INTRODUCTION
In the constellation of Jewish languages (from Judeo-Spanish, aka Ladino, and Judeo-Portuguese to Hybriya, aka Judeo-Arabic, and Judeo-Persian, and not counting biblical and Modern Hebrew), Yiddish, or Judeo-German, is unquestionably the most popular. Its development over a millennium is attested, among other things, by the variety of dictionaries it has produced, the earliest one dating back to the end of the sixteenth century. For centuries, Yiddish flourished in the Pale of Settlement, the region in Central and Eastern Europe where the Russian tsar allowed Jewish settlements, until the Holocaust, when 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, many of them Yiddish speakers. Decades before, Yiddish followed the route of immigration to Israel, the United States, Argentina, Australia, Canada, South Africa, Mexico, and elsewhere, where modern dictionaries continued to appear before and after World War II. Factoring that Yiddish is considered an “endangered” language, the conversation concentrates on the most recent lexicon, Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary.
Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath with Paul Glasser, eds., Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016; revised 2nd ed., 2021).
This conversation is excerpted from Conversations on Dictionaries: The Universe in a Book, ed. Ilan Stavans (Cambridge University Press, 2025).
Ilan Stavans : As far as know, the oldest Yiddish dictionary was a multilingual endeavor: Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Latin. It was compiled in 1592, that is, about fifty years before Glückel of Hameln—meaning Hamburg, Germany—was born. We no longer produce lexicons of such ambition. The first Yiddish-English dictionary was made in 1891 by Alexander Harkavy, who also translated Don Quixote into Yiddish. He eventually produced a Yiddish-English-Hebrew lexicon. Harkavy’s endeavor was a companion to the Yiddish-speaking immigrants from the Pale into America. I’m interested in your view as a Yiddish lexicographer. How does a dictionary come to be?
Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath: Every lexicographer could probably give you a different story of how his/her dictionary came to be. But the bottom line— di untershte shure—is that a dictionary comes into being because someone sees a need for a different kind of lexicon. Perhaps a paucity of content in existing dictionaries. Previous dictionaries may include outdated words or expressions, either linguistically, culturally, or sociologically. Or new words have come into the language—either through necessary neologisms that address new concepts, or borrowings from surrounding languages. Or a language has been mostly an oral language (e.g. oral Indigenous tongues which are in danger of vanishing), and the dictionary is intended to preserve the language in writing for future generations.
As you mentioned, the first Yiddish multilingual lexicon was published more than 400 years ago. But the first English-Yiddish dictionary, by Alexander Harkavy, wasn’t published until 1891, after the historic waves of Jewish immigration had begun from Europe to America in the later nineteenth century. Prior to those mass migrations, there really was no need for an English-Yiddish lexicon, as there was no significant community or society in which such a dictionary would play a needed role. By 1924, however, approximately 2.5 million (mostly Yiddish-speaking) Jews had entered the United States. In order to acculturate them to the new English-speaking world—where they would need to find a home, a job, perhaps learn a different trade from the one they practiced back in the “old country,” and become a productive member of society—the Harkavy dictionary was reprinted a number of times, and republished in several editions, the last one in 1928. Forty years (and a Holocaust) were to pass before a new English–Yiddish dictionary was published: Uriel Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (1968). And nearly fifty years before the next one was published. In the case of the Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary( CEYD), it was a decades-long and intergenerational effort. But we can discuss that a bit later.
Incidentally, the Yiddish language is unusual in that it is not a state language, although in 1999 it was declared an official “national minority language” in Sweden. Still, it is spoken all over the world, in many countries, and in different dialects. Standardizing the language
within the context of a dictionary, yet making it accessible to all Yiddish speakers, is no simple task. Lexicographical history has recorded the difficulties that Harkavy experienced with standardizing the gender of various nouns—which may have different genders depending on which dialect one is speaking. By the time he got to the second letter, beys, he had dispensed with indicating genderaltogether and just indicated the part of speech (e.g. “ n.”).
IS: Tell me more about that first multilingual dictionary: Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and Latin. What needs did its creation respond to? Who was behind it and who were its users? For instance, it predates the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Dictionaries that aren’t regularly updated die a slow death. Were there attempts to prolong the life of this one?
