Why There May Have Been Contacts between Slovenes and Jews before 1000 A.D.

The traditional view of Jewish settlement history in Europe posits migrations from the Mediterranean region through northern France and Italy into Bavaria and the Rhineland by the end of the first millennium. The Judaized dialects of German (known as Yiddish) were allegedly created when these Romance-speaking Jews switched toregional German dialects. Yiddish has traditionally been defined asa Judaized form of High German dialects. This paper will demonstrate how linguistic evidence allows us to postulate an innovative theory about the migration of Jews (both Palestinian emigres and indigenous European converts) – namely, through the Balkans into the bilingual Sorbo-German lands by the late first millennium A.D. In this view, Yiddish was created by Balkan Jewish emigres speaking one or more Balkan languages: Romance, Greek and/or South Slavic. Contrary to the common view, Yiddish is best seen as a dialect of Sorbian which eventually became relexified to Middle High German (thus resulting in a Slavic language with an overwhelming German vocabulary). The article specifically emphasizes evidence from the Slovene territory.