Jewish Dutch
Description by Kyle Elbaz Fingerhut
Introduction
Jewish Dutch is a modern variety of Standard Dutch that incorporates loanwords and other influences from Hebrew, Yiddish, Portuguese, and other languages that have historically been spoken by the Jewish community in the Netherlands. It can be divided into several varieties based on era and speaker ancestry: 17th-century Sephardi Dutch, influenced by Portuguese; 18th- and 19th-century Ashkenazi Dutch, influenced by Western Yiddish; 19th- and 20th-century Ashkenazi Dutch, influenced by Eastern Yiddish; and post-Holocaust Jewish Dutch, influenced primarily by Textual and Modern Hebrew and Yiddish but with some influences from previous immigrant languages.
Quick facts
Names of language:
Jewish Dutch
Territories where it was/is spoken:
- Netherlands
Estimated # speakers:
1939: 140,000
2024: ~35,000
Writing systems:
Latin alphabet
Literature:
There is literature in the old variety of Jewish Dutch, but the modern variety is limited to in-group news/casual writing (see, for example, the Dutch Jewish weekly—Nieuw Israëlitisch Weekblad).
Language family/branch:
West Germanic
History
Once Jews were allowed to settle in the Low Countries beginning in the 16th century, most came from the Iberian Peninsula. Many of them had been forcibly converted to Christianity, but once they arrived in the Low Lands, they resumed practicing Judaism. These were Sephardim who mainly spoke Portuguese (not Ladino, which developed in Ottoman lands following the exile of Iberian Jews).
Alongside the Sephardi Jews, who were initially the majority, Western Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi Jews from Central European territories began to immigrate as well. From this point onwards, Jews have been continuously present in the Low Lands, and Sephardi and Ashkenazi communities tended not to intermingle.
In the 17th century, most of these Jews were only present in Amsterdam, which became the global center for Yiddish and Hebrew printing and the largest Jewish city in Europe. Beginning in the 18th century, Jews began to settle in other cities in the Netherlands. At this point, Ashkenazim began to greatly outnumber Sephardim. While many Sephardim were wealthy traders, most Ashkenazim were extremely poor. There was also a group of mostly Ashkenazi Jews who engaged in criminal activity, which ultimately had an impact on the genre of Yiddish loanwords that entered Standard Dutch via Bargoens, a form of Dutch slang associated with Jewish criminals (Bernfeld & Wallet, 2023). This will be further discussed in the following section.
By the late 18th century, among the Ashkenazi elite and most Sephardim, knowledge of Dutch grew, and Ashkenazi Jews made more of an effort to teach their children the language. However, for the non-elite Ashkenazi majority, Western Yiddish remained the main language of communication until the latter part of the 19th century (van de Kamp, 2009).
For the Ashkenazi Jews who acquired Dutch, the form they spoke was influenced heavily by Yiddish, both lexically and phonologically. This can be seen in mid-19th-century writings and post-Holocaust linguistic observations, which contain Yiddish loanwords and spelling changes that represent divergent pronunciations used by Dutch Jews at the time (van de Kamp, 2009). Depending on the language that the Jewish community originally spoke (Yiddish or Portuguese), the variety included aspiration of word-initial voiceless stops, unusual voicing patterns for obstruents and (un)rounding of vowels, hyper-correction and deletion of [h], the complementizer as instead of the standard dat ‘that,’ and the particle an, which would sometimes precede nominal and pronominal subjects and objects (Hinskens & Muysken, 2007).
Towards the end of the 19th century, Jews were no longer a secluded group. Sephardim had largely already switched to Dutch, though some Portuguese usage can be observed in naturalistic literature that centered on the lives of Amsterdam Jews, oftentimes detailing their language use, sometimes humorously. For example, the Portuguese ké sorte de gente! ‘what a kind of people!’ can be encountered alongside Sephardic Hebrew-origin terms such as kabod ‘honor’ (van de Kamp, 2009). Many Yiddsih words are also present, even as being used by Sephardim: droosje ‘sermon,’ mesjokke ‘crazy,’ geloosjes ‘nausea’ (van de Kamp, 2009). Overall, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews were largely speaking Dutch, living all around the Netherlands, and sending their children to regular Dutch schools. This was in part due to increased enforcement of the ban on Yiddish in schools and synagogues by King William I in 1817.
Though the Askhenazim, who were already established in the Netherlands, had largely stopped speaking Yiddish, with the arrival of Eastern European Jews fleeing pogroms in the late 19th century, Yiddish was spoken in the Netherlands once again. As Dutch Jews were in the process of assimilating and abandoning Yiddish, the new community of Yiddish speakers largely remained separate from the existing Dutch Jews until after the Holocaust. However, the number of Eastern European migrants remained limited, and by the end of this century, most Jews spoke Dutch, and the Netherlands’ dialect of Yiddish, Western Yiddish, had died out (Bernfeld & Wallet, 2023).
