Sephardi Hebrew - History

History

There have been several theories on the origins of the different Hebrew reading traditions. The basic cleavage is between those who believe that the differences arose in medieval Europe and those who believe that they reflect older differences between the pronunciations of Hebrew and Aramaic current in different parts of the Fertile Crescent, that is to say Judaea, Galilee, Syria, northern Mesopotamia and Babylonia proper.

Within the first group of theories, Zimmels believed that the Ashkenazi pronunciation arose in late medieval Europe and that the pronunciation prevailing in France and Germany in the time of the Tosafists was similar to the Sephardic. His evidence for this was the fact that Asher ben Jehiel, a German who became chief rabbi of Toledo, never refers to any difference of pronunciation, though he is normally very sensitive to differences between the two communities.

The difficulty with the second group of theories is that we do not know for certain what the pronunciations of these countries actually were and how far they differed. Since the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, if not before, the Sephardic pronunciation of the vowels became standard in all these countries, ironing out any differences that previously existed. This makes it harder to adjudicate between the different theories on the relationship between today's pronunciation systems and those of ancient times.

Leopold Zunz believed that the Ashkenazi pronunciation was derived from that of Palestine in Geonic times (7th-11th centuries CE), while the Sephardi pronunciation was derived from that of Babylonia. This theory was supported by the fact that, in some respects, Ashkenazi Hebrew resembles the western dialect of Syriac while Sephardi Hebrew resembles the eastern, e.g. Eastern Syriac Peshitta as against Western Syriac Peshito. Ashkenazi Hebrew in its written form also resembles Palestinian Hebrew in its tendency to male spellings (see Mater lectionis).

Others, including Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, believed that the distinction is more ancient, and represents the distinction between the Judaean and Galilean dialects of Hebrew in Mishnaic times (1st-2nd centuries CE), with the Sephardi pronunciation being derived from Judaean and the Ashkenazi from Galilean. This theory is supported by the fact that Ashkenazi Hebrew, like Samaritan Hebrew, has lost the distinct sounds of many of the guttural letters, while there are references in the Talmud to this as a feature of Galilean speech. Idelsohn ascribes the Ashkenazi (and, on his theory, Galilean) pronunciation of qamats gadol as /o/ to the influence of Phoenician: see Canaanite shift.

In the time of the Masoretes (8th-10th centuries CE) there were three distinct notations for denoting vowels and other details of pronunciation in Biblical and liturgical texts. One was the Babylonian; another was the Palestinian; the third was the Tiberian, which eventually superseded the other two and is still in use today.

Of these, the Palestinian notation provides the best fit to the current Sephardi pronunciation: for example it does not distinguish between pataẖ and qamats, or between segol and tsere. (Similarly, the Babylonian notation appears to fit the Yemenite pronunciation.) The Tiberian notation does not quite fit any pronunciation in use today, though the underlying pronunciation has been reconstructed by modern scholars: see Tiberian vocalization. (A variant of the Tiberian notation was used by Ashkenazim, before being superseded by the standard version.)

The accepted rules of Hebrew grammar, including the current Sephardic pronunciation, were laid down in medieval Spain by grammarians such as Judah ben David Hayyuj and Jonah ibn Janah. By then the Tiberian notation was universally used, though it was not always reflected in pronunciation. The Spanish grammarians accepted the rules laid down by the Tiberian Masoretes, with the following variations.

1. The traditional Sephardic pronunciation of the vowels (inherited, as it seems, from the old Palestinian system) was perpetuated. Their failure to fit the Tiberian notation was rationalized by the theory that the distinctions between Tiberian symbols represented differences of length rather than quality: thus pataẖ was short a, qamats was long a, segol was short e and tsere was long e.
2. The theory of long and short vowels was also used to adapt Hebrew to the rules of Arabic poetic metre. For example, in Arabic (and Persian) poetry, when a long vowel occurs in a closed syllable an extra (short) syllable is treated as present for metrical purposes, though not represented in pronunciation. Similarly in Sephardic Hebrew a shewa following a syllable with a long vowel is invariably treated as vocal. (In Tiberian Hebrew this is only true when the long vowel is marked with meteg.)

Further differences from the Tiberian system are:

• Sephardim now pronounce shewa na as /e/ in all positions, though the older rules (as in the Tiberian system) were more complicated.
• Resh is invariably pronounced by Sephardim as a "front" alveolar trill; in the Tiberian system the pronunciation appears to have varied with the context, so that it was treated as a letter with a double (sometimes triple) pronunciation.

In brief, Sephardi Hebrew appears to be a descendant of the Palestinian tradition, partially adapted to accommodate the Tiberian notation and further influenced by the pronunciation of Arabic, Spanish and Judaeo-Spanish (Ladino).