Marjorie Wolfe read the same article in The New York Times that I did.
The article, captioned “At relativity, a genius; as a sailor, not so much: Recalling Einstein’s summer of 1939,” was based on an interview with Long Island resident David Rothman, whose father owned a general store in Cutchogue Harbor that Albert Einstein frequented during a summer spent in a cottage overlooking Long Island Sound. Einstein, as is well-known, loved to sail; less well-known — at least to me — was that he was, apparently, a comically bad sailor, repeatedly running himself aground and capsizing. What I also didn’t know was that he affectionately called his “clunky little sailboat,” as it’s described by the author of the Times article, Corey Kilgannon, “Tinef” — which, Kilgannon explains, is “Yiddish for ‘worthless’ or ‘junk.’” And Ms. Wolfe writes to ask: What kind of Yiddish word is tinef? No Yiddish speaker asked by her about it, she says, ever heard of it.
Actually, tinef (stress on the first syllable), deriving from Hebrew tinnuf (stress on the last syllable), is a Yiddish word, though it’s not from Yiddish that Einstein was likely to be familiar with it — and certainly not from the Yiddish of Eastern Europe, which is what we usually mean by Yiddish. Tinef in Eastern-European Yiddish means “filth,” not “junk.” This is how it is defined both by Uriel Weinreich in his “Modern English-Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary” and by Nahum Stutchkoff in his thesaurus Der oytser fun der yiddisher shprakh. Alexander Harkavy alone, in his Yiddish-English-Hebrew Dictionary, also gives the meaning of “worthless goods,” but only in the combination — which we shall get to in a moment — of tinef-tinoyfes.
The noun tinnuf is not found in the Bible, although the Hebrew verb le’tannef from which it is formed does occur once there, in the sense of “to dirty,” in the verse in The Song of Songs: “I have put off my coat; how shall I put it on? I have washed my feet; how shall I dirty them [eykhakha atanfem]?” The noun first appears in rabbinic literature, where it means “filth,” “impurity,” or “defilement,” and in a medical context, a discharge from the uterus. It also turns up in the secondary form of tinnofet — and here we get a bit closer to Einstein’s sailboat, since we read in the Mishnah, in the tractate of Bava Batra: “If someone sells someone else fruit, the buyer agrees to accept a twenty-fourth part tinnofet; if figs — ten percent with worms; if a cellar of wine — ten percent that is spoiled.” Tinnofet is thus rotten or worthless fruit, which is but a short step from “junk.”
Einstein’s boat, however, was not call Tinofet (or Tinoyfes, in Eastern-European pronunciation), but rather Tinef. Moreover, Einstein certainly didn’t speak Eastern-European Yiddish and never had much occasion in his life to be exposed to it, neither in Germany nor in America. Could he, then, have picked up tinef in the sense of “junk” from Western-European Yiddish, which though now extinct was still being spoken in parts of Germany in his childhood? Even though he came from a relatively assimilated Jewish family that spoke only proper German, this is theoretically possible, since tinef, as we shall see, certainly meant “junk” in Western Yiddish. But there’s no need to resort to such a hypothesis. Spelled Tinnef, the word also meant junk in colloquial German, and indeed still means that today, as well as drivel or foolishness. As the German-Jewish writer Andreas Nechama puts it in his Jiddisch in Berliner Jargon, the word “describes something of inferior quality, and if you can’t tell it when you see it, it describes your judgment.”
Quite obviously, German borrowed Tinnef from Western-European Yiddish, possibly via Rotwelsch, the German underworld argot in which Yiddish words were common. Moreover, tinnef or tennef also means junk in the Dutch slang of Amsterdam known as Bargoens, which, too, is full of Yiddish words, and must have meant junk in Western Yiddish everywhere.
Even though Albert Einstein had a strong sense of Jewish identity, the name of his sailboat, then, is no indication of Jewish knowledge on his part, or even of an association with other Jews. It came from the German-speaking environment he grew up in. It’s not like the name of Freud’s dog.