GSV*: probably don’t know much more than you do on this one. Shemot devarim (Yiddish: Shemos devorim, meaning “Names of Things,” 1542), by Elia Levita, is a thirty-two-page compendium of professional words, including names of diseases, pharmaceuticals, and technical words relating to other professions. The work is alphabetical according to the Yiddish alef-beys and translated in parallel columns into the three other languages—Hebrew, German, and Latin.
Levita, a lexicographer and writer (much better known for his authorship of the hugely popular Bove-bukh, the first Yiddish novel) published the lexicon in Isny, a small town in southeastern Germany, near modern-day Liechtenstein, where permission had been granted for Hebrew works to be printed through the press opened by Paul Fagius—a Renaissance scholar of Biblical Hebrew and, interestingly, a protestant reformer—with whom Levita worked closely in the printing press.
Who used it? Doctors, nurses, pharmacists (or the medieval equivalents of these modern titles), and other artisans or craftsmen. Perhaps it provided a window (or opened a door) into non-Yiddish-speaking circles for Jewish practitioners to wield their craft outside their own communities.
IS: The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York (originally, Yidisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) has a collection of over 100 dictionaries. The vast majority were published in the twentieth century. Exceptions include Y. Lifshits’ Rusish-Yudisher verterbukh (1880), published in Kiev, and . Dreyzin’s Russish-yudishes verter bukh (1886), released in Warsaw. What happened between 1592 and the end of the nineteenth century?
GSV: Well, there was the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), and, with it, the related rise in literacy over time that came with its impact on traditional Jewish society. People were able to read and wanted to read books.
From a purely economic point of view, the nineteenth century saw the development of more efficient printing methods and the sourcing of paper from wood pulp (where printers up until this time had used various materials, e.g. cotton rags and hemp). Paper became much cheaper, with a resulting decline in book prices, which made literature much more available and accessible to the masses. And of course, reading literature—especially for immigrants learning a new language—necessitated the creation of new, particularly bilingual, dictionaries.
IS: Alexander Harkavy (1863–1939) is an engaging figure. Born in what is today Belarus, he lived an itinerant life in Paris, New York, Montreal, and Baltimore, among other places. He wrote the first history of the Jews in Canada and rendered portions of the Masoretic versions of the Torah into English, including Genesis and Psalms. He also translated parts of Don Quixote into English, not from Spanish but, like Chaim Nakhman Bialik, from German. But he is best known for his bilingual Yiddish-English dictionary.
GSV: A multifaceted individual. As a child in Navaredok, he received a traditional education and studied several languages; later in Vilna he worked as an accountant in the Romm publishing house and took up writing poetry and essays in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. He joined a youth group, Am-Oylem, which was planning on organizing Jewish agricultural colonies in America. After arriving in America in 1882, Harkavy worked at a number of odd jobs not usually associated with Yiddish lexicographers. He was—according to his obituary in the New York Times—a “jack-of-all-trades,” who worked for two years in New York as a longshoreman, factory worker, dishwasher, and assistant in a matzo bakery. He also apparently spent time on a farm in upstate New York, milking cows. All during this time, he continued studying languages and became fluent in English. He moved to Montreal, where he taught Hebrew and published the first Yiddish newspaper in Canada (Di tsayt [The time]). Only one single issue of this paper was published; later he founded another Yiddish newspaper, in Baltimore, called Der yidisher progres, which had a slightly longer life (nine issues). Harkavy published both bilingual (English-Yiddish and Yiddish-English) dictionaries, as well as a trilingual one (Yiddish-English-Hebrew), which were hugely popular among the immigrants from Eastern Europe.
IS: These are all either bilingual or multilingual dictionaries. What about the tradition in Yiddish of monolingual lexicons? Did it get its wings clipped?
