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Jewish languages are the variouslanguages anddialects that developed inJewish communities in thediaspora. The original Jewish language isHebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular byAramaic following theBabylonian exile. Jewish languages feature asyncretism ofHebrew andJudeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population.
EarlyNorthwest Semitic (ENWS) materials are attested through the end of theBronze Age—2350 to 1200 BCE.[1] At this early state,Biblical Hebrew was not highly differentiated from the other Northwest Semitic languages (Ugaritic andAmarnaCanaanite), though noticeable differentiation did occur during theIron Age (1200–540 BCE).[2] Hebrew as a separate language developed during the latter half of thesecond millennium BCE between theJordan River and theMediterranean Sea, an area known asCanaan.[3]
The earliest distinctively Hebrew writing yet discovered was found atKhirbet Qeiyafa and dates to the 10th century BCE.[4][5] The Israelite tribes established a kingdom in Canaan at the beginning of the first millennium BCE, which later split into theKingdom of Israel in the north and theKingdom of Judah in the south after a dispute of succession.[6]
The kingdom of Israel was destroyed by theAssyrians in 722 BCE, and the kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Babylonians in 586 BCE, its higher classes exiled and thefirst Temple destroyed.[6][7] Aramaic became the primary language of the Jews deported toBabylonia, with the first attestations of Jewish/Judean Aramaic found inscrolls from the 5th century BCE on the island ofElephantine.[8] Later the Persians made Judah a province and permitted Jewish exiles to return andrebuild the Temple.[6] Aramaic became the common language in the north of Israel, inGalilee andSamaria, though Hebrew remained in use in Judah with Aramaic influence.[7]
Alexander the Great conquered Judah in 332 BCE, beginning the period ofHellenistic domination.[7] During theHellenistic period Judea became independent under theHasmoneans, but later the Romans ended their independence, makingHerod the Great their governor.[6] One Jewish revolt against the Romans led to the destruction of theSecond Temple in 70 CE, and the secondBar-Kochba revolt in 132–135 CE led to a large departure of the Jewish population of Judea.[6] Biblical Hebrew after the Second Temple period evolved intoMishnaic Hebrew, which ceased being spoken and developed into a literary language around 200 CE.[9] Hebrew remained in widespread use amongdiasporic communities as the medium of writing and liturgy, forming a vast corpus of literature which includes rabbinic, medieval, and modern literature prior to the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.[8][10]
Jewish communities were dispersed around the world in