“Freud’s dog?” you ask. Well, yes. Freud had a dog named Yofi — or Jofi, as he would have spelled it in German, except that you won’t find Jofi in a good German dictionary the way you’ll find Tinnef. Yofi does, however, mean “beauty” in Hebrew (in Israel today it’s a ubiquitous word meaning “great” or “terrific”), and there’s no doubt that Freud, who had a far better Hebrew and Jewish education as a boy than he generally cared to admit in later life, got it from there. Yofi was thus a Jewish dog. Tinef was not a Jewish sailboat, even if Einstein is said to have sailed it like a Jewish sailor.
The link to this lovely article on the main page of the Forward describes Einstein as an "assimilated German Jew". Philogos calls him more appropriately as one who "had a strong sense of Jewish identity". Einstein participated in the founding of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem which marked the climax of the Hebrew renaissance and expressed the renewal of Jewish national life in the Land of Israel. He also bequeathed his papers to the university where they are held until today. Obviously, an assimilated Jew wouldn't take an interest in such things. Why, then, would the editor of the main Forward page define Einstein as an assimilated Jew - and not as having "a strong sense of Jewish identity"?
Tinef? Yiddish? My Aunt Trudy (GERTRUDE) born in Cologne (KOLN) Germany always referred to costume jewelry as Tinef. She spoke not a word of Yiddish, in fact she referred to it as a peasant language from the east. My grandmother, also of German extraction, but born in NYC 107 years ago referred to the merchandise at F.W. Woolworth or Alexander's as Tinef. Again, she spoke no Yiddish and refereed to the German of my Great Grandmother as 'music to her ears' and Yiddish as an attack on her aural senses. Grandmother was referred to in the family as the 'Viennese Pricess'. So these two ladies from different areas of the German Jewish world used the word Tinef to refer to inexpensive merchandise of dubious quaility. Perhaps your looking for a Yiddish/Hebrew source is a futile search.
My grandmother, who was from Mohilev, now in Belarus, always used tinnef for manure, solid waste from man or animals. She believed that dreck was a dirty word and tinnef was clean. If you wish you can say that Einstein's boat was called manure or, better yet, s__t.
Tinnef is a word quite familiar to me from my childhood in Germany, where my family owned a textile store. There, we often distinguished between quality and shoddy wares by using that term. Of course we spoke a "judeo-german" argot with many real Hebrew and quite a few germanized Yiddish words in it. Tinnef also served as a judgemental term about all sorts of inferior things. So Einstein, born and growing up in Ulm, Bavaria, knew that he was describing an inferior or possibly even damaged boat with that well-chosen term
Einstein never visited Germany and refused to involve himself in any activities in post war Germany. He was genuinely annoyed with his fiend Max Born who vent back to live in post war Germany.Einstein never classified himsel as a"German Jew" (see correspondence with Emmanuel Velikovsky)
My recollection of "tinef" goes back to the Yiddish song "zehn scheine bruderlach" which is a version (probably an earlier one) of "ten little Indians". In the song the initial ten brothers trade in various commodities and after each stanza one brother is gone and the commodity changes. The stanza where there are six brothers goes: sechs scheine bruderlach seinen mir gevesn, gehandled, gehandled hobn mir mit TINEF, geblibn, geblibn seinen mir mit finef (five). I have a hazy recollection that the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger referred to this song in one of his novels dealing with a Jewish-German family. Chances are that Einstein was indeed aware of the word and its meaning.
Since Mr. Einstein was a self-depreciating man, perhaps one could entertain the possiblity that his tiny sailboat's name "Tinef" is the comic antithesis to a Chinese "junk"?
Andreas Nachama is also the Chief Rabbi of Berlin.
As I sit here at the computer in a building extension over the exact spot that Prof Einstein's sail boat was stored the winter of 1939-40, my recollection was that the Professor never had the Name Tinnef painted on his lovely boat. It was merely a casual remark he made about his pride and joy with a smile on his lips and a twinkle in his eyes to my Father David. While the derivation of the word is interesting I don't think the Professor made its background a priority.
The Forward welcomes reader comments in order to promote thoughtful discussion on issues of importance to the Jewish community. In the interest of maintaining a civil forum, the Forward requires that all commenters be appropriately respectful toward our writers, other commenters and the subjects of the articles. Vigorous debate and reasoned critique are welcome; name-calling and personal invective are not. While we generally do not seek to edit or actively moderate comments, the Forward reserves the right to remove comments for any reason.