GSV: The Groyser verterbukh fun der yidisher shprakh is arguably the most famous Yiddish monolingual lexicon. There were several attempts in the early twentieth century to create a comprehensive monolingual lexicon for Yiddish. They failed for a variety of reasons (not the least of which were Stalin and Hitler). Harkavy, in addition to his bilingual dictionaries, also compiled a 50,000-word monolingual (Yiddish-Yiddish) dictionary, tentatively titled “ Yidisher folks-verterbukh,” but it remained unfinished and unpublished by the time he died in 1939. In the 1950s, the well-known Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark was commissioned by YIVO to begin work on a new comprehensive Yiddish dictionary.
After four hefty volumes of words beginning with the letter alef (a huge proportion of Yiddish words happen to start with alef), the project stalled and ended with that first letter of the alef-beys and never saw another volume past the first letter. Those four volumes, published between 1961 and 1980, contain an absolute treasure of words (as does Nahum Stutchkoff’s Der oytser fun der yidisher shprakh, the definitive Yiddish thesaurus), but the Groyser verterbukh ceased production partly due to lack of funds andavailable manpower.
There was a subsequent collaborative effort on the part of both Columbia University and Hebrew University to produce a fifth and sixth volume—which reportedly would have included English and Hebrew glosses as well, and Latin-letter transcriptions of every Yiddish entry word—but no new volumes were subsequently published. During those years, however, a devoted team of lexicographers and linguists from these two universities spent innumerable hours editing, and supplementing, the original manuscripts. This resulted in the astounding (one could even say miraculous) news this past year that the scans of the nearly complete typewritten manuscripts for volumes five (letters beys and giml) and six ( daled and hey) are now publicly available online, allowing open access to this latest treasure of the Yiddish language. (There’s also a new chamber opera based on the history and travails of Yudel Mark and the Groyser verterbukh, but that’s a story for another day.)
Regarding bilingual vs. monolingual dictionaries: I would also mention that as an itinerant wandering people, Jews were so often finding themselves in new locales, having to learn new languages. And that reality likely played a role in the publication of a much greater proportion of bilingual, rather than monolingual, dictionaries—supporting the need to learn new languages, as well as the assimilation into new cultures and societies.
IS: The Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary by Uriel Weinreich (1926–67) is, in my mind, a university endeavor, since Weinreich taught at Columbia, where he developed his concept of “interlanguage” and his studies of Yiddish. What does it mean for a dictionary to emerge from an academic context?
GSV: For one thing, it reflects the reality that Ashkenazi Jews (other than the various Hasidic communities who continue to use Yiddish as a daily language) don’t live in a Yiddish-speaking geographical area, or in an area where Yiddish is the first language. Non-Hasidic people speaking Yiddish today are likely second-, third-, or fourth-generation learners of the language. Since we don’t have an official Yiddish-speaking environment to call our own and have to continually create such spaces, the newly taught Yiddish speakers by necessity come mostly out of the academic setting.
Incidentally, one of the fundamental principles of the CEYD is that Yiddish users of the dictionary should have access to language used in all aspects of life, not just the limited fund of words utilized in the narrow academic setting. Students of Yiddish can’t really become fluent in all areas of the language when the context is purely an academic one. Weinreich seemingly attempted to address some of those issues by including, for example, a number of expressions to counter the natural tendency of language learners to use calques from their primary language. In addition, he included accent marks to indicate the appropriate stress, which is especially helpful in words such as, for example, סאַלאַ֜ט \[SALÁT\], the Yiddish word for “salad,” which is accented differently in the two respective languages.
An important note (with thanks to Alec Leyzer Burko): although Uriel Weinreich wasn’t appointed professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture at Columbia University until 1959, he had already completed a basic draft of his dictionary as early as 1949; it still needed to be edited and, of course, there were funding issues, which were eventually resolved, finally allowing for its publication in 1968.
IS: Let’s move to your Comprehensive English-Yiddish Dictionary. You come from a distinguished family of Yiddishists: your father was Romanian-born linguist Mordkhe Schaechter, who taught Yiddish at Columbia, Yeshiva University, and the Jewish Theological Seminary, was the third editor of the Yiddish magazine Afn Shvel (1957–2004) and associate editor of The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language, and your son, Arun Schaechter Viswanath, has translated the first two books of Harry Potter into Yiddish. I’m just referring totwo relatives in a galaxy of luminaries. You said dictionaries come about whensomeone sees a need for a different kind of lexicon.
