Judeo-Arabic

JUDEO-ARABIC

The various forms of Arabic spoken or written by Jews from before the rise of Islam to modern times.

Like all Diaspora Jewish languages, Judeo-Arabic is distinguished from its non-Jewish cognate, Arabic, in the use of the Hebrew alphabet, a significant number of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and elements, and its own distinguishing grammatical, syntactical, and phonological forms.

In the Middle Ages, written Judeo-Arabic, which depending upon the subject matter ranged from Classical to Middle Arabic in style, became a primary medium of Jewish intellectual creativity for theologians, philosophers, grammarians, lexicographers, and legal scholars, and was also the primary medium of correspondence. Only for poetry (which in Islamic society is considered the supreme national art form) was Hebrew the principal language of expression. Owing to the decline of Hellenistic humanism after the High Middle Ages and the increased social isolation of Jews within the context of a larger Arab world after the thirteenth century, the regional varieties of modern Judeo-Arabic that emerged in the late fifteenth century were characterized by their vernacular nature.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Judeo-Arabic books and newspapers were published from Morocco to India (where there was an Iraqi Jewish mercantile colony). Many of the books were translations or adaptations of European popular literature and, in some instances, works of Haskalah Hebrew writers. By the 1920s, Judeo-Arabic publication was declining in many places as French became the main language of high culture for many Jews, because of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools. Nevertheless, it remained the spoken language for the great majority of Jews until their mass exodus to Israel in the mid-1950s. Judeo-Arabic is dying out among the second and third generations born in Israel, France, and the Americas, who tend to speak their national languages (Hebrew, French, and English, Spanish, or Portuguese).

see also alliance israÉlite universelle (aiu); haskalah.

Bibliography

Stillman, Norman A. "Language Patterns in Islamic and Judaic Societies." In Islam and Judaism: 1400 Years of Shared Values, edited by S. Wasserstrom. Portland, OR: Institute for Judaic Studies in the Pacific Northwest, 1991.

Stillman, Norman A. The Language and Culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco: An Ethnolinguistic Study. Manchester, U.K.: University of Manchester, 1988.

norman stillman