Lingua sotterranea, lingua di famiglia, lingua segreta. Lo yiddish e le migrazioni dall’Europa orientale in Germania nelle testimonianze dell’Israelkorpus

This contribution focuses on the dynamics between insiders and outsiders, specifically assimilated German Jews from the German Reich and Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe during the migratory waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. These migrations were linked to worsening economic conditions and the exacerbation of anti-Semitic movements on one hand, and the expansion of the railway network on the other, leading to migratory flows towards the metropolises and more industrialized areas of the German Reich.The analysis is based on text examples concerning the Yiddish language, extracted from the so-called Israelkorpus, which comprises narrative biographical interviews with individuals from the German Reich and occupied territories collected in Israel by the German linguist Anne Betten and her collaborators. An introductory section summarizes Jewish migratory movements from Central and Eastern Europe into the German Reich and provides a brief description of the corpus as a collection of linguistic biographies. This is followed by an outline of the interviewees' attitudes towards the German language and a qualitative analysis of their attitudes concerning Yiddish.The contribution concludes with a discussion of the results and a brief presentation of future perspectives.