I am fascinated with the Yiddish typewriter. Finding a Yiddish typewriter is a bit like finding a whale at sea: though not exceedingly rare, you still write home about it. There is very little information on the Yiddish typewriter online as I write this. No Wikipedia article, no anything really, so I figure I will do my part to piece together the history. I will be updating this article, so if you have any information, please share!
First off, the Yiddish typewriter is not the same as the Hebrew typewriter. The Yiddish typewriter, like the language and culture at large, often finds itself in the shadow of its Hebrew brother, but there are significant differences. It is true that one technically does not need to have a Yiddish typewriter to write Yiddish and a Hebrew typewriter will suffice, but having a Yiddish typewriter prevented post-editing with a pen or pencil to add in certain accents.
Once I startled compiling images I found of Yiddish typewriters online, I see that there were many typewriter companies that made a Yiddish version. The question is, were these special order, or were many of these made? The companies who made Yiddish typewriters included Remington, Underwood, Hammond, Royal, Mercedes, Corona, Olivetti, and Everest. My favorite name for a Yiddish model is the “Underwood Semitic 46.”((Image credit Markotown, http://typewriter.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=1685 )) Other dedicated Yiddish makes were the Corona 3 XC-R and Blickenderfer Oriental. Almost all of these models below were American made.
The heyday of the Yiddish typewriter was between 1910 and 1940 when Remington and Underwood seem to have been both the first and the largest manufacturers of Yiddish typewriters. Remington came out with a Yiddish typewriter in 1903 and Underwood in 1911.((Tobias Jonas, Praktishe metode far der yidisher shrayb-mashin, 1929, p. 9. One reference states that a young Rabbi Barnett Brickner convinced Underwood to make its 1911 Yiddish typewriter. )) The earliest Yiddish typewriter I’ve seen is posted below, circa 1909. One can just imagine the impressive Yiddish literature written on these machines. The great Polish Yiddish writer Y. L. Peretz specifically requested a Remington Yiddish typewriter in 1907 and “had been wanting one for a long time.” The Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer typed his works on several different Yiddish typewriters over the years, the first was an Underwood bought in 1935.((http://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00354p1)) The University of Oregon has a late example of a Yiddish typewriter made in 1961. But the last Yiddish Linotype machine used in the United States, weighing 4,500 pounds, set the type for the Jewish Daily Forward in New York until 1991. Keep reading below for more.
Gallery of Yiddish Typewriters
I have posted here every Yiddish typewriter I have found online, showing you how rare they are.((Here are sources for the typewriter images in the gallery. Images on Ebay disappear, so no links will be given for those images. 1909 Remington https://new.liveauctioneers.com/item/43579019; Remington http://cambridgetypewriter.blogspot.com/2011/01/foreign-language-typewriters.html; Remington https://www.instagram.com/p/J2mc5Enrbi/; 1920 Corona XC-R http://collection.spertus.edu/item/yiddish-typewriter; Hammond http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/12/us/12religion.html; 1922 Underwood Semitic 46 http://typewriter.boardhost.com/viewtopic.php?id=1685; Underwood Semitic 46 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclharris/x-jhc-r3321; Underwood 46 http://myanachronousstuff.tumblr.com/post/15652700066/yiddish-underwood-typewriter-1920s-supposedly; Underwood 46 14 in. http://myanachronousstuff.tumblr.com/post/15652700066/yiddish-underwood-typewriter-1920s-supposedly; 1927 Remington 92 http://typewriterdatabase.com/1927-remington-92.4239.typewriter; late-1920s Corona 3 XC-R http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/jb-Yiddish-typewriter; 1930 Underwood 5 http://magnes.berkeley.edu/files/underwood-manual-typewriter-hebrew-and-yiddish; 1930s Remington Portable 3 #2 https://www.pinterest.com/pin/436638126354019443/; 1934 Remington Portable Model 5 http://www.collectorsweekly.com/stories/135954-hebrew-or-yiddish-typewriter; 1935 Royal O http://www.kevinderntravel.com/blog/2012/09/11/paris-journal-day-7-le-marais-jewish-museum-and-bhv-dept-store; Underwood http://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-underwood-yiddish-typewriter-20603351; Singer Underwood 1 http://www.fsgworkinprogress.com/2012/03/the-archives-i-b-singer/; Singer Underwood 2 http://www.kultur22.dk/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Isaac-Bashevis-Singers-Underwood.jpg; ~1940 Royal Arrow http://www.uyip.org/keyboards.html; 1940s Remington Portable provided by Richard Polt http://site.xavier.edu/polt/typewriters/; 1940s Remington Rand 17 http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/picture-of-a-typewriter-with-hebrew-characters-found-among-news-photo/89075823#picture-of-a-typewriter-with-hebrew-characters-found-among-the-debris-picture-id89075823; 1948 Remington Rand http://carolynyeager.net/book/export/html/350; 1961 Everest K2 https://prminders.wordpress.com/2016/04/17/another/ ))
