The Holocaust and scripts in Europe: writing on the wall?  

Writing in Yiddish on a wall in Vilnius. Photo: Arturas Jasevicius / Shutterstock

Letters and words

In post-war Europe, next to no attention has been paid to languages, let alone script. With a couple of exceptions, the norm emerged that a proper nation-state comes complete with its own distinctive national language. In Portugal, the Portuguese language plays this role, in France French, in the Netherlands Dutch (Netherlandish), and in Hungary Hungarian. Similarly, before the polities fractured, in Yugoslavia “Yugoslavian” (that is, Serbo-Croatian) was official, or Russian in the Soviet Union. The aforementioned exceptions, where a language does not define a state and its nation, include, the officially quadrilingual Switzerland, German-speaking Austria, and the use of French and Dutch in Belgium. Between 1968 and 1992, the officially bilingual Czechoslovakia also belonged to this group of “oddballs”.

In comparison to languages as instruments of politics, even less notice has been given to scripts (writing systems), which are popularly dubbed “alphabets”. An alphabet is a type of script in which letters (graphemes) denote both consonants and vowels. In contrast, abjads (“consonantries”) have letters only for marking consonants, while it is left to readers to fill in texts with the necessary vowels. This is the case regarding both Arabic or Hebrew script. What is more, scripts used in India tend to be syllabaries, in which a letter stands for a syllable. In the popular mind, the Chinese writing system is stereotypically seen as “picture writing”. In reality, a single Chinese letter (“character, logograph”) denotes a morpheme (basic word), which in Chinese almost invariable means also a single syllable.

To illustrate how a syllabary works, let us have a look at the English word “chicken”. It consists of two syllables – “chick•en” – so would require two letters to be noted in a syllabary. In contrast, the single syllable word “dog” would be written with the use of a single letter. The same basic principle can be seen in the case of the Chinese morphemic script. Because the two syllable verb “to be•lieve” is a morpheme (basic word), a single Chinese letter would suffice to jot it down. Yet, the gerund ending “-ing” counts in English as another morpheme. So, at least two letters would be necessary for writing down the word “believing” in a morphemic script. In turn, “be•liev•ing” is composed of three syllables, which translates into three letters in a syllabary.

Language politics

The protracted breakup of Yugoslavia between 1991 and 2008 constitutes a pointbreak. The wars that occurred during this time, alongside the accompanying acts of ethnic cleansing and genocide, evoked a growing awareness of language politics among politicians, decision makers and scholars across Europe. Not only did the country split but also its official (state, national) language of Serbo-Croatian fractured. This second process yielded Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian as single and distinctive national languages for the post-Yugoslav nation-states of Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia.

Inter-state quarrels about the status and “true national ownership” of this or that language impact foreign relations and international politics. For instance, Serbian politicians question the existence of the Montenegrin language. By the same token, they contest Montenegro as a sovereign state, preferring to see it as a “second Serbian polity” or a “wayward province” of Serbia itself.

Another recent example can be seen in 2019, when the European Union was about to commence accession negotiations with North Macedonia. Bulgaria issued the neighbouring country with an unprecedented ultimatum. Bulgaria, as an EU member since 2007, has the right of veto because the unanimity of all members must be secured before any new state is allowed to join the Union. Sofia’s main sticking points are that North Macedonia must recognize that it is nothing more than a second Bulgarian state and that its population constitute part of the Bulgarian nation. This is complemented by a belief that the Macedonian language amounts to a second written standard of the Bulgarian language.

Politics of script in the past

On the other hand, an awareness of the fact that not only languages but also scripts can be abused for political ends has largely been lacking in Europe. What are scripts anyway?

During the Cold War, a short-sighted consensus developed that in Europe people (should) read and write in a single “most developed and civilized” script, namely, the Latin alphabet. This was and still is the undisputed reality on the ground in Western Europe.

In Central Europe under Soviet domination, the dominance of Latin letters was also apparent with the sole exception of Bulgaria, where Cyrillic is employed for writing the Bulgarian language. The exception of the Greek alphabet was brushed off by apportioning Greece to Western Europe, while Cyprus to the Middle East. Meanwhile, in communist Yugoslavia, the biscriptal language of Serbo-Croatian was written both in Cyrillic and Latin letters. Yet, with time the employment of the second became predominant.

