Q&A: Are the Yiddish and the Hebrew cursive scripts the same style?

Pretty much—since the modern Hebrew cursive (MHC) is based on the Ashkenazi cursive style that began to emerge in the 18th century, or thereabouts.

Here’s a fairly typical example of Yiddish handwriting:

Typical example of Yiddish handwriting
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Q&A: Are there rules to making ligatures in handwritten Hebrew?

True ligatures, in the sense of a character made up of two enjoined letters, like œ or , don’t really exist in Hebrew—with the possible exception of the double yod (ײַ), which was common in Yiddish, but little used in Hebrew (most people aren’t even aware that has its own keystroke).

If you mean instances of joined-up letters in modern Hebrew cursive (as I suspect you do), those are mostly precluded by the very nature of that cursive.

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Q&A: What is the history of the cursive Hebrew type (כתב)?

Cursive forms of Hebrew arose in every Jewish community during the Second Exile to communicate or write in Hebrew in secular contexts (i.e., when not writing Scripture). As in the case of the cursive forms of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt, and the lowercase letters and italics in the Roman script in the Middle Ages, the cursive forms of Hebrew developed in a bid to write the printed letters more quickly. Thus, the three-strokes of printed letters such as aleph, bet and tzadi became just two-stroke ones; and two-stroke letters such as gimmel, dalet, etc. became continuous, fluid strokes, etc.:


Evolution of cursive aleph and dalet (from “Aleph Through the Looking Glass”)

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