Hebrew cursive
Hebrew cursive is what Hebrew and Yiddish were actually written in by hand, and it shares almost no shapes with the square print letters used in books. Readers fluent in printed Hebrew routinely cannot read a family letter in it.
- 22 letters, none resembling their printed forms
- Written right to left
- Five letters take a different final form
כתב רהוט
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Why it looks like that
The cursive hand developed separately from the square script used for printing and religious texts, and became the ordinary hand for correspondence and record-keeping across Eastern Europe. Because the two systems look unrelated, literacy in printed Hebrew carries over poorly, which is the usual reason a Yiddish family letter is illegible to its own descendants.
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