GSV: My father lived and breathed Yiddish every moment of his life. An arrival in New York in 1951 as a survivor and newly minted PhD in Linguistics (University of Vienna), he immersed himself in research, writing, and teaching, with the ever-optimistic approach that Yiddish would continue to live and prosper—in the US and elsewhere—if we only will it to be so. Of course, in order to ensure this, we needed textbooks, terminologies, and dictionaries to support these efforts. The publication in 1968 of Weinreich’s Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary was a monumental achievement, a high-quality contemporary dictionary consisting of 20,000 entries.
A little-known fact for those who are familiar with Weinreich’s dictionary is that it was intended as an initial attempt, the first edition, which would be followed by improved and expanded editions. Weinreich unfortunately died in 1967, at the young age of forty, and didn’t even live to see the publication of his oeuvre. From that point onward, no one undertook to revise or expand the corpus of the dictionary, although subsequent printings continued for decades, to this very day. This was the dictionary used in most university-level Yiddish classes. At 20,000 entries (which seemed like a lot at the time), this pioneering work became increasingly more limited as time went on, yet many existing words/expressions in Yiddish just didn’t appear there. Just a few examples:
flea market (דער פֿליימאַרק/װאַנצנמאַרק) \[DER FLÉYMARK/VÁNTSNMARK\]
flip a coin (װאַרפֿן גורל) \[VARFN GOYRL\]
shake sb. down(אױספּרעסן) \[ÓYSPRESN\]
hit pay dirt (געפֿינען גאָלד ;אַרײַנפֿאַלן אין אַ שמאַלצגרוב) \[GEFÍNEN GOLD; ARÁYNFALN IN A ShMÁLTSGRUB\]
Thousands of other words were missing—for example, terms of anatomy and physiology, sex and intimacy, chemistry, art, music, sports, cuisine, medicine—many thousands of verbs and nouns and adjectives and adverbs that had long existed (you think they didn’t do these things, or speak of these things, in Eastern Europe?), but a dictionary of 20,000 simply couldn’t include them all.
Dr. Schaechter, a philologist with an interest in compiling specific terminologies, gradually became more and more intent on the need to create a new dictionary. As a field researcher for YIVO’s Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, he travelled to all five boroughs of New York City on the subway, shlepping a humongous tape recorder, his magnetofon, to interview hundreds of Jews who had lived in Eastern Europe and were now transplanted to a different country. He would interview them about their trade or profession, and record their Yiddish dialects, including the subtle differences within even one spoken dialect.
He interviewed tailors, shoemakers, farmers, teachers, professional athletes, scientists, cooks/balebustes, former soldiers in the Russian army, and many more specialists, all of whom used Yiddish in their daily work. Aside from that, he read every manner of Yiddish newspaper and magazine being published in the world—you can’t even imagine what my childhood dining-room table looked like. He voraciously read literature, memoirs, prose, poetry, essays—and that’s how he collected all those words—one by one, by transcribing them onto 300 x 500 index cards. He estimated that over the years he had amassed around a million words. Based on this accumulated treasure, he was able to publish several terminological dictionaries, among them: English-Yiddish Dictionary of Academic Terminology (1988); Pregnancy, Childbirth and Early Childhood: An English-Yiddish Dictionary (1991); and Plant Names in Yiddish (2005). He also compiled unpublished terminologies e.g. the sports terminology, compiled for use atthe weeklong Yiddish immersion retreat ( Yidish-Vokh), organized by Yugntruf—Youth for Yiddish.
Finally, at the beginning of the new millennium, he began to devote much of his time, together with several of his colleagues, to compiling all those words in a manageable format. I was tasked with and involved in data-entering the words on those index cards onto a computer, after which it took nearly two years for him to compile a first draft of the letter “A.” He then became ill, was unable to continue, and the work ground to a halt. (In the Yiddish lexicographical world it seems we have a history of not getting beyond the letter alef or “A.”)
