Yekke
Sign in to saveA Yekke (also Jecke, Jekke) is a humorous, mildly derogatory reference to a German-speaking Jew in Israel. In Germany, they were contrasted with their Eastern European counterparts, the Ostjuden.
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Encyclopedic overview
6 sectionsContents
- Etymology
- Demography and history
- Notes
- References
- Further reading
- External links
A Yekke (also Jecke, Jekke) is a humorous, mildly derogatory reference to a German-speaking Jew in Israel. In Germany, they were contrasted with their Eastern European counterparts, the Ostjuden.
==Etymology== There are several suggestions on the etymology of the word, all of them being inconclusive. In the older Yiddish dictionaries the word was translated as "German", but this meaning was not preserved, neither in Yiddish, nor Hebrew. The word is productive in Yiddish and when borrowed into Hebrew it had become productive there as well, accepting Hebrew patterns of word formation. For example, in Yiddish the feminine for is yekete, feminine plural: yeketes, while in Hebrew it is yekit and yekiot, respectively.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Yekke” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.