The Jews are a universally recognised people. Their current diaspora has its origins in the dispersal that followed the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, and later after the revolt led by Bar Košeba between the years 132 and 135, which was crushed by Emperor Hadrian. With the abandonment of Hebrew as a spoken language centuries before Christ – and the subsequent abandonment of Aramaic, the language that succeeded Hebrew in everyday life – they acquired the languages of the countries in which they settled, changing them so substantially, however, that they turned them into "Jewish languages". The most famous of these is Judeo-German, or Yiddish, a language built on Rhineland dialects of German spoken around the end of the first millennium. Before the nazi genocide, Yiddish (in two main dialect forms) was spoken by 10 million people throughout Eastern Europe. Since the 16th century, Yiddish has produced a substantial body of secular literature. It is still spoken today by more than a million people, mainly outside Europe. Other Jewish languages formed in a similar way include Judeo-Spanish, which disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 when the Jews were expelled from Spain towards the eastern Mediterranean, although it survived throughout the Ottoman Empire and in the countries that succeeded it. It is known as Djudyo or Djudezmo. Judeo-French disappeared in the 13th century and Judeo-Occitan in the 20th. A Judeo-Arabic language continues to thrive and there are other, more localised Jewish languages, for example in Iran and India. Of all these languages only Yiddish and to a lesser extent Djudyo are spoken in the European Union. With regard to the question of Jewish identity, many volumes have been written on the subject, and the very fact that there is debate about whether to write the word "Jew" with a capital or a small letter neatly illustrates the complexity of the issue.
Yiddish enjoys protection in Europe under Recommendation 1291 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, of 20 March 1996.

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