Beigels, the BUF and the Blitz: how the East End started speaking Cockney Yiddish
In the old East End, two communities seen as insular rubbed shoulders and mixed language to produce what we can only call Cockney Yiddish
You may have heard of Cockney and you may have heard of Yiddish, but have you heard of Cockney Yiddish? That’s the term Queen Mary University of London professors Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs have given to the hybrid mix of languages that developed during the mass migration of Eastern European Jews to the East End in the mid to late 1800s.
Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) academics Nadia Valman and Vivi Lachs both have ancestry from this thriving pocket of the Jewish diaspora. Valman’s great-grandfather worked as a beadle, or caretaker, in a small synagogue on Dunk Street, which no longer exists. Lachs’ great-grandfather was a cabinet maker living in Spitalfields and had a salt-beef cafe (now shuttered) on Mile End Road.
Both Lachs and Valman have spent their careers peering back into a past where Yiddish was widely spoken in the East End, with Valman working as a Professor of Urban Literature focused on the East End and QMUL and Lachs working as both a historian of the Jewish East End and a performer of Yiddish song and comedy.
‘There’s been lots of history written about the Jewish East End, but actually the particular point of view you get from people who are writing songs or poetry or theatre pieces or fictional pieces for the newspapers is a completely different type of history,’ Lachs said, ‘So I was very keen on looking at what does it tell us?’
Valman said, ‘Animating this research for a public audience also made me really enter into the feel of the past in a way that I haven’t done before, which is why it was so enjoyable, so rewarding.’
To evoke and understand the language and culture of the Jewish East End, they produced The Cockney Yiddish Podcast. The podcast investigates language, music, and everyday life with original research and playful curiosity. It was born from a collaborative project between Lachs and Valman called Making and Remaking the Jewish East End.
One example of this cultural interchange is the spelling of the word ‘Beigel,’ iconic in the East End when pronounced with a thick Cockney accent. Although Jewish immigrants brought the chewy baked bread to both America and London, the ‘bagel’ pronunciation was popularised in America and became the norm. This is because Jewish immigrants to America were mostly from Northern and wealthier regions, where in Yiddish it was pronounced ‘bagel.’
Poorer Jewish immigrants, often from Poland, were more likely to pronounce it ‘beigel,’ and it was these immigrants who arrived in the East End, where the journey was shorter but opportunities were more scarce. The word has since been absorbed into Cockney parlance.
With strong family ties and few options for affordable housing in London, the East End’s Jewish community quickly became its own little world. The Jewish community of the East End spoke Yiddish, the language used by Jewish people in central and eastern Europe before the Holocaust, which began as a German dialect. There were synagogues on every street corner, Yiddish language newspapers, and Jewish immigrants easily bumped into friends, family, coworkers and acquaintances while walking down the street.
There’s been lots of history written about the Jewish East End, but actually the particular point of view you get from people who are writing songs or poetry or theatre pieces or fictional pieces for the newspapers is a completely different type of history.
VIVI LACHS
Cockneys, aka the largely white working class born ‘within the sound of the Bow bells,’ already had an established culture when Jewish immigrants arrived in the East End. Their distinctive dialect, marked by rhyming slang ( apples and pears, stairs), absorbed some Yiddish words, like ‘Chutzpah,’ (bravery) ‘Shtum’ (to keep quiet) or ‘Schmooze’ (to chat).
For example, research suggests that the modern English pronunciation of the ‘r’ sound was derived from Jewish immigration.
Lachs notes that the Yiddish words which were absorbed in London into the English language changed their meaning slightly. ‘Chutzpah, for example, in English has got slightly less oomph or slightly less negative vibe to it than it has in Yiddish,’ Lachs said, ‘So in Yiddish it might be brazen cheek, whereas in English, it could be quite a feisty thing.’
‘But they can be the other way around as well, because the word ‘schmooze,’ which just means to chat in Yiddish, can mean to butter someone up in English.’
Because of cross-continental Jewish newspapers, as well as Yiddish mixing with English in similar ways, much of what English and Yiddish have exchanged in London is similarly reflected in New York.
However, some Yiddish words, such as ‘Nosh’ have a distinctly British connotation today. Absorbed into Cockney English, specifically by low-level thieves, were words like ‘Gonuf’ (thief) and ‘Gelt’ (money), adopted for the advantage of not being widely understood, Valman explains.
But English didn’t only absorb Yiddish – Yiddish absorbed English too. In Eastern Europe, the Yiddish for having tea was commonly called ‘glezl tey’ or ‘glass of tea,’ because tea was served in small glasses without milk. Confronted with big milky British mugs of tea, Yiddish absorbed a new/borrowed word ‘Kapati’ (cup of tea) to mark the difference. English words such as ‘Alright,’ which have no Yiddish equivalent, were also adopted.
Jewish and Cockney communities of the time have been understood as insular and separate, living parallel lives in the East End. In some ways this was true, with separate neighbourhoods and places of worship. However, sharing streets, friendships, busy markets and workplaces, Yiddish and Cockney evolved together.
Unfortunately, the era of Yiddish and English co-existing was short-lived. Unlike in New York, Yiddish was not widely spoken in the East End after the mid-20th century. Today, it is rare to find Yiddish speakers in London.
Miriam Margolyes is somebody who, because of her politics has been really vilified in the Jewish community
NADIA VALMAN
‘The anglicisation push, the push to become more integrated was very strong here, really because of the size of the community and because also after the Blitz people were moving out of the East End,’ Lachs said.
Yiddish was also somewhat purposefully dropped by the Jewish community. ‘There was a strong push from within the Jewish community to eliminate Yiddish from the language of the immigrants because it was seen as foreign and lower class, and it was seen as an ugly dialect that was impeding their integration and their social mobility,’ Valman said.
Violence towards the Jewish community from the British Union of Fascists also forced many East End Jews to move to other parts of London, among them Valman’s ancestors. All these factors together splintered and weakened Yiddish-speaking in London.
The podcast includes celebrity guests like Miriam Margolyes. ‘Miriam Margolyes is somebody who, because of her politics has been really vilified in the Jewish community,’ Valman said, ‘And I think it’s very important to her to assert her own Jewish roots and belonging. It was important for us to also include her as part of it.’
The Cockney Yiddish Podcast is now complete and free to listen to, with episodes spanning theatre, oral history, and even a longstanding mystery solved along the way. To do their part in keeping Yiddish alive, Valman and Lachs have produced one episode entirely in Yiddish (with a transcript available in English).
You can listen to Cockney Yiddish here.
If you liked this, read Migrants and the working class: How the populous has shaped the political history of Tower Hamlets
Yiddish really is not rare in London. In Stamford Hill there are thousands of Yiddish-first language speakers, many of whom rarely use English. There doesn’t seem to be much cross-over between the old East End community and the current population (Rachel Kolsky has given a fascinating talk about the foundation of the latter and it seems the Chareidim mostly didn’t come from the East End). However, I’ve always assumed that one of the reasons the community flourished in the Stoke Newington area is that there were already kosher butchers, many managed by those who moved out from the East End. I would love to know more.
I believe the Moroccan community round East End has been around for a long time and there was once a German community as well?