arly communities of German and Alsatian Jews arriving in the city in the 18th and 19th centuries, settling and working first in lower Manhattan, likely had some knowledge of the language. The last major wave of German Jews, coming in the tens of thousands as refugees to Washington Heights in the 1930s, apparently contained some as well. According to the historian Steven Lowenstein, "Among many formerly rural Jews one could hear strong accents of the local South German dialects; in the Breuer congregation the Frankfurt dialect was often noticeable. Among some members of the oldest generation, especially those born in villages in the 1880s and before, the German spoken was still heavily influenced by the now almost obsolete Western Yiddish dialects once spoken by western European Jews. Speakers of these dialects did not sound much like Yiddish speakers from eastern Europe. In fact both they and eastern European Jews would probably have denied the connection between their 'jüdisch-deutsch' and the better known eastern European Yiddish. Yet there were connections clear to all scholars of Yiddish. Many Washington Heights Jews who no longer spoke with the characteristic Jewish accent of the very old rural Jews still threw many Jewish phrases into their German."