During the communist period, Eastern Europe was associated with the Soviet Union. After 1938, Russian, written in Cyrillic, became the communist empire’s sole official language. At the level of the union republics, other languages remained in use and some even employed different scripts than Cyrillic. Yet, these republican languages were increasingly sidelined in favour of Russian. Hence, outside observers scarcely noticed that in the Soviet Baltic republics Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian continued to be written in Latin letters, whereas in Soviet Armenia and Georgia, the eponymous republican languages came together with their unique alphabets.

Politics of script today

After the fall of communism in 1989 and the self-dissolution of the Soviet Union two years later, the politics of script debuted in a big way across Central and Eastern Europe. But the West took little note of these momentous developments. The single script of Latin letters was adopted for the new standard languages of Bosnian and Croatian, entailing the enforced exclusion of Cyrillic in publishing and public life in Croatia and across most of Bosnia (apart from Republika Srpska). While in Serbia only Cyrillic is official, in Montenegro Cyrillic is recognized as a co-official alphabet. In reality, the use of Latin letters for writing and publishing predominates in both countries.

However, in today’s Serbia the line of division regarding script separates pro-European liberals from pro-Russian nationalists, with the first group opting for Latin and the second for Cyrillic. Similarly, in Montenegro pro-European proponents of Montenegrin language and culture choose the Latin alphabet in contrast to their pro-Serbian and pro-Russian opponents, who have adopted Cyrillic as their symbol. In post-Yugoslav Macedonia, the sole official language of Macedonian used Cyrillic. But in 2019, North Macedonia became an officially bilingual country. Alongside Macedonian, Albanian (written in Latin letters) was elevated to the status of the country’s co-official language.

In the 1990s, some suggested changing Bulgarian’s script from Cyrillic to Latin, but the proposal proved to be unpopular. Meanwhile, by the turn of the 21st century, the post-Soviet states of Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan had switched from Cyrillic to Latin letters for writing their languages of Azeri, Turkmen and Uzbek. Moscow saw this move as a sure sign of the former republics’ drift away from the Kremlin’s post-imperial sphere of influence. Hence, Russia made sure to use economic and military leverage to prevent Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan from following a similar route of “de-Russification”. Availing itself of Russia’s loss in Syria and stalemate in Ukraine, in 2025 Kazakhstan began its timid transition to Latin letters.

Before the Kremlin had an opportunity to enforce Cyrillic on post-Soviet countries, the Russian Duma (parliament) had to squash any similar developments back home in the Russian Federation. After all, autonomous Tatarstan had adopted a decision in 1999 to move away from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet for writing the Tatar language by 2005. In 2002, a federal law was adopted, entailing that all of Russia’s about 30 official regional languages must be written in Cyrillic. This scriptal homogeneity appears to have been initially of more ideological importance for a resurgent Russia than enforcing monolingualism in Russian.

Nowadays, wherever neo-imperialist Russia expands, both impositions of Cyrillic script and Russian monolingualism are sure signs of the arrival of Russkii mir (Russian world). In the early 1990s, in Moldova’s breakaway region of Transnistria under Russian control, the Latin alphabet of Romanian was replaced with Cyrillic, while in line with the Soviet tradition this language was renamed “Moldavian”. Subsequently, the co-official use of Moldavian and Ukrainian in Transnistria became almost defunct, with Russian emerging as the de facto state’s sole official language.

In 2014, when Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, the co-official employment of Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian was retained on the law books. But the parallel use of Latin letters for writing and publishing in the first language was banned in accordance with the Duma’s 2002 law. At present, the Kremlin applies this law across all of the Ukrainian lands under Russian occupation. Cyrillic is the sole permitted script in public use. What is more, Ukrainian is banned outright and immediately replaced with Russian.

Scripts and interwar Europe

Having sketched out the politics of script in relation to language politics, let us have a glance at Europe before the Second World War. All the official languages of Western Europe’s states used (and still use) Latin letters. The situation was similar in Central Europe outside of Bulgaria and Greece. These two countries’ respective languages of Bulgarian and Greek came with their respective scripts of Cyrillic and Greek letters. Interwar Yugoslavia constituted a notable exception. Its sole national and mostly Latin alphabet-based language of Serbo-Croato-Slovenian (“Yugoslavian”) was composed of two territorial varieties. These were namely Slovenian in the country’s northernmost corner (or today’s Slovenia) and Serbo-Croatian anywhere else. The second came in two subvarieties, with Croatian in Latin letters and Serbian in Cyrillic. In addition, Arabic letters were informally but widely used for writing the de facto (unofficial) Bosnian subvariety.