1923 Remington #LL33024 (Refurbished 1940s?) 
1923 Corona 3 XCRD #584863 
1924 Corona 3 XCRD #586710 
Mid-1920s Remington 
Another Mid-1920s Remington 
1925 Corona XCR #608924 
1926 Corona 3 XCR #611332 
1926 Corona 3 XCR #611366 
1926 Royal 92 #1030435 
1927 Corona XCR #613178 
1927 Underwood Semitic 46 #2217297-10 
Abish Meisel's late-1920s Corona 3 XC-R
What’s the Difference between a Yiddish and Hebrew Keyboard Layout?
The English keyboard is known as the QWERTY keyboard for its arrangement of the letters at the top left. Using this same system, I will term the Yiddish keyboard the KORAT keyboard, distinguishable from a modern-day Hebrew layout, the KRAT keyboard. There is not a great deal of difference between the two keyboards. The key distinction is to look for the double letter combinations [װ] and [ײ] in the center. This clearly distinguishes a Yiddish keyboard. A third marker is the key [אָ] at top left, the “o” in KORAT.
To get into the specifics about what makes a Yiddish keyboard layout, you first should know that Yiddish vowels are always written out as separate letters, where Hebrew does not need to do this and can simply write using consonants. Therefore, some vowels that you will see on a Yiddish keyboard will be the aleph with a kometz underneath: [אָ]. Again, this sound is the “o” in KORAT. Two other vowels, either “ey” (as in “ape”) or “ay” (as in “pie”) can be represented by putting two yud letters together: [ײ]. The first letter [אָ] would not have been made possible with only a Hebrew typewriter. The second letter combination [ײ] could have been made with a Hebrew typewriter by simply typing the yud-letter [י] twice. One last letter found on a Yiddish typewriter is a double-vav letter that makes a “v” sound: [װ]. This again can be made with a Hebrew typewriter by simply typing the vav letter [ו] twice in a row.
In summary, the test for a Yiddish typewriter is
- double letter combinations [װ] and [ײ]
- if there are no double letter combinations, it still might be a typewriter meant for mainly Yiddish writing, if there is the vowel [אָ].
Some other distinctions are that a Yiddish typewriter might include a pe-letter with a dot in the middle [פּ] to distinguish it (p) from the pe-letter without a dot (f) [פ]. Some typewriters also includes a beit-letter with [בּ] and without a dot [ב] to distinguish (b) from a second (v)-sound option.
Through standardization efforts by the Yiddish Institute YIVO, certain letters today require other lines above or below them when writing Yiddish. Not many of these Yiddish typewriters had these options. It is interesting to note that a Yiddish journal today that does not follow YIVO standard like The Algemeiner Zshurnal would be fully able to type on one of these Yiddish typewriters without any adaptions.((There are no lines (rofe) above the veys and fe. A silent alef is placed between vowels where otherwise one would need a dot (melupn vov or khirik yud) to disambiguate letters. There is no sin-dot. There is no pasekh-tsvey-yudn; the reader must be able to know when tsvey-yudn is (1) Northern Yiddish /aj/, Polish Yiddish /aː/, Ukrainian Yiddish /a/, and when it is (2) Northern and Ukrainian Yiddish /e/, Polish Yiddish /aj/. See http://www.cs.engr.uky.edu/~raphael/yiddish/makeyiddish.html))
Other Differences
Obviously, the carriage moves from right to left. In 1914 Underwood patented a double English-“Hebrew” typewriter that enabled the user to type both languages on a single piece of paper on the same carriage. I have not found one of these in real life. The few characters shown at left show this patent to be for a Yiddish KORAT typewriter and not a Hebrew KRAT keyboard. The characters also show how the keyboard layout was becoming standardized. Seemingly Underwood was adopting the KORAT layout that Remington had made earlier.
