Yidbits - Fight to Save History

What could possibly be more "traditionally Jewish" than bagels-cream cheese-'n' lox? (Well, except for a certain progressive voting pattern that defies even Joe Lieberman - but we needn't go there right now.)

Turns out, though, that this "traditional" delicacy is actually a reflection (celebration?) of America's cultural diversity - traceable through a knowledge of Yiddish.

The bread part was known - and named, and eaten - in Eastern Europe. Some sources even trace it to Krakow, in Galician Poland, called kroke in Yiddish, an important Jewish cultural center. (Anything other than the "plain" variety is a much later development.)

Cream cheese and lox, however, were unknown to our Yiddish-speaking forebears prior to the Great Migration of 1881-1924. Those delicacies were first introduced to the teeming masses upon their arrival here, or shortly thereafter.

How do we know? The earliest reliable Yiddish dictionaries have definitions - though laughable - for beygl, but none for cream cheese or lox.

So much for the socio-historic part of our tale. Now, on to the linguistic:

beygl

Beygl (that's the proper transliteration into chaotic English spelling) is both a singular and plural masculine noun when it applies to the familiar "hard, doughnut-shaped roll." However, it's a singular neuter noun when it applies to a small sheet of paper, or to a small arc.

A beygele can refer to a miniature beygl or to a very small sheet of paper, or a very small arc, but it was most frequently used in colloquial Yiddish as the name for what is nowadays dubbed a "soft pretzel" (you want salt or mustard on that?).

To review:
The breakfast roll: der beygl (sing.), di beygl (pl.)
The miniature roll/soft pretzel/sheet of note-paper/small arc: dos beygele (sing.), di beygelekh (pl.)

Cream cheese is a purely American invention (1872, see Wikipedia) that was later named, in American Yiddish: shmirkez (smearing cheese). It does not appear in Alexander Harkavy's dictionaries of 1898 or 1928, first achieving recognition in Uriel Weinreich's Modern Yiddish-English/English-Yiddish Dictionary of 1968. It is a masculine (der) noun.

lox

Lox was unknown to Eastern European Jews nor to Americans of earlier immigrations until the arrival of Scandinavians, esp. Swedes. Wikipedia is misled by the American Heritage Dictionary into crediting Yiddish as the origin of the word. Salmon do not populate Eastern European waters, salt or fresh. It is telling that the English-Yiddish section of Harkavy's 1898 dictionary has no entry for "lox," but does define "salmon" as lox, with the necessary explanatory note to the Yiddish reader that it is "a sort of fish."

So: beygl (bagels, brr) from Yiddish-speaking Jews; cream cheese from a New York inventor; lox from Swedish immigrants. Put them all together and enjoy our multicultural land!

_ _ _ _ _

Have a question for the vortsman? Send him an email and ask the meaning of a favorite, or confusing, word or phrase.