Enjoyed reading this thread, and apologies for a drifting question, but I'd rather keep it here than launch a separate thread which could evolve into yet another dialogue of the deaf about current events in what we know with a certain unconscious irony as the Holy Land.

Having long been attracted to multilingual wordplay, I was fascinated as a student by the very idea of Yiddish. I took a course on Yiddish while spending a year studying German in Germany, but it was a descriptive course rather than one designed to impart an ability to speak the language, and I was discouraged by the fact that Yiddish was written in Hebrew characters and that anyway one would really want to have a fairly good idea of both the slavic languages and Hebrew to make sense of it.

Some of the books which I bought at the time, particularly collections of Jewish jokes and sayings by Salcia Landmann, refer to the Ostjuden who are represented as somewhat exotic. I could never figure out if this term refers to unassimilated Jews from the Pale of Settlement who might seem exotic to more assimilated Ashkenazim in Germany, or to Sephardim whose "territory" would extend to the area which we now call the Middle East. From the context it seemed to refer to the latter. Can anyone help in clarifying this?