Those familiar with typewriters will note that these typewriters DO have all of the numbers 0-9, including the number 1. On most pre-’60s typewriters, the number 1 was left out because the typist could simply type the lowercase letter “L” and have it serve as a 1. This is however not possibly with the Hebrew alphabet. Since there is not “L,” it was necessary to include 1 as a separate key.
Shifting on Yiddish and Hebrew typewriters changes the font size! If one wanted to have a title in a different size, one simply uses the shift lock-key. It intrigues me that the choice was made for the shift to act in this way, instead of choosing to have fewer keys and have the shift put the various accents and/or print final characters instead. Nice bonus however.
Pre-History of the Yiddish Typewriter
Based on my own research, I believe the world’s first-ever Hebrew typewriter is located at the New York University’s Kevorkian Center for Middle East Studies, possibly unknown to even them about its significance. In February 1898, Yost Typewriter Company of London, under the advice of Chief Rabbi Dr. Moses Gaster, announced their Hebrew typewriter, which they advertised as being for both Hebrew vowelization and Yiddish. In an interview in 1901, Dr. Gaster gave his reasons for working on this “first of its kind” typewriter: “The reason which impelled me to devise such an instrument was my desire to foster the use of Hebrew as a living language. When we go back to our own land, Hebrew typewriters will come into everyday use. But they will be used much in the meanwhile, and they will be found most serviceable in copying Hebrew MSS. I get three simultaneous copies with great ease. At the present time I am copying on it an unknown part of the Chronicles of the famous Joseph Hakohen, from an autograph MS.”((Israel: The Jewish Magazine 2, no. 14, April 1898, p. 40)) In the picture taken at NYU, this Yost No. 4 was created both with standard Hebrew script (without vowels?) and a second option for the Hebrew script in so-called Rashi script, a cursive variety (shown in black keys). The letters are also arranged in a jumbled fashion not according to the alphabetical (aleph-beit) order, like QWERTY is to the English alphabet. This order was not preserved in the standard Hebrew keyboard of today. Robert Messenger writes about the history of the Hebrew typewriter after Gaster’s Yost No. 4.
The 1907 Blickensderfer Oriental / Orient Model 8 was able to type both German and Hebrew on the same typewriter. The Blickensderfer Niagra was a cheaper version for only Hebrew. There is no kometz-aleph key to define this as a full-blown Yiddish typewriter. The kometz was a separate accent key.
The 1920s Hammond typewriter offered a non-standard Yiddish typewriter, even though full Yiddish typewriters with Yiddish-specific characters had come out previously with Remington. Though there is no double-vav or double-yud character, there is a kometz-alef character [אָ]. It was advertised in 1922 as being for both vowelized Hebrew and Yiddish.
The folding Corona 3 XC-R typewriter, like the Hammond, has a non-standard Hebrew layout as established by this time by Remington and Underwood. The Yiddish playwright Abish Meisels and the journalist Morris Indritz used this model.((Jewish Museum London, Spertus Institute in Chicago)) There are no double letters, but it does have the [אָ] key at top left like the Hammond above, making this too a Yiddish typewriter. This typewriter also has all of the diacritical vowelization marks for Hebrew, making it an all-purpose Yiddish or Hebrew typewriter. The model name XC-R dedicated to this Yiddish line refers to the carriage moving from right to left. What also makes this a Yiddish typewriter is that the parts peculiar to this model are distinguished by “Y” as a suffix to the part numbers, suggesting it was conceived of as a Yiddish (and not Hebrew) typewriter.
