them, their own unique vernaculars, so that there were Jewish versions (sometimes more than one) of Arabic, Persian, Greek, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, among many others. Or perhaps they were not just “versions,” as some scholars, who prefer “Judezmo” over “Judeo-Spanish” and “Yahudic” over “Judeo-Arabic,” have suggested (echoing the “Angloromani” versus “Romani English” debate). Yiddish, for example, is usually classified as a Germanic language or a dialect of German; either way, it is unique in that it contains an extremely large body of non-Germanic grammatical elements; cannot be traced back to any particular dialect (Solomon Birnbaum called it “a synthesis of diverse dialectal material”); and was spoken exclusively by an occupationally specialized and religiously distinct community wherever its members resided. 20 There is no evidence that the early Jewish immigrants to the Rhineland ever shared a dialect with their Christian neighbors; in fact, there is evidence to suggest that the (apparently) Romance languages that they spoke at the time of arrival were themselves uniquely Jewish. 21 Some scholars have suggested that Yiddish may be a Romance or Slavic language that experienced a massive lexicon replacement (“relexification”), or that it is a particular type of creole born out of a “pidginized” German followed by “expansion in internal use, accompanied by admixture.” 22 The two canonical histories of Yiddish reject the Germanic genesis without attempting to fit the language into any conventional nomenclature (other than “Jewish languages”): Birnbaum calls it a “synthesis” of Semitic, Aramaic, Romance, Germanic, and Slavic “elements,” whereas Max Weinreich describes it as a “fusion language” molded out of four “determinants”—Hebrew, Loez (Judeo-French and Judeo- Italian), German, and Slavic. More recently, Joshua A. Fishman has argued that Yiddish is a “multicomponential” language of the “postexilic Jewish” variety that is commonly seen as deficient by its speakers and other detractors but was never a pidgin because it never passed through a stabilized reduction stage or served as a means of intergroup communication. 23 Generally, most creolists mention Yiddish as an exception or not at all; most Yiddish specialists consider it a mixed language without proposing a broader framework to fit it into; a recent advocate of a general “mixed language” category does not consider it mixed enough; and most general linguists assign Yiddish to the Germanic genetic group without discussing its peculiar genesis. 24 What seems clear is that when service nomads possessed no vernaculars foreign to their hosts, they created new ones in ways that resembled neither genetic change (transmission from generation to generation) nor pidginization (simplification and role restriction). These languages are—like their speakers—