[ch1054][ch1088][ch1090][ch1080][ch1085][ch1086],
Do you know if the use of the term 'Yid' was a pejorative in 1890's Russia or simply a slang term referring to a speaker of Yiddish? The meaning of words do change over time so one should not assume that the meaning was what it is today.
David
Disclaimer: The comments below are
not meant as an attempt to “redeem” the word “zhid” or to defend the Romanovs' use of the word.
Etymology and historical usage are incapable of “rehabilitating” a word once the majority of people have come to consider it to be a pejorative epithet.
My point here is that it is imprecise and misleading to translate the Russian word “zhid” into English as “yid”. It would be best to simply
transliterate the word as “zhid”, and leave it at that.
The word “yid” (from Yiddish) is a mid-nineteenth century English-language coinage. It was originally just a slang term; one which is now considered to be pejorative and derogatory.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YidThe relatively modern word “yid” has never been standard usage in English, whereas the Russian word “zhid” has a long and rich lexicographical history in the Slavic languages. Both “zhid” and ‘evrei” occur in the Slavonic translations of the Bible. In medieval Russian chronicles the two words occur interchangeably. And the hero of the legend “The Wandering Jew” is known in Russian as “Vechny Zhid”, the Eternal Zhid.
The word occurs in the classics of Russian literature by such famous authors as Gogol and Dostoevsky, and it is used in St. Dmitry of Rostov’s [d. 1709] collection of the
Lives of Russian Saints, published in Russian in twelve volumes from 1902 to 1911.
A. Alexandrov’s well known
Complete Russian-English Dictionary (Sixth Edition, Petrograd, 1917, p. 159) has seven entries under the root ‘zhid’, (nouns, adjectives, verbs, etc.), all of which are translated into English as Jew, Jewess, Jewish, Judaism, Judaize, etc. Only one entry of the seven carries a negative connotation.
This is not to deny that the word “zhid” was used pejoratively, but certainly not in every case, and not by all classes and groups. By the end of the 19th century, “progressive” circles in Russian society, especially journalists, considered use of the word unacceptable. Some Jewish scholars have even noted a politico-ideological divide here, with socialists and liberals using the word “evrei”, while nationalists, monarchists, and conservatives retained the common people’s term “zhid”.
Already during the reign of Catherine II, prominent Jews in Russia had sought to have the word banned. However, it was the Bolsheviks who officially proscribed the word — declaring it to be an “anti-Semitic and counter-revolutionary” term, and making the use thereof a criminal offense. Later, in the 1950s, the Soviets even deleted it from reprints of V. Dahl’s famous and authoritative pre-revolutionary
Comprehensive Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language.
In Ukrainian, the word “zhid” was normative until the 1930s (until the 1950s in the western Ukraine), and it only took on a negative connotation under the influence of the Russian language. Even today, in Polish, Czech, Slovakian, Croatian, Hungarian and Lithuanian, the root word “zhid”, or derivatives thereof, still denotes simply a Jew.
Such well known contemporary historians of the period of late Tsarist Russia, such as Walter Laquer, Richard Pipes, Robert Nichols, Mark Steinberg, and others, have, in certain contexts, judiciously and selectively translated the word “zhid” as “Jew”, and not as “yid”.
Both Tsar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra used the words “zhid” and “evrei” interchangeably when referring to Jews. And it is interesting to note that in their
private diaries they often wrote “evrei”, while writing “zhid” in letters
posted from captivity which would be read by the censors, and possibly by others. (One would have expected the exact opposite: “zhid” in private, and “evrei” in public.)
