Why Yiddish Was Often a Source for Thieves’ Slang in European Languages

Andrew Koss writes:

Recently, I had lunch with an anthropologist studying Soviet Jews. She mentioned the Russian phrase shakher-makher, which means shady business dealings or black-marketing, and suggested that it comes from the Hebrew word shaḥor, black, via Yiddish. I contended that this was unlikely and that it much more probably came from German Schacher, meaning haggling, particularly by Jews. (The origin of this word is a question in itself, but even if it comes from Hebrew, I can’t believe that it comes from shaḥor.) Shakher-makher could have entered Russian either via Yiddish or directly from German, courtesy of the numerous Germans present in Slavic lands. Might you be willing to settle the dispute?

Koss is correct, I believe, about shaḥor. True, shakher-makher is a good Yiddish expression, and since a makher (literally, a maker) in Yiddish, like a Macher in German, is a finagler or slick operator, the Russian meaning of “wheeling-dealing” is clearly a grammatical garbling of a prior Yiddish or German word meaning wheeler-dealer. True, too, since “black market” and its derivative of “black money” are terms relating to illegal economic activity, Hebrew shaḥor, which would become shokher in Yiddish, might be suspected of being this word.