Yiddish Map of Palestine, 1939

Yiddish is a Germanic language which borrows words from Hebrew and is written in the Hebrew Alphabet. It's an old language and was historically spoken by Jews in Eastern and Central Europe. The number of speakers declined as a result of the Holocaust, but it remains the vernacular in many orthodox Jewish communities in Israel and elsewhere and has made somewhat of a cultural renaissance as evidenced by the popularity of things like this.

I had the good fortune to be offered a number of Yiddish books from an elderly relative who was downsizing. Among those books was "der algemeiner encyclopedia", the General Encyclopedia, published in Yiddish, in a number of volumes first in Paris, as of 1939 and later in New York.

1939 may have been the time in history with the most Yiddish speakers on the planet, before their numbers were drastically reduced by Nazi evil. These volumes are contemporary with that moment in history and they contain some Yiddish language maps. I'm not sure I'd ever seen one before and now I've discovered several of them. I wanted to write about them here, one at a time. I'll do my best to translate and explain what they are. They give fascinating insight into what the Jewish community found important at a moment in time when Nazism was on the rise, and when there were split allegiances within the Jewish community between various labour and communist movements, religious movements and the Jewish National movement, today known as Zionism.

The first map is in the "Jewish History" section of the encyclopedia and is titled "Palestine, in the Time of the Jewish Kingdom, a Historical Map". The caption at the bottom of the page reads: "A Historical Map of Palestine (Judah and Israel at the time of the splitting of the kingdom)". This relates to the biblical split between the 10 tribes of Israel and the other two tribes of Judah.

The legend on the map explains a bit about what we're looking at.

The areas shaded with dots are the the tribes of Israel while the one with solid lines are the tribes of Judah. The squiggly lines below the boxes are labeled as "vegn" which I would translate as ways, or routes or roads.

Above is an image of the map showing what today, would be parts of central and southern Israel, Jordan, the West Bank and Gaza.

Highlighted in Yellow is Jerusalem. The green square is around a place called Lod, which is essentially modern Tel Aviv. Israel's international airport is in Lod. Bethlehem is underlined in red, south of Jerusalem, Gaza city has a yellow square around it and underlined in blue is the ancient Jewish fortress of Massada. The Inclusion of Massada here is interesting, because it's not a place that appeared in the bible and only became famous afterwards as a symbol of Jewish nationalism. Its inclusion in this map is probably more of a nod to the Zionism of the time than to creating an accurate biblical map.

Finally, the kingdom of Edom is in a purple box and the kingdom of Moab underlined in purple.

I believe this map to be quite rare. I have almost never seen any Yiddish maps at all, much less old ones. It has a great deal of historic significance as well, not just for its content, but also for its purpose. It remains in the encyclopedia, which is in excellent condition, and I intend to keep it that way indefinitely.