During the beginning of the 20th century, Jews played a large role in Dutch life and culture, but the situation quickly deteriorated. In Germany, as the Nazis rose to power and Jews were shut out of society, many German Jews fled to the Netherlands. Seventy-five percent of Dutch Jews were exterminated, the highest death rate of Jews in Nazi-occupied Western Europe (Lidor, 2024). When the German forces surrendered on May 5, 1945, of the 140,000 pre-war Dutch Jews, 28,000 survived. Today, there are approximately 35,000 Jews in the Netherlands (Staetsky, 2025).
Because of the destruction of Dutch Jewry in the Holocaust, the distinctive variety of Dutch spoken by Jews died out. In general, contemporary Dutch Jews use pronunciation that is indistinguishable from that of non-Jews, but many use loanwords from a variety of languages to enrich their language when speaking to other Jews.
Usage of Hebrew-Origin Words in Standard Dutch
Although this article focuses on the language of Dutch Jews, it is notable that many words from Yiddish (typically loshen-koydesh) have entered Bargoens and many are now widely used in Standard Dutch. Examples of these words include lef ‘courage, bravery, audacity,’ geintje ‘fun, pleasure, joke,’ mazzel ‘luck,’ smoes ‘excuse, pretext,’ nesjomme ‘soul’ (the <sj> represents the sound /sh/ in Dutch), stiekem ‘secretly,’ and gotspe ‘insolence’ (the <g> represents the sound /kh/ or /ch/ in Dutch). A large majority of Yiddish loanwords in Dutch have loshn-koydesh roots as opposed to Germanic, even though Yiddish is mostly Germanic (van de Kamp, 2009). This might be because Dutch had already influenced Western Yiddish’s Germanic features, meaning that the Germanic features in Western Yiddish had become similar to Dutch (van de Kamp, 2009). Because Germanic words in Yiddish were similar to Dutch words, these were less conspicuous to Dutch speakers and thereby less susceptible to borrowing.
Interestingly, many loanwords acquired a more negative connotation in Dutch than they had in Yiddish (Loeb-Diehl, 1995). As an example of this, kalletje (diminutive of kalle), which means ‘whore’ in Bargoens, simply means ‘bride’ in Yiddish and Textual Hebrew. Likewise, bajes means ‘prison’ in Bargoens and Standard Dutch, but simply means ‘house’ in Yiddish and Textual Hebrew.
Though the majority of Yiddish loanwords in Standard Dutch came into Dutch via Bargoens, some also entered through trade. Many Jews worked as peddlers, livestock traders, and shopkeepers, jobs requiring communication between seller and buyer (Loeb-Diehl, 1995). Therefore, some Yiddish words used by the Ashkenazi Jewish sellers were adopted by Dutch-speaking buyers. Examples of usage of Yiddish loanwords in Standard Dutch are provided below from Loeb-Diehl (1995). All of the Yiddish words below are loshn-koydesh.
“Ik heb mazzel gehad.”
“I was lucky.”
“Het was maar een geintje.”
“It was just a joke.”
“Mijn rekenmachine is gejat.”
“My calculator has been stolen.”
While various Yiddish loanwords exist in Dutch, many of these are less widely used by young people today (Loeb-Diehl, 1995). Nowadays, Dutch speakers under the age of 30 are much less likely to know the meanings of Yiddish loanwords in Dutch, including goochem ‘smart, cunning,’ ponem ‘face,’ and kinnesinne ‘hatred, envy.’ On the other hand, the words that participants did know were so common that they were surprised to learn that they were even loanwords. These included smoesje ‘excuse’, stiekem ‘secretly; secretive,’ and likely also mazzel ‘luck,’ among many others (Loeb-Diehl, 1995).
Language
This description and the Jewish Dutch Lexicon are so far based on a study of Jewish Dutch speakers in Amsterdam by Kyle Elbaz Fingerhut in 2024, but it can be assumed that Jews in other Dutch/Flemish-speaking areas use some of the collected items as well. My 2024 study sought to establish the extent to which Jewish Dutch diverges from Standard Dutch and to establish a repertoire of the variant. To do so, I interviewed five Dutch Jews of various ages and religious observances from in and around Amsterdam. Questions focused on concepts (e.g., inquiring what word a participant uses for a particular Jewish concept) and specific words and phrases. For the latter section, I asked participants whether they use 117 specific loanwords or phrases that are used in Jewish English and that I suspected might be used in Jewish Dutch. These came mostly from Hebrew and Yiddish. Participants were asked to indicate whether they use the word or phrase in their Dutch, and if so, to pronounce it. It was concluded that Jewish Dutch differs from Standard Dutch to a similar extent as Jewish English differs from Standard English. This was mainly observed in the addition of loanwords from mostly Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish. Of the 117 items tested, 86% were indicated to be used by participants.
