Jewish Languages - Background

Background

The oldest and most treasured books of the Jewish people have been the Torah and Tanakh (i.e. the Hebrew Bible) written almost entirely in Biblical Hebrew, with a small amount of Biblical Aramaic, and widely used by Jews during their history. Jews zealously studied these detailed Hebrew texts, observed the commandments formulated in them, based their prayers on them, and spoke its language. Jews maintained a belief that Hebrew was God's "language" as well (as it was the language God uses in the Torah itself), hence its name "lashon hakodesh" ("Holy language" or "tongue").

The earliest surviving Hebrew inscription, the Gezer calendar, dates from the 10th century BCE; it was written in the so-called Paleo-Hebrew alphabet (ktav ivrit), which continued to be used through the time of Solomon's Temple until changed to the new "Assyrian lettering" (ktav ashurit), the "square-script", by Ezra the Scribe following the Babylonian Exile. During this time there were also changes in the language, as it developed towards Mishnaic Hebrew. Until then, most Jews had spoken Hebrew in Israel and Judea, however, by the destruction of the Second Temple, most had already shifted to speaking Aramaic, with a significant number in the large diaspora speaking Koine Greek. To cater for their needs, the Bible had been translated into the Aramaic Targum and the Greek Septuagint. As Jews emigrated to far-flung countries, and as the languages of the countries they were in changed, they often adopted the local languages, and thus came to speak a great variety of languages. During the early Middle Ages, Aramaic continued to be the principal Jewish language. Most of the Talmud is written in Aramaic. Rashi wrote in Hebrew with references to the French language of his day. Later in the Middle Ages, most Jewish literary activity was carried out in Judeo-Arabic, which was Arabic written in the Hebrew alphabet; this is the language Maimonides wrote in.

Hebrew itself remained in vigorous use for religious and official uses such as for all religious events, Responsa, for writing Torah scrolls, and along with Aramaic, retained a position of importance for the writing of marriage contracts and other literary purposes.

As time passed, these Jewish dialects often became so different from the parent languages as to constitute new languages, typically with a heavy influx of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and other innovations within the language. Thus were formed a variety of languages specific to the Jewish community; perhaps the most notable of these are Yiddish in Europe (mainly from German) and Ladino (from Spanish), originally in al-Andalus but spreading to other locations, mainly around the Mediterranean, due to the 1492 expulsion of practicing Jews from Spain and the persecution by the Inquisition of the conversos.

Jews in the diaspora have tended to live in segregated communities. This segregation was partly enforced on them by the wider communities, and partly by choice in an endeavor to maintain their own culture. These sociological factors contributed to the formation of dialects that often developed and diverged to form separate languages.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Yiddish was the main language of Jews in Eastern Europe (thus making it the language spoken by the majority of Jews in the world), while Ladino was widespread in the Maghreb, Turkey, Bulgaria and Greece; smaller groups in Europe spoke such languages as Judeo-Italian, Yevanic, or Karaim. The Jews of the Arab world spoke Judeo-Arabic varieties, while those of Iran spoke Dzhidi (Judeo-Persian); smaller groups spoke Judeo-Berber, Judeo-Tat or even, in Kurdistan, Judeo-Aramaic. The Beta Israel were abandoning their Kayla language for Amharic, while the Cochin Jews continued to speak Malayalam.