During the 1920s, a modernization policy of “Latinization” was adopted in the early Soviet Union. This was chosen due to the dearth of Cyrillic typewriters for running the burgeoning bureaucracy of the totalitarian empire. Ideally, all the communist polity’s about 130 languages in official administrative and educational use were to start using the Latin alphabet, as it was seen as the epitome of civilization and development. This transition was implemented for over a hundred languages, including Chinese and Korean in the Soviet Far East. Yet, despite the prepared plans to this end, Cyrillic was retained for writing in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian.

Uniquely, interwar Soviet Belarus was quadrilingual and triscriptal. Its four official languages were written in three scripts, namely, Belarusian and Russian in Cyrillic, Polish in Latin letters, and Yiddish in the Hebrew script. This was the first instance of the Hebrew script being recognized at a state level as an official writing system in modern Europe. Prior to this event, mostly during the 19th century, increasingly politicized antisemitism had led to the imposition of a variety of measures banning the employment of Hebrew letters in local administration, law courts, and mail addresses across what has been called “Yiddishland”.

This modern “country” of Yiddishland was never marked on the political maps of Europe but coincided with the Central European homeland of Ashkenazi Jewry, extending from the Baltic in the north to the Black Sea and the Danube in the south. South of this river, in the Balkans, in the Middle East and across North Africa, Sephardim developed a parallel Jewish modernity in “Ladinoland”. These two Jewish vernaculars of Yiddish and Ladino were written in Hebrew letters. However, under French influence, quite a few Sephardim switched to the Latin alphabet for writing their vernacular language.

In 1939, Europe’s population amounted to 520 million, including 135 million in the European section of the Soviet Union. Let us now turn to script use, disregarding the fact that in many areas of the continent people remained largely illiterate until the 1960s. What is more, practically every European with full elementary education can read the Latin alphabet, even when his own (state or ethnic) language is written in another script. In the Soviet Union, the same was true regarding Cyrillic for speakers of these Soviet languages that continued to be written in other scripts. Last but not least, practically all European Jews knew the script of the official language of their home country.

Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, 125 million people writing in Belarusian, Russian and Ukrainian employed Cyrillic in the Soviet Union’s European section. The number corresponded to 73 per cent of all the Soviet citizens and would be closer to four-fifths if the Asian section of this country was taken into account. The remaining ten million people across the European Soviet Union used the Armenian alphabet in Soviet Armenia, the Georgian alphabet in Soviet Georgia, or the Latin alphabet in Soviet Azerbaijan and Belarus. Outside the Soviet Union, Cyrillic was employed by six million Bulgarians and about seven million Yugoslavs of ethnic Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian backgrounds. All in all, 138 million people knew Cyrillic in Europe, amounting to 26 per cent of all Europeans. Yet, if the Soviet population were disregarded, then the share of users of Cyrillic in non-Soviet Europe plummeted to a mere three per cent.

The combined population of Greece and Cyprus, amounting to 7.5 million in 1939, may be seen as a good approximation of the number of people with a working knowledge of the Greek alphabet.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the world’s Jews lived in interwar Europe, or around ten million in 1939. Obviously, given the increasingly discriminatory antisemitic policies in Nazi Germany, European Jewry found itself in flux, moving countries and continents to flee persecutions. But this number alone made Hebrew letters into the third-largest script by number of users in interwar Europe.

Post-Ottoman Muslim populations accounted for a tenth of the inhabitants in interwar Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, and a couple of per cent in Greece, amounting to over two million. The Muslim majorities in interwar Albania and the European section of Turkey are not taken into consideration because both countries as part of their respective programmes of modernization adopted the Latin alphabet for writing and publishing in Albanian and Turkish. Hence, the traditional Balkan Muslim users of the Arabic script persisted in interwar Bulgaria, Greece and Yugoslavia.

It is worth reiterating these figures. In 1939:

• About 380 million Europeans read and wrote in the Latin alphabet;
• About 138 million Europeans employed Cyrillic;
• About ten million Europeans used the Hebrew script;
• About 7.5 million Europeans read and wrote in the Greek alphabet;
• About three million used the Georgian alphabet;
• About two million read and wrote in the Arabic script;
• While about 1.5 million employed the Armenian alphabet.

The Holocaust and its unnoticed consequences

Before the Second World War, 12 million speakers of the closely related languages of Dutch and Flemish lived in the Netherlands and Belgium. The number was exactly the same as that of Yiddish speakers worldwide, with four-fifths of them living in Europe.

