Mutual intelligibility is evidence of overlap, not of belonging to a dialect continuum.
That's defined by phonology, and Yiddish has never been part of the German continuum.
This a just a case of two languages being closely related.
If the two parents of a tongue are lexis and phono, Yiddish and German are similar appearing half sisters that share the lexis one but not the phonology one
IEsoecially because if we speak Yiddish to a German as we would to each other, the German wouldn’t be able to follow, no matter how extensive his mastery of German dialects may be.
Many sentences of the type “A herring iz a fish” that would be easy for a German to figure out wouldn’t be that much harder for a Dutch or English speaker. Thanks to the definite articles in Yiddish looking like the German ones, ‘der’, ‘di’, ‘dos’ and ‘dem’, and the indefinite article looking like the English ones, ‘a’ and ‘an’, one can construct large numbers of sentences that are easily intelligible in German or English. For a German-English bilingual, the number is huge. However, in real life, one is unlikely to get several of these in a row, so following a conversation is out of the question for a German without specific knowledge. The very fact that a bilingual is advantaged points to something other than dialect divergence defining the difference. In fact, also knowing Aramaic, Hebrew, French or Russian would all help a German decipher Yiddish.
The ancestors of Yiddish speakers came to Europe as Aramaic speakers with a Hebraicized Aramaic who picked up a Romance vernacular based on old French in Champagne and Burgundy. That tongue was heavily Germanized without the loss of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin elements, so it began more as a fusion of existing Jewish speech with Middle High German than an actual dialect of German, and was normally written in the Aramaic square script, which also served to keep it apart from the German sprachbund.
The German elements are a mix of Rhineland, Alpine and Bavarian forms, and don’t cohere to any particular German dialect. Since the Germanizing occurred, the distance between Yiddish and any form of German has only been increasing; with the continued influx of Hebrew, Latin elements mostly from Italian and French, a variable amount of Slavicizing having occurred especially in the northern and eastern forms and considerable penetration of Anglo lexis since the 1880s.
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