boyuvke

English dictionary entry

Meanings

noun
  1. A Jewish armed self-defence unit during the first Russian revolution

Word forms

boyuvke boyuvkes boyuvka

Etymology

From Russian "boy", combat, battle; hence, Yiddish "boyuvke", combat unit, commando. e.g. The last decade of the 19th century in Babruysk was characterized by pogroms as a result of the assassination of the Russian emperor Alexander II. However, most of the attacks were repelled by self-organized Jewish armed units called boyuvkes.

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.