A third of Europe’s Jews survived the Holocaust, mostly in the Soviet hinterland. But widespread popular antisemitism, alongside repeated antisemitic campaigns across the Soviet bloc, fuelled the emigration of Holocaust survivors mainly to Israel and North America. The number of Europe’s Jews plummeted to two million in 1991 and to 1.4 million twenty years later. At most a tenth of the globe’s Jewry still live on the Old Continent. Antisemitism continues unchecked across Europe in the 21st century, which generates further emigration.

After the Holocaust, an attempt to revive Yiddishland in the Soviet Union was thwarted already by 1949, while a more successful attempt was terminated in communist Poland in 1968. To survive and have a chance at a normal life, Jews remaining in the Soviet bloc had to hide their identity and assimilate with the languages and cultures of their environs. It meant abandoning the use of Hebrew letters for reading and writing Yiddish, Ladino or Hebrew, alongside with these Jewish languages. A similar but better hidden aversion toward Jews in post-war Western Europe made them follow a similar path of social mimicry.

Subsequently, cohesive secular and indigenous Yiddish speech communities practically disappeared. Not a single dedicated Yiddish-language library survives in Europe. The Holocaust and the post-war antisemitic campaigns in the Soviet bloc eliminated Yiddish as a language of everyday life in Europe. However, emigration to Western Europe, combined with Hassidic piety, led to the emergence of small Yiddish-speaking religious communities in Antwerp, London, Amsterdam and Paris. Their combined populations do not amount to more than 10,000 people.

Nowadays, in 2025, around 23 million speakers of Dutch and Flemish live in the Netherlands and Belgium. If antisemitism had not existed in interwar Europe, the Holocaust had not taken place, and Ashkenazim had been left to pursue their own path of communal development in Yiddishland, today this “country” would have had close to 30 million inhabitants. I assess the potential number of Ashkenazim to be higher than speakers of Dutch and Flemish because during the interwar period, Jews were poorer on average than citizens of Belgium and the Netherlands. This situation typically translated into a higher birth rate.

Europeans have consistently failed to notice and lament the disappearance of an entire full-fledged modern language and culture surrounding Yiddish. They have also not shown or even feigned surprise at the fact that for all practical reasons the Hebrew script has been erased from the continent’s everyday life and culture. No discussion or reflection ensued regarding the precipitous nosedive in the number of Europe’s users of the Hebrew script from ten million to 10,000. To get the situation in perspective, the second number is a mere one thousandth (0.1 per cent) of the first.

At present, in 2025, Europe’s population amounts to 740 million. Most Europeans, or 560 million, read and write with the employment of the Latin alphabet. The users of Cyrillic who live in Belarus, Bulgaria, Macedonia, the European section of Russia, and Ukraine number about 162 million. The Greek alphabet is employed by almost 11 million people for reading and writing in Cyprus and Greece. Almost four million people use the Georgian alphabet in independent Georgia, while three million stick to Armenian letters in Armenia.

Would Europeans not notice if the entire speech community of Dutch and Flemish speakers were exterminated, with each and every single library, bookstore and publishing house specializing in books in this language levelled? Would Europeans not loudly protest if the users of the Greek alphabet were wiped out and the production of Greek-language books ceased?

I am sure that in these cases, concerned Europeans would stream out into the streets and city squares in their millions to protest such a tragedy and injustice. Why then, to this day, have open-minded and liberal Europeans not lamented and decried the wholesale eradication of Yiddishland and the subsequent suppression of any use of the Hebrew script in everyday life across the continent? Is this not a contradiction of the value of inclusivity (on which Europe prides itself), as well as a sure sign of a largely unnoticed but persistent antisemitism that continues to blight the continent?

Tomasz Kamusella is Reader (Professor Extraordinarius) in Modern Central and Eastern European History at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. His recent volumes include Rreziqet e Neoimperializmit rus (Kristalina 2024), Politics and the Slavic Languages (Routledge 2021), Eurasian Empires as Blueprints for Ethiopia (Routledge 2021) and Languages and Nationalism Instead of Empires (Routledge 2023). His reference work Words in Space and Time: A Historical Atlas of Language Politics in Modern Central Europe (CEU Press 2021) is available as an open access publication. 

Please support New Eastern Europe's crowdfunding campaign. Donate by clicking on the button below.

Europe, Holocaust, Jewish heritage, language, script, Yiddish