The American Yekkes
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The American Yekkes The American Yekkes[1] By Yisrael Kashkin As I march around town grasping my Hirsch Siddur, I sometimes am asked, “Are you a Yekke?” to which I answer, “I am an American Yekke.”[2] This statement draws puzzled looks as if I had said that I were an Algonquin Italian. “America is a Germanic country and my family has lived here for a century,” I say, attempting to explain but provoking usually even more puzzlement. For those who want to hear more, I present my case. Consider the country’s language. English is technically a Western Germanic tongue. It started when Germanic tribes settled in Britain in the fifth century, displacing Common Brittonic, a native Celtic language, and Latin, which had been introduced by the Romans. The English that was formed then was called Old English. As Wikipedia describes it, “Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic dialects originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony, Jutland and Southern Sweden by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. As the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain…”[3] Frisia is a coastal region along the Southeastern corner of the North Sea which today sits mostly in the Netherlands. The Frisian languages are the closest to English. Wikipedia explains: The Frisian languages are a closely related group of Germanic languages, spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. The Frisian dialects are the closest living languages to English, after Scots.[4] The language of Scots mentioned here is also a Frisian tongue brought by the Germanic immigrants and not Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language that people generally associate with Scotland.[5] Old English was followed by Middle English which started in the 11th century after the Norman Conquest and continued unto the late 15th century. While Modern English contains vocabulary from several languages, the second most prominent being French which arrived with the Normans, the basic vocabulary and grammar of English is Germanic. Of the 100 most commonly used English words, 97% are Germanic; of the 1000 most commonly used English words, 57% are Germanic.[6] Look at this example. Here’s one way to say, “Hello, my name is Harold” in several languages, the first four being Germanic. Dutch: Hallo mijn naam is Harold. German: Halo mein numen ist Harold. Swedish: Hej, mitt namn är Harold English: Hello, my name is Harold. French: Je m’appelle Harold. Italian: Ciao, mi chiamo Harold. Latin: Salve nomen meum HOROLD. Russian: привет меня зовут Гарольд. Chinese: 你好，我的名字是哈羅德 See what I mean? As mentioned, those Germanic tribes went by the names Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. While most people associate the term Anglo- Saxon with the American aristocracy and the British, the term actually finds its origins in those Germanic settlers of Britain as does the name of the language called English, which derives from the Angles specifically. The Encyclopedia Britannica sums it up as follows: Anglo-Saxon, term used historically to describe any member of the Germanic peoples who, from the 5th century ce to the time of the Norman Conquest (1066), inhabited and ruled territories that are today part of England. According to the Venerable Bede, the Anglo-Saxons were the descendants of three different Germanic peoples—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who originally migrated from northern Germany to the island of Britain in the 5th century at the invitation of Vortigern, king of the Britons, to defend his kingdom against Pictish and Irish invaders.[7] The Venerable Bede was an 8th century English monk and historian whose book The Ecclesiastical History of the English People earned him the title “The Father of English History.” The name Bede is actually Anglo-Saxon, ie. Germanic, being built on the root bēodan or to bid or command.[8] Thus, the father of English history has a Germanic Anglo-Saxon name. It is possible that a high percentage of the inhabitants of 5th century Britain were not only influenced by the Germanic invaders but were actually comprised largely of those Germanic invaders and their descendants. We see this in the spread of the Frisian-Germanic language throughout Britain. In “Empires of the World, A Language History of the World,” Nicholas Ostler traces the decline of Latin during the collapse of the Roman Empire against invading armies. Slavic languages took hold in Eastern Europe but Germanic-Frisian held sway in Britain. Perhaps something similar happened at the opposite end of the Roman dominions, for Britain too lost its Latin in the face of invasions in this period. It also lost its British. This event of language replacement, which is also the origin of the English language, was unparalleled in its age – the one and only time that Germanic conquerors were able to hold on to their own language.[9] Ostler cites a theory by researcher David Keys that the ravages of the bubonic plague facilitated the spread of the Frisian Germanic dialect as it wiped out a high percentage of the Britons who, unlike the Saxons, maintained trade routes with the Roman Empire, from which the plague entered the island. A Germanic language took hold because a large percentage of the populace was actually Germanic. Genetic studies support the theory. One study at the University College of London tracked a chromosome that is found in nearly all Danish and North German men to about half of British men.[10] It is not found in Welsh men of Western England where the Angles and Saxons did not invade. While anthropologists debate the percentages of the British populace that trace to the AngloSaxons, the sociological discussion is more relevant to the thesis. The Germanic Anglo- Saxons ruled the British Isles for centuries, and rulers tend to dictate cultural norms. The Wikipedia entry on the Britons sums up their demise with the pithy words: “After the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons the population was either subsumed into Anglo-Saxon culture, becoming “English”; retreated; or persisted in the Celtic fringe areas of Wales, Cornwall and southern Scotland, with some emigrating to Brittany.”[11] The point here is that the nationality called English is built on Anglo-Saxon or old Germanic culture. And again, pithily, Wikipedia sums up the entire cultural transformation of Britain under the Germanic invasion: The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain is the term traditionally used to describe the process by which the coastal lowlands of Britain developed from a Romano-British to a Germanic culture following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the island in the early 5th century. The traditional view of the process has assumed the large-scale migration of several Germanic peoples, later collectively referred to as Anglo-Saxons, from the western coasts of Europe prior to the establishment of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that came to dominate most of what is now England and lowland Scotland.[12] A connection between the aristocracies of Germany proper and England has endured to modern times. British Kings George I and II were born in Germany, spoke German, and belonged to the House of Hanover.13 Queen Victoria’s mother was born in Germany, and Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria, also was born in Germany. Their son King Edward VII, was an uncle of Kaiser Wilhem II, the last German Emperor and King of Prussia. Mary, the Queen consort of King George V, was a princess of Teck, a German aristocratic line. The present British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, inherited the throne from Edward VII’s grandson George VI. Thus, she too is part German as are the princes Charles and William, the current heirs to the throne. It should be no surprise that the British and other Germanic peoples have much in common. One sees it in their orderliness, rationalist mindset, industriousness, and emotional reserve. Similar too is the Anglo aristocracy that set up the USA, laid down its primary culture, and arguably continues to run the place or did so through the 1950s. The educated American reader certainly needs no overview of the British roots of the USA which started as a British colony. The connection is so strong that the term WASP or White Anglo-Saxon Protestant is generally used by Americans to designate a type of American even though, as I have shown, it traces back to the Germanic English and their German ancestors. While the USA is composed today of many ethnic groups, it is governed mostly in an AngloGermanic style, ie. rule-based and organized. So there’s the Germanic-English connection and its role in the founding of America. What about the American people? There we have an even more recent linkage via 19th century immigration. German Americans, some forty-nine million strong, are the largest ancestral group in the country.[14] By contrast, Irish Americans number thirty-five million and Italian Americans seventeen million. The 2010 census reports the top five as follows: 1 German 49,206,934 17.1% 2 African 45,284,752 14.6% 3 Irish 35,523,082 11.6% 4 Mexican 31,789,483 10.9% 5 English 26,923,091 9.0% Incredibly, there are nearly twice as many Americans of German ancestry as English.[15] In 1990, fiftyeight million Americans reported German ancestry, constituting 23% of the entire country.[16] Between 1850 and 1970, German was the second most widely spoken language in the United States, after English.[17] Germans immigrated in the greatest concentrations to the Midwest where the state legislatures of several of the North- Central states promoted their immigration with funding and support.[18] The area between Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St.