I first became interested in Jewish Words when I married a Jewish girl from Brooklyn. My wife is third generation American, from an Ivy League school and fluent in Yiddish. She learned the basics from her Grandfather, a native speaker, took a couple of courses in college and now she can shmooze with anyone in the ganze oilam.

I began to feel that I'd missed out. Not just me, but my parents and grandparents too. It would drive my wife meshugah when they'd misuse or mispronounce the handful of Yiddish words they did know, shlepping (instead of schepping) naches from their grandchildren as if the satisfaction their offspring provided was extraordinarily burdensome.

Gradually, I learned how my birthright had been stolen from me in exchange for a thin gruel of Anglo-Jewry gentility. I discovered the story of how the masses of Eastern European immigrants to Britain in between 1880-1920 were acculturated with ruthless efficiency by the West End Anglo-Jewish establishment, anxious about what a lot of uncouth foreigners would do to their standing in British Society. A whole network of Anglicising institutions sprang up around the turn of the twentieth century, from the Jews' Free School to the Jewish Lads and Girls Brigade all bent on inculcating English manners, discipline and etiquette, literature, history and geography as well as forbidding the utterance of a single word of Yiddish. No doubt there was a modicum of disinterested benevolence in all this philanthropy, but there was a hefty element of communal control too, "designed to protect the status of the communal elite at the expense of the culture of the communal poor," as the historian Bill Williams put it.

Israel Zangwill expressed the spirit of the time, in this ditty (originally composed in Yiddish),

The experiment in social engineering succeeded magnificently. Within a couple of decades, British Jewry had reared a new generation who were constitutionally incapable of saying "oy oy oy" but stood in the front row at the Proms, and although they couldn't make head nor tail of a page of Talmud, they knew the England batting averages by heart.

My generation growing up in the 70's and 80's knew that the ersatz anglicized Judaism of our parents somehow lacked the real geshmack. Many of us understandably drifted further away from Anglo-Jewishness, but some tried to retrace our grandparents steps backs towards more authentic brands of Yiddishkeit. Throughout the community there was a renaissance of Jewish learning from the Orthodox Project Seed to the cross-denominational Limmud conference. Secular Jewish identity bloomed too, through literature, drama and music. Oxford University became an unlikely fountainhead of Yiddish language and culture.

From the 1970's onwards one could pursue these journeys under the flag of convenience of multi-culturalism. Monolithic Englishness was crumbling and gradually it became acceptable to be British and something else. Not yet the effortlessly hyphenated identity of Jewish-Americans but nevertheless, Jews took their place among the ranks of recognized ethnic minorities in whom our post-imperial British hosts began to display a belated curiosity.

True, it took some time to realize that the multi-cultural dispensation applied equally to Jews. While Arundati Roy hooked the Booker Prize, Jewish fiction was still being rejected by (often Jewish) agents and publishers as "too Jewish," perhaps because our grandparents did such an excellent job of presenting British Jewry as thoroughly mainstream and boring. But with Naomi Alderman now being touted by Penguin as the Jewish Zadie Smith, and her Orthodox North West London milieu described on the jacket blurbs as "exotic", it seems that the cat is at long last out of the bag: in many ways Jews are jolly odd. And to my grandmother's surprise and relief, public realisation of this fact is leading not to Zangwill's feared "hatred and repatriation" but instead to a spate anthropologically curious Channel 4 documentaries.

These cultural shifts have profoundly altered the place of Jewish words in the English language and in the language of English Jews, in a way that hasn't happened since the Renaissance. Around that time there was a flurry of interest in Hebrew among English scholars which engendered an injection of Hebrew words into English. Hebrew was seen as a mythical, almost magical language. It was the key to esoteric Jewish teachings for example Kabbalah, which were thought to contain within them secrets of Christian doctrine. Hebrew and Aramaic were also necessary to understand the distinctive logic of the Talmud was thought to be the chief bastion of Jewish resistance to Christianity. Among the Hebrew-based words that entered English around this time were cabal and abracadabra, expressions with a magical, esoteric flavour.

In the last decade or two, Yiddish and Hebrew terms have again begun to find their way into everyday British English (just as they trickled into American English half a century ago.) Today goyim wish you Happy Hannukah, laugh knowingly when you call yourself a schlemiel and decry the chutzpah of other motorists who double park. When the Royal Society of Architects advertises its Institute as the perfect place to hold your Simcha, it's a sign either that the market for parties in posh surroundings is mostly Jewish, or that something intriguing is happening to the English language.