Is a Jewish Language Really Still Spoken by Non-Jews in Bavaria?

Mosaic reader Brigitte Goldstein writes:

I recently came across a post on Facebook about a Jewish language that is still spoken by the non-Jewish inhabitants of a village in Bavaria called Schopfloch. It’s in German, but if you can read it, you may find it of interest.

I read the Facebook post that Ms. Goldstein sent me. It’s about a local Bavarian isolect of German, hardly a separate “language,” that is known to its speakers as Lachoudisch and that is replete with Hebrew and Hebrew-derived words. Lachoudisch was written about in a New York Times article in 1984, has been discussed in various other places, and is the subject of a slim German book (of which I unfortunately don’t possess a copy) published in 1998 by a former mayor of Schopfloch, Hans Rainer Hoffmann, as Lachoudisch sprechen: Sprache zwischen Gegenwart und Vergangenheit (“Speaking Lachoudisch: A Language Between Present and Past”). Its existence is thus hardly fresh news.