekke'

Etymology

Demography and history

Notes

References

Further reading

External links

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