Unterlander Jews

Unterlander Jews (Yiddish: אונטערלאנד‎, translit. Unterland, "Lowland"; Hebrew: גליל תחתון‎‎, translit. Galil Takhton, "Lower Province") were the Jews who resided in the northeastern regions of the historical Kingdom of Hungary, or present-day eastern Slovakia, Zakarpattia Oblast in Ukraine and Northern Transylvania. Like their kindred Oberlander Jews, the term is uniquely Jewish one, and is not related to "Lower Hungary." Unterland, or "Lowland", was named so by the Oberlander, in spite of being topographically higher: according to Dr. Menahem Kratz, it served to reflect the scorn of the educated westerners to their poor and unacculturated brethren.

While refugees from the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising were the first Jews to settle in these regions, the vast emigration from the adjacent Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria following its annexation by Empress Maria Theresa in 1772 shaped the character of the Unterlander, in addition to the area's backwardness. Throughout the 19th century, the northeast remained underdeveloped by any parameter. While hundreds of modern Jewish schools, teaching in German, were established by the authorities in 1850, there were only 8 in the entire Kaschau school district which covered most of Unterland. The linguistic shift from Yiddish to vernacular, which was over in the rest of Hungary by the mid-19th century, was little felt in the province. Other Hungarian Jews derisively called them "Finaks" or "Fins", based on their pronunciation of the phrase 'Von [fin in Unterland accent] Wo bist du?' ("from where are you?"); In Fatelessness, Imre Kertész recalled the Yiddish-speaking, devout "Fins" in Auschwitz. The boundary which separated Unterland from the rest of Hungarian Jewry ran between the Tatra Mountains and Cluj-Napoca. It paralleled the linguistic demaracation line of Western and Middle Yiddish. While the locals' dialect resembled the Galician one, it was laced with Hungarian vocabulary and more influenced by German grammar. Its sibboleth was the pronunciation of R as an Apical consonant. Unterland Yiddish is conserved today mainly by the Satmar hasidim's educational network.

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