Paul Wexler (linguist)

Paul Wexler (born November 6, 1938, he, פאול וקסלר, ) is an American-born Israeli linguist, and Professor Emeritus of linguistics at Tel Aviv University. His research fields include historical linguistics, bilingualism, Slavic linguistics, creole linguistics, Romani and Jewish languages.

Wexler is known in Yiddish linguistics mainly for his hypothesis that Eastern Yiddish is ultimately derived from Judaeo-Slavic, an hypothesis that has been widely rejected by other Yiddish and Germanic linguists and geneticists.

Wexler has argued that the Yiddish language structure provides evidence that Jews had "intimate contact" with early Slavs in the German and Bohemian lands as early as the 9th century.

Biography

Wexler was born to parents of Ukrainian Jewish background and raised in the United States, earned his B.A. at Yale University in 1960, his M.A. in 1962 at Columbia University, where he studied under Uriel Weinreich and George Shevelov, and his Ph.D. at the same university in 1967. In the same year, while resident at the University of Washington, he wrote a pedagogical grammar of the Aymara language for Peace Corps volunteers. He moved to Israel in 1969. He did his basic training in the IDF in 1974.

Hypotheses on the origins of Jewish languages

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Wexler subscribed to the traditional view of Yiddish as a very Slavicized dialect of Middle High German, dating back to its formation around the 9–10th century, when Romance-speaking Jews settled in the Rhineland and Bavaria. By the early 1990s he became sceptical of this mainstream theory.

In 1990, Wexler published a book titled ''The Schizoid Nature of Modern Hebrew: A Slavic Language in Search of a Semitic Past'' in which he argued that Modern Hebrew is not a direct continuation of the Hebrew language, but rather a Slavic language. He noted that several scholars of distinction had expressed a minority view casting doubt on the semitic, as opposed to the European, character of modern Hebrew, among them specialists in Semitic languages like Gotthelf Bergsträsser and Henri Fleisch. Wexler also noted that one writer, K. Kacnelson, even suggested in 1960 that modern Hebrew was a dialect of Yiddish. He argued that the modern language spoken by Israelis was simply Yiddish relexified to Biblical Hebrew and Mishnaic Hebrew. Wexler advanced the view that Yiddish itself arose from Sorbian, and, given the strong influence of the former on Modern Hebrew, in this perspective Modern Hebrew can be considered a Slavic language.

There are 3 distinct theories regarding the origin of Yiddish, and Wexler's approach differs radically with the two main theories positing a Western Rhineland origin or a Bavarian/Czech genesis, and does so by breaking the genetic link between the Slavic countries and those Jews who lived in medieval Germany. Wexler argues that Yiddish began as two distinct languages: Judeo-French (Western Yiddish) and a Judeo- Sorbian dialect spoken in eastern Germany. The former died out while the latter formed the basis for the later Yiddish language. Eastern Yiddish, he hypothesizes, is derived from an interlanguage in which Sorbian played a germinal role. He hypothesizes this second relexification of Eastern Yiddish took place in the 15th century, at which time the descendants of the Khazars no longer spoke a Turkic language but rather a mixed Slavo-Turkic.

Wexler's hypotheses are based on analyses of numerous Jewish languages and introduce creolization as a factor in the formation of many of them. Other than linguistic analysis, he separates Jewish cultural areas into Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Romance, Judeo-Germanic, Judeo-Turkic, Judeo-Tat, Judaeo-Georgian, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Slavic. While he acknowledges that many Jewish languages have a Hebrew substratum, Wexler's hypothesis holds that these languages were derived from various proselyte groups who retained the grammar of their old non-Jewish languages, while relexifying them through the extensive adoption of new vocabularies. This approach reflects Wexler's interpretation of Jewish ethnogenesis, according to which Jews are not a Semitic "people" so much as a "religious community" of diverse ethnic backgrounds, among which "Semitic" Arabs and Aramaeans form only a very minute component.

Wexler considers it possible that the Slavicized descendants of the Khazars immigrated north and westward, causing some Eastern Slavic terms for Jewish holidays to becoming part of Western Slavic. Wexler states that his hypothesis does not require Yiddish to contain a significant Turkic substratum. Wexler rejects the theory that the differences between Eastern and Western Yiddish were caused by the former's greater exposure to Slavic, instead viewing the two dialects as two largely separate languages.

In his 1993 book he stated that Ashkenazi Jews could be considered ethnically Slavic. He asserts that the Ashkenazi are not of Mediterranean origin. Considering the logical outcome of his linguistic hypotheses to be that Ashkenazi Jews are the descendants of Iranian, Turkic, and Slavic proselytes. He has also applied his linguistic hypotheses to Sephardic Jews suggesting similarly that they are in fact also of non-Jewish origin, originating from Berber proselytes rather than from Spain.

