Judeo-Arabic Languages

Judeo-Arabic dialects (, ; ; ) are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Iraqi Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).

''Judeo-Arabic'' can also refer to Classical Arabic written in the Hebrew script, particularly in the Middle Ages.

Many significant Jewish works, including a number of religious writings by Saadia Gaon, Maimonides and Judah Halevi, were originally written in Judeo-Arabic, as this was the primary vernacular language of their authors.

Characteristics

The Arabic spoken by Jewish communities in the Arab world differed slightly from the Arabic of their non-Jewish neighbours. These differences were partly due to the incorporation of some words from Hebrew and other languages and partly geographical, in a way that may reflect a history of migration. For example, the Judeo-Arabic of Egypt, including in the Cairo community, resembled the dialect of Alexandria rather than that of Cairo (Blau). Similarly, Baghdad Jewish Arabic is reminiscent of the dialect of Mosul. Many Jews in Arab countries were bilingual in Judeo-Arabic and the local dialect of the Muslim majority.

Like other Jewish languages and dialects, Judeo-Arabic languages contain borrowings from Hebrew and Aramaic. This feature is less marked in translations of the Bible, as the authors clearly took the view that the business of a translator is to translate.

Dialects

* Judeo-Iraqi
** Judeo-Baghdadi
* Judeo-Moroccan
* Judeo-Tripolitanian
* Judeo-Tunisian
* Judeo-Yemeni

History

Jews in Arabic, Muslim majority countries wrote—sometimes in their dialects, sometimes in a more classical style—in a mildly adapted Hebrew alphabet rather than using the Arabic script, often including consonant dots from the Arabic alphabet to accommodate phonemes that did not exist in the Hebrew alphabet.

By around 800 CE, most Jews within the Islamic Empire (90% of the world’s Jews at the time) were native speakers of Arabic like the populations around them. The language quickly became the central language of Jewish scholarship and communication, enabling Jews to participate in the greater epicenter of learning at the time, which meant that they could be active participants in secular scholarship and civilization. The widespread usage of Arabic not only unified the Jewish community located throughout the Islamic Empire but also facilitated greater communication with other ethnic and religious groups, which led to important manuscripts of polemic, like the Toledot Yeshu, being written or published in Arabic or Judeo-Arabic.

Some of the most important books of medieval Jewish thought were originally written in medieval Judeo-Arabic, as well as certain halakhic works and biblical commentaries. Later they were translated into medieval Hebrew so that they could be read by contemporaries elsewhere in the Jewish world, and by others who were literate in Hebrew. These include:

* Saadia Gaon's ''Emunoth ve-Deoth'' (originally ), his tafsir (biblical commentary and translation) and ''siddur'' (explanatory content, not the prayers themselves)
* David ibn Merwan al-Mukkamas
* Solomon ibn Gabirol's ''Tikkun Middot ha-Nefesh''
* Bahya ibn Paquda's ''Kitab al-Hidāya ilā Fara'id al-Qulūb'', translated by Judah ben Saul ibn Tibbon as ''Chovot HaLevavot''
* Judah Halevi's ''Kuzari''
* Maimonides' ''Commentary on the Mishnah'', ''Sefer Hamitzvot'', ''The Guide for the Perplexed'', and many of his letters and shorter essays.

Most communities also had a traditional translation of the Bible into Judeo-Arabic, known as a ''sharḥ'' ("explanation"): for more detail, see Bible translations into Arabic. The term ''sharḥ'' sometimes came to mean "Judeo-Arabic" in the same way that "Targum" was sometimes used to mean the Aramaic language.

Present day

In the years following the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the end of the Algerian War, and Moroccan and Tunisian independence, most Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews in Arab countries were expelled, without their property, mainly for mainland France and for Israel. Their distinct Arabic dialects in turn did not thrive in either country, and most of their descendants now speak French or Modern Hebrew almost exclusively; thus resulting in the entire continuum of Judeo-Arabic dialects being considered endangered languages. This stands in stark contrast with the historical status of Judeo-Arabic: in the early Middle Ages, speakers of Judeo-Arabic far outnumbered the speakers of Yiddish. There remain small populations of speakers in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Lebanon, Yemen, Israel and the United States.

Orthography

See also

* Arabic language in Israel
* Judeo-Berber language
* Judeo-Iraqi Arabic
* Baghdad Jewish Arabic
* Judeo-Moroccan Arabic
* Judeo-Tunisian Arabic
* Judeo-Yemeni Arabic
* Judeo-Syrian Arabic
* Letter of the Karaite elders of Ascalon
* Arab Jews
* Haketia

Endnotes

Bibliography

* Blanc, Haim, ''Communal Dialects in Baghdad'': Harvard 1964
* Blau, Joshua, ''The Emergence and Linguistic Background of Judaeo-Arabic'': OUP, last edition 1999
* Blau, Joshua, ''A Grammar of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic'': Jerusalem 1980 (in Hebrew)
* Blau, Joshua, ''Studies in Middle Arabic and its Judaeo-Arabic variety'': Jerusalem 1988 (in English)
* Blau, Joshua, ''Dictionary of Mediaeval Judaeo-Arabic Texts'': Jerusalem 2006
* Mansour, Jacob, ''The Jewish Baghdadi Dialect: Studies and Texts in the Judaeo-Arabic Dialect of Baghdad'': Or Yehuda 1991
* Heath, Jeffrey, ''Jewish and Muslim dialects of Moroccan Arabic'' (Routledge Curzon Arabic linguistics series): London, New York, 2002.

External links

Alan Corré's Judeo-Arabic Literature site, via the Internet Archive



Reka
Kol Yisrael, a radio station broadcasting a daily program in Judeo-Moroccan Arabic

Jewish Language Research Website
(description and bibliography)

Tafsir Rasag
a translation of the Torah into literary Judeo-Arabic, at Sefaria

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