Note 14 — II. THE JUDEO-GERMAN LANGUAGE

Witness the frequent dogmatic statements and attacks on it by the historian Grätz. These finally brought forth a rejoinder by J. Dienesohn in the Jüd. Volksblatt, Vol. VIII. (Beilage), pp. 33-43, entitled Professor Grätz un' der jüdischer Žargon, oder Wer mit wās darf sich schāmen? and this was followed by a similar article (ibid. pp. 65-68, 129-133) from the editor of the Volksblatt, in which Grätz's dogmatism is put in no enviable light. Even Steinschneider has no love for it; although he has written so much and so well on its literature, he knows nothing of its nineteenth-century development, and nearly all his quotations of Judeo-German words that in any way differ from the German form are preposterously wrong. Karpeles, writing the history of its literature, confessedly knows nothing of the language. M. Grünbaum, in his Jüdisch-deutsche Chrestomathie and Die Jüdisch-deutsche Litteratur, displays an ignorance of the dialect which would put to shame a sophomoric newspaper reporter of a scientific lecture. What wonder, then, that D. Philipson, devoting a chapter to The Ghetto in Literature (pp. 220-255 in Old European Jewries, Philadelphia, 1894), should not even suspect the existence of an extensive and highly interesting literature of the subject in the language of the Ghetto itself! Among the few memorable exceptions among German scholars are Güdemann and Strack, who approach Judeo-German in a fair and scholarly manner. See M. Güdemann, Quellenschriften zur Geschichte des Unterrichts und der Erziehung bei den deutschen Juden, etc., Berlin, 1891, pp. xxii, xxiii, and, by the same author, Geschichte des Erziehungswesens und der Cultur der Juden in Frankreich und Deutschland, Vol. I. note iii. pp. 273-287, and Vol. III. note vii. pp. 280-297. Still fewer are those who have subjected Judeo-German to a thorough philological investigation. All efforts in that direction will be found catalogued by A. Landau, Bibliographie des Jüdisch-deutschen, in Deutsche Mundarten, Zeitschrift für Bearbeitung des mundartlichen Materials, herausgegeben von Dr. Johann Willibald Nagl, Vienna, 1896, Heft II. pp. 126-132. To those mentioned by him must be added A. Schulmann's Die Geschichte vun der Žargon-literatur, in Jüdisches Volksblatt, Vol. II. pp. 115-134, which is very rich in data, and A. Landau's Das Deminutivum der galizisch-jüdischen Mundart, Ein Kapitel aus der jüdischen Grammatik, in Deutsche Mundarten, Vol. I. pp. 46-58. This is, outside of Şaineanu's work (mentioned in Landau's Bibliographie), the best grammatical disquisition on Judeo-German that has so far appeared.