Herbert Paper in his 1995 paper on two of Wexler books rejects two of Wexler's hypotheses: first, that Yiddish is derived from an undiscovered Judeo-Sorbian language and secondly that Modern Hebrew is in fact a Slavic language. He prefers to describe languages Max Weinreich described as Eastern and Western Knaanic as, rather, Judeo-Slavic. In more recent work, Wexler has proposed three origins of Yiddish, by dividing it into two distinct languages: he regards Western Yiddish as a Judaized German; Eastern Yiddish is interpreted as developing from Judeo-Slavic relexified to High German and then again to Yiddish. He has also argued however that that eastern Yiddish is a relexification of Judeo-Turkic and linked to the Khazars and Karaites.

Katz has argued that Wexler's methodology is inconsistent with the accepted methods of historical linguistics. Since the conventional comparative method, used throughout the field of historical linguistics, suggests that Yiddish is descended from Old High German, and furthermore that the dialects of both Western and Eastern Yiddish can be reliably traced back to a Proto-Yiddish phonology, Wexler's arguments about the origin of Eastern Yiddish are considered by some critics to be "in the realm of unsupported speculation" and marginal within the field of linguistics.

Paul Wexler has revised or refined his earlier views on both Yiddish and the Turkic-Iranian-Khazar origins given in several papers between 2000 and 2009. In 2021 he proposed that there is a significant Afro-Eurasian component in Yiddish and adduced 20,000 forms from roughly 270 such languages in support of his thesis, relating them to over 5,000 pieces of Yiddish evidence, concluding that:-

the Khazar Empire and its Turkic minority population probably did not play a major role in the ethno-linguistic genesis of Yiddish and the Ashkenazic Jews ... the Khazar Empire did emerge as a central venue for the creation of several Jewish languages (including Yiddish and its forebears) and for the conversion of many non-Turkic non-Jews to Judaism who desired access to the lucrative Silk Road trade that was dominated widely by the Jewish merchants.

Wexler's approach has often been harshly criticized by many other specialists in the field, the majority of whom reject them. Alexander Beider states: "Sometimes I even wonder if he himself believes in what he writes. If he does not believe, but merely wants to provoke, his writings of the last 20 years are oriented just to prove that Jews are not Jews. In this case, there is nothing to discuss."

Linguistics and genetics

In 2016, Wexler and geneticist Eran Elhaik co-authored a study that analyzed the geographical origin of Yiddish speakers using a method called Geographic Population Structure (GPS) to analyze their DNA. They claimed that the DNA has originated in Northeastern Turkey in four villages whose names were, they argued, derived from the word "Ashkenaz." The predicted location was also on the hub of Silk Road routes and close to the Khazarian Empire, as predicted by Wexler and in contrast with the predictions of the Rhineland hypothesis. The authors argue that this is where a non-Germanic "pre-Yiddish" was developed as an undocumented language for trade and that with the Judaization of Slavs it acquired its alleged Slavic component. A group paper by geneticists headed by Pavel Flegontov, together with the linguist George Starostin criticized this paper, arguing that it had serious methodological flaws in the evaluation of the linguistic and genetic components. Appealing to the consensual view that Yiddish is descended from Old High German, they also argue that the Geographic Population Structure (GPS) tool is not suitable "for admixed populations and for tracing ancestry up to 1,000 years before present, as its authors have previously claimed." In reply, Elhaik, Wexler et al., dismissed the Flegontov paper as marred by lack of knowledge of Jewish history and a failure to evaluate relexification.

In 2021 Wexler published a new work, his ''Silk Road Linguistics: The Birth of Yiddish and the Multiethnic Jewish Peoples on the Silk Road.'' In this monograph, running to well over 1,400 pages, Wexler discusses the origins and relations of almost 300 lexemes he considers part of the "Afro-Eurasian elements in Yiddish".

Criticism

Dovid Katz considers his approach is inconsistent with conventional methods of historical linguistics and the comparative method, arguing that such methods demonstrate that both Eastern and Western Yiddish are descended from a Middle High German dialect with components of Aramaic and Hebrew vocabulary, and underwent the same regular sound changes as those undergone by the German components.

Controversy

In 1988, Wexler was suspected of having written, under the Ukrainian pseudonym Pavlo Slobodjans'kyj, a harshly-worded review in the journal ''Language'' of a volume entitled "Origins of the Yiddish Language". While criticising others, the writer excluded Wexler's work, contained in the same volume, from criticism. Dovid Katz, whose claim that Aramaic-speaking Jews immigrated to Germany prior to 10th century was dismissed as "incredible", raised strong protests over the putative use of a pseudonym, with evidence suggesting that the review had all the hallmarks of Wexler's polemical style and that the submission had been sent from the address of one of Wexler's relatives. The journal where it was published, ''Language'', later published an apology and retracted the review.

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See also

* Khazar hypothesis
* Pseudoscientific language comparison

Notes

Citations

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wexler, Paul
1938 births
American emigrants to Israel
Historians of Jews and Judaism
Israeli Jews
Khazar studies
Linguists from Israel
Linguists from the United States
Linguists of Yiddish
Living people
Pseudolinguistics
Tel Aviv University faculty