The Yiddish Typewriter Layout Gave Birth to the Modern Hebrew Keyboard Layout
Which came first, the Hebrew keyboard layout as we know it today or the Yiddish layout? It’s a bit of a chicken or egg scenario, but it seems the Yiddish typewriter layout was made first. Even though the Hebrew typewriter was made first (for Moses Gaster’s Hebrew purposes), this did not have a standard keyboard layout as we know it today. Remington was the one who made their first Hebrew typewriter layout, but for Yiddish writers. This KORAT layout is the basis for the Hebrew KRAT layout in use today.
What makes researching the topic of early typewriters in the first decades of the 20th century difficult is that Yiddish wasn’t really widely known as “Yiddish” until the 1920s or 1930s. It was often referred to as “Hebrew” and sometimes with other names in English, like “Jargon.” So even though the Yiddish typewriter makers were making Yiddish typewriters, they referred to them as Hebrew, not making a distinction between the two. A clear example of this is a 1912 advertisement from a type slug foundry selling its Yiddish character set. It clearly labels it a “Hebrew typewriter,” but then provides a type sample in the Yiddish language. The only Yiddish typewriters available in 1912 would have been Remington and Underwood, but this type slug maker was hoping to find more customers.
The creator of the KORAT layout might have been Jacob Fishman (1878-1946), editor of the New York Yiddish-language newspaper The Jewish Morning Journal (דער מאָרגען זשורנאַל). His obituary states, “He is credited with having designed the first typewriter with Hebrew characters.”((JTA Daily News Bulletin 13, No. 292, 23 December 1946, p. 4. http://www.jta.org/1946/12/23/archive/hold-funeral-services-for-jacob-fishman-zionist-leader-and-ex-jewish-journal-editor. See also https://books.google.com/books?id=Q8QMAQAAMAAJ&q=yiddish+typewriter&dq=yiddish+typewriter&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjS76Px3PzPAhVJVD4KHTW1BAAQ6AEIPjAI.)) This newspaper printed the most amount of articles, announcements, and advertisements for typewriters among Yiddish periodicals before 1910. One reference is to an unknown 1906 Yiddish-English typewriter company “Mitzpeh” (מצפּה) located at 320 Broadway, Room 715. It is hailed as “the best invention of the century” for typing in both English and Yiddish.((February 18, 1906, p. 8))
The pictures above of the earliest Remington typewriters show them all to have the Yiddish characters on them. Even in 1914, when Underwood made its double “Hebrew”-English typewriter on the patent above, it had the Yiddish letters on it. I would be curious to know what was the first Hebrew typewriter to EXCLUDE the Yiddish characters from the standardized Yiddish keyboard layout.
In 1903, the year that Remington came out with the first marketed Yiddish typewriter, a newspaper reported “There is no instrument for writing Hebrew, and this fact a typewriter maker explains by saying that, although thousands use that language, business operations are not conducted in it very extensively.” ((Pitman’s Phonetic Journal, 15 Aug 1903, p. 655 citing Typewriter and Phonographic World)) It is difficult to know whether by Hebrew they meant Hebrew or Yiddish. In 1911, Remington announced it had 84 different languages with their own typewriters. In the article, they list having both Hebrew and Yiddish typewriters. 
But looking closer at the typing samples they give, one can see the same typewriter is used to type both languages, and specifically it is the Yiddish typewriter that is used to type the Hebrew sentence. The last word in the Hebrew sentence (chaim) is typed with the double-yud key only available on the Yiddish typewriter. This shows that a purely Hebrew typewriter wasn’t yet made. ((“Remington Maxim in Eighty-four Languages,” Business Equipment Topics 18, no. 1, p. 17-19, https://oztypewriter.blogspot.com/2014/02/remington-typewriters-in-84-languages.html))
The Yiddish Typewriter in its Peak Years
Around 1930 seems to be the peak production of Yiddish typewriters and innovations. Two points to be mentioned in the context of the sophistication in Yiddish typewriter usage are 1) alternative keyboard layouts and 2) shorthand.
