Why There Was Never an Italian “Yiddish” (and Why There Will Never Be an American One)

A while ago, a copy of an article from a newly published book called Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective turned up in my email. Its author was the Italian linguist Maria Maddalena Colasuonno, and its title was an academic-sounding mouthful: “Modern Judeo-Italian in the Light of Italian Dialectology and Jewish Interlinguistics through Three Case Studies: Judeo Mantuan, Judeo-Venetian, and Judeo-Livornese.” I glanced at it and put it away.

This week, I picked up Colasuonno’s article again and read it through. There, amid her technical discussions of such differences between Judeo-Italian and ordinary Italian dialects as “[The] Anaptyctic Vowel,” “Fricativization of the Occlusive p,” “Absence of the Clitic Pronoun as Subject,” and “Circumfix (i.e., Bipartite) Negation,” was a little Judeo-Mantuan poem so charming that I can’t resist sharing with you.

A few words of background are called for. Mantua, Italian Mantova, is a town in southern Lombardy, about 100 kilometers southwest of Venice and a similar distance southeast of Milan—which puts it, as Colasuonno points out, well above the line, or isogloss, separating northern Italian dialects like Piedmontese and Lombard from central ones like Tuscan and Roman. The town’s Jewish population, though never large, was a thriving one until it began to depart for larger urban centers in the late 19th century, leaving barely 500 Jews in Mantua at the outbreak of World War II.