Jewish Dutch can be best described as Dutch spoken or written by Jews with a repertoire of distinctive features, especially words and phrases. These items stem mainly from Yiddish and Hebrew, though some words and phrases come from Portuguese and Ladino from Sephardi Jews. As previously mentioned, Yiddish elements have entered Standard Dutch, but non-Jews are not familiar with the majority of the elements in the distinctly Jewish repertoire. Interestingly, based on my 2024 study, it is clear that Dutch Jews do not consider their use of the repertoire a language in its own right, nor do they use the label Joods Nederlands ‘Jewish Dutch.’ Rather, they generally consider themselves to be speakers of Standard Dutch who occasionally use loanwords from mostly Hebrew and Yiddish in certain contexts.
The repertoire consists mainly of nouns from Hebrew and Yiddish covering both everyday and religious vocabulary, e.g., beet dien ‘religious court,’ nebbisj ‘sad,’ olee chadasj ‘new immigrant to Israel.’ However, Sephardi speakers use words and phrases from Portuguese instead of Yiddish, such as boas entradas de Saba ‘good Shabbat.’ In addition, likely due to the influence of other Sephardic communities on the Dutch ones, some Ladino expressions have been incorporated, mostly in religious contexts, such as Bendigamos, a post-meal prayer.
Jewish Dutch also includes loan translations. In my study, a participant shared op je gezondjes as a loan translation of Yiddish טראָג געזונט trog gezunt ‘wear it in good health,’ which is said to someone wearing a new garment. Similarly, when presented with the Yiddish ביז הונדערט און צוואַנציק biz hundert un tsvantsik ‘(may you live) until 120,’ which is said to someone on a birthday, tot honderdtwintig was offered as a Dutch loan translation. Furthermore, the compounds jaartijd ‘the anniversary of a death,’ vleeskost ‘food or utensils in the meat category,’ and melkkost ‘food or utensils in the dairy category’ were used. These are all made up exclusively of Dutch lexical items, communicating the same as the Yiddish terms, but with Dutch words.
In a similar case, Dutch words have acquired Jewish meanings in Jewish Dutch that they do not have in Standard Dutch. As an example, the verb uitkomen ‘to come out’ has acquired the Jewish meaning ‘to convert to Judaism.’ See the example sentence below.
"Tientallen Nederlanders willen jaarlijks 'uitkomen'. Ze volgen een inburgeringscursus joodse religie, cultuur en geschiedenis." (source)
“Dozens of Dutch people want to 'come out' (i.e., convert) every year. They follow an integration course in Jewish religion, culture and history.”
Due to the linguistic closeness of Yiddish and Dutch, many Yiddish elements are easily integrated into Dutch. For example, the verbs kasjeren ‘to make kosher’ and sjleppen ‘to lug’ in Jewish Dutch are nearly identical in Yiddish: כּשרן kashern and שלעפּן shlepn.
In an interesting case, Jewish Dutch diverges from the patterns of Jewish English loan verb incorporation. In Jewish Dutch, the verb lernen (from Yiddish לערנען lernen) means ‘to study Torah,’ while the Standard Dutch verb leren means ‘to learn.’ Unlike Jewish English, where the meaning of ‘to study Torah’ was added to the English verb ‘learn,’ Jewish Dutch adopted lernen from Yiddish to express this specific concept. The usage of lernen can be seen in the example below.
"Ik was met meer dan 150 rabbijnen, de meesten een stuk jonger dan ik, in Porto (Portugal) vanwege drie dagen lernen." (source)
“I was in Porto (Portugal) with more than 150 rabbis, most of them much younger than me, for three days of lernen (Torah study).”
Jewish Dutch tends to pluralize Hebrew words similarly to Jewish English. For most of the pluralized forms that I studied, participants tended to use the original Hebrew pluralization markers. For example, words such as madrichim ‘tour guides,’ sefarim ‘books,’ and chatanim ‘grooms’ were used and pluralized according to the Hebrew forms. Such a plural usage can be seen in the example below, alongside an instance of both masculine and feminine forms of the noun, as they are used in Modern Hebrew.
“Lof en hulde voor Taiby Camissar en Chaya Koppenhol-van Halem en alle vrijwillige madrichiem en madrichot die deels uit ons land afkomstig waren en deels vanuit Israël en de VS waren ingevlogen.” (source)
“Praise and tribute to Taiby Camissar and Chaya Koppenhol-van Halem and all the volunteer madrichiem (i.e., male tour guides) and madrichot (i.e., female tour guides) who came partly from our country and partly from Israel and the US.”