1) Alternative layouts. Every language has its standard keyboard and then its detractors. In English, there is the QWERTY and the Dvorak layouts. Yiddish too had the Jonas layout from 1929. Tobias Jonas designed a layout, commissioned both Remington and Underwood to make his typewriters, and then wrote a manual to learn touch-typing with his layout. Unfortunately, this is the only Yiddish manual for learning how to type, but it uses the non-standard Jonas layout.((Tobias Jonas, Praktishe metode far der yidisher shrayb-mashin, 1929, p. 9.))
2) Shorthand. Yiddish even had its own shorthand system developed! Below is a sample from a 1934 article advocating typewritten Yiddish shorthand. The first line of the sample typed on an Underwood reads: “Leninism is Marxism from the era of Imperalism and proletariat revolution. More correct: Leninism–that is the theory….” (What else would you expect to be written on a Yiddish typewriter?!) In English, some 101 characters. In Yiddish shorthand, only 25.((N. Shatski, “Stenotipie: Kurtsshrift af der shraybmashinke” in Afn visnshaftlekhn front 5 and 6 (Minsk 1934), 127-138. The same article has an example of Yiddish shorthand written by hand.))
Post-History of the Yiddish Typewriter
A stepping stone between the manual typewriter and computers today was the “Yiddish golf ball,” made available for IBM Selectric I and II Typewriters in 1983.((AJR Information 38, no. 9, September 1983, p. 4. )) The Selectric golf ball’s manual states it was designed by Hugh Denman of Queen’s University. “It will now be possible for the first time to produce perfectly aligned bi-lingual camera-read copy for offset litho printing.”
Today, Yiddish can be written on a computer keyboard using different programs in addition to your operating system’s keyboard settings. Tavultesoft Keyman Desktop offers Yiddish as one of their languages, which is what I use on my PC. A website titled “The Yiddish Typewriter” allows one to write Yiddish in phonetic English and it gives you the corresponding Hebrew characters.
And in case you’re wondering where Yiddish typewriters go to die, you can see this image of a Yiddish typewriter that was chopped up to sell for jewelry.
How do you say typewriter in Yiddish?
In standardized Yiddish today, you find the word shraybmashin שרײַבמאַשין or (with a hyphen) שרײַב־מאַשין, based on the German Schreibmaschine. In the early twentieth century though, the English word tayprayter טײפרײטער or (with a hyphen) tayp-rayter טײפ־רײטער was used. This word made its way into the works of the American Yiddish authors Jacob Gordin and Morris Rosenfeld. Jacob Gordin refers to one of his characters as a tayprayter-meydel טײפּרײטער־מײדל, a typewriter girl (typist). A 1929 manual for Yiddish typewriters from New York used both the word shrayb-mashin in its main title and tayprayter in its subtitle.((Based on the examples I saw, “to write something with a typewriter” is “epes shraybn af a shraybmashin.” “Es iz tsugeshribn gevorn af a shraybmashin” (It was written on a typewriter) and “a shraybmashin-kopie fun … artikel” (a typewritten copy of … article).))
For additional Yiddish typewriter vocabulary, here were what some of the parts were called:
- shift key – umshelter – אומשעלטער
- backspace – rikshteler – ריקשטעלער
- caps lock – festshteler – פֿעסטשטעלער
- carriage – vogn – װאָגן
- keyboard – shlisl-bret – שליסל־ברעט
- key – shlisl – שליסל
- spacebar – צװישן־רױס־שטאַנג
Buying a Yiddish Typewriter
Expect to pay between 200 and 400 dollars for a Yiddish typewriter online. I have been tracking the market on Yiddish typewriters since 2016, and I have found about five put on sale per year. In general, portable typewriters sell on the lesser end of this estimate than a standard typewriter. Only one typewriter went for well above this rate ($900), a custom standard typewriter made with full diacritics.
Keep your eyes peeled for those double letters though, because Yiddish typewriters are often sold as “Hebrew typewriters.” Set “yiddish typewriter” as a saved/followed search on Ebay, and you will receive an e-mail when someone posts an item that matches that criteria. I would suggest also saving “hebrew typewriter” in order to catch those Yiddish typewriters in disguise.
