Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim from Eastern Europe began to settle in Ottoman Palestine in the late eighteenth century, mainly in the holy cities of Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron, which already had small Yiddish-speaking populations. The ensuing contact of these communities with Arabic resulted in salient lexical interference, documented by Mordecai Kosover in Arabic Elements in Palestinian Yiddish, a book based on his fieldwork in Jerusalem between the years 1927 and 1937 (the transcriptions in this article are his). 

According to Kosover, many Arabic loanwords re…