With enthusiasm, tempered with a considerable amount of doubt (yet without truly understanding how raw the material still was and what the scope of this effort would be), we decided to carry on with the project. The undertaking was expanded to include many more additional entries that were missing from Schaechter’s corpus that should be a necessary part of any bilingual dictionary. It took sixteen years, but the 83,000-plus-word CEYD was finally published by Indiana University Press in 2016, and republished in 2021 in a second revised edition with approximately 1,000 additional words, some of them in active use in contemporary Hasidic Yiddish.
IS: What about the criteria of word selection as well as the protocols in shaping each definition?
GSV: The word selection came directly from the collections of Mordkhe Schaechter. Although thousands of additional words not found on those index cards were added during the process of expanding and editing the CEYD, the glosses were generally drawn from other existing dictionaries—either Yiddish-only (e.g. Stutchkoff Oytser, Mark’s Groyser verterbukh) or English-Yiddish (e.g. Weinreich) or Russian-Yiddish (e.g. Shapiro and Spivak, 1984). Neologisms were, for obvious reasons, handled separately and were selected based on consultations with other Yiddish language experts—as well as (Yiddish-speaking) professionals in a variety of fields, usually the sciences or technology, or even a field as timeless as music, because the editors of this dictionary have their own limited vocabularies when it comes to specialized fields.
IS: What do you make of Uriel’s father Max Weinreich’s dictum: “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Yiddish has never had either of them. It has also not had a territory, unless we count the infamous episode of Birobidzhan, the administrative locus of Jewish life created by Josef Stalin on the Trans-Siberian Railway, near the China-Russia border. Does having no homeland force a language to have a different relationship to dictionaries than their peers with an address and everything that comes with it?
GSV: That saying is attributed to Max Weinreich who, in any case, was the one who popularized it. He was being facetious, as he believed with his entire being that Yiddish was a language that stood on its own. The border between a language and a dialect—at what point a dialect is recognized as a language—is difficult to pinpoint, although that determination becomes much more concrete, so much easier to ascertain, when you attach an entire military—an inherent and necessary corpus of a political system—to the language. Weinreich’s dictum reflected the historical social and political position of Yiddish and the resulting manner in how it is viewed by other communities.
IS: Does Yiddish therefore have a different relationship to dictionaries?
GSV: No doubt. A Yiddish dictionary for the Yiddish student and even the advanced Yiddish speaker/professor/linguist is an absolute must if they are to navigate literature (in the passive use of the language) or day-to-day life (e.g. when trying to raise young children with Yiddish). In the case of an official language of a country, the residents/citizens/tourists in that country constantly absorb words spoken, heard, and written all around them, displayed on signs and billboards: old words used in new contexts, new words reflecting novel ideas and products, catchy expressions, words that have been vetted by the country’s official “language panel”—all of which easily and naturally become part of the local language.
Without a homeland, the Yiddish speaker—unless they are lucky enough to live in a Yiddish-speaking environment where everyone speaks the language fluently and grammatically correctly, without creating calques or loan translations from the surrounding environment (in itself a heavy lift)—is by default reliant on the written compilation, the “bible” of words that is the dictionary.
IS: Are you the first woman ever to publish a Yiddish dictionary?
GSV: Definitely not. First of all, should mention here that without my coeditor-in-chief, Paul (Hershl) Glasser, the CEYD would not have crossed the finish line. The same should be said as well for our associate editor, Chava Lapin. The CEYD may be the most extensive dictionary ever edited by a woman, but know of several, including the tiny English-Yiddish Liliput dictionaries edited or compiled by Dr. Zina (Paula) Horowitz, and published in Leipzig. The first edition was published around 1920 and republished a number of times through the 1950s, believe. have a copy of this 621-page, 12,000-word palm dictionary, and it’s a bit difficult—even with my reading glasses—to read the words clearly, but it’s definitely the most portable dictionary.
IS: Yet the shaping of dictionaries, or at least the leadership behind such endeavors, remains a male endeavor. Am wrong? Of course, the irony in the case of Yiddish cannot be ignored. It started as a language of women, children, and the average folk.
GSV: You’re right that the history of the making of Yiddish dictionaries (you could possibly even say the same about dictionaries in other languages) was almost exclusively male-only. But again, most of those Yiddish dictionaries were produced in the late nineteenth through the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly, there were exceptions, but women were generally not out there breaking down the walls of Yiddish academia or linguistics to find a place for themselves. The sociological reasons for this don’t need much explanation.
Read a great line in an article by the contemporary female lexicographer Kory Stamper, who said “Lexicography moves so slowly that scientists classify it as a solid.” Dictionary-making is incredibly time-consuming and may not lend itself to a decision to devote years of one’s life for a person who may have other clocks and responsibilities in mind. And is it possible that the occasional highly qualified woman was politely excluded from lexicographic circles? Not sure, but it may be something to think about…
IS: The updated edition of CEYD is laudable. But as you know, dictionaries in the twenty-first century thrive—let me be humble here: survive—online.
GSV: You are absolutely correct. And as a matter of fact, you’ll be thrilled to know that the CEYD has had an online presence since September 2021, accessible at englishyiddishdictionary.com. The online version is updated regularly, with new entries, subentries, synonyms, and expressions, and is the most current version of any English-Yiddish dictionary extant in the world today. It’s also interactive, in the sense that it allows subscribers to write us with comments regarding words or expressions that may be missing, or with other questions or remarks.
IS: As you look back at the development of Yiddish as a language, might it be said that dictionaries propelled it to achieve its own maturity?
GSV: Yes, believe so. The more people became literate and wanted access to reading material, the more they needed dictionaries to explain many of those words. And with the publication in time of additional dictionaries (some of them specialized, others more generalized), the more varied and multidimensional became the sources available to teachers and students of Yiddish, in the further learning and development of Yiddish. Dictionaries also play a certain role in standardizing the written language, which contributes partly to the maturity of a language.
IS: By the way, Gitl, do you have a sense of how many Yiddish speakers there are worldwide today? The statistics see range widely, from 200,000 to a million. ask not only out of curiosity but because, obviously, lexicography and demographics go hand in hand. The more users a language has, the vaster the need for dictionaries. Do you think otherwise?
GSV: agree, of course, that the need for dictionaries grows with the number of users of a given language. Two hundred thousand seems a bit low, though, given the prevalence of Yiddish as a daily language among many Haredim and Hasidim (usually generically referred to as “ultra-Orthodox”), together with their high birth rate (one study showed the birthrate among Haredi Jews in Israel to be seven children compared with three among non-Haredi and/or secular Jews). The numbers that’m familiar with—500,000 to a million—place most of those speakers in the Haredi communities.
IS: What, in your view, is the future of Yiddish lexicography?
GSV:’m sure you recall Isaac Bashevis Singer’s famously immortal words in his Nobel acceptance speech: “There are some who call Yiddish a dead language, but so was Hebrew called for 2,000 years…Yiddish has not yet said its last word.” The same could be said about Yiddish lexicography, and all the more so. Yiddish dictionaries of various kinds continue to be published in the twenty-first century: Yiddish bilingual dictionaries in various languages (French, English, Russian, Dutch, Hebrew, amongst others), a cultural dictionary, a dictionary of place names, dictionaries of Jewish given names and surnames, and other specialized dictionaries. Some of these dictionaries can be found online and can, therefore, be easily edited and updated “in real time,” so to speak, which renders the art of Yiddish dictionary-making significantly more manageable. No question that Yiddish lexicography will be around for quite some time.
IS: Are there any attempts, in your knowledge, within the Haredi community, to engage in dictionary-making?
GSV: Of course! have a copy of a 6,000-word Yiddish-Yiddish thesaurus targeted to the haymish (read “ultra-Orthodox”) community. The book was published back in 2009, expanded and republished in 2011, with subsequent editions as recently as 2019 that know of. There’s at least one other plan that’m aware of to produce a dictionary for the Haredi community, but don’t believe that project has made much headway. Oh, and by the way, the above-mentioned dictionary was written by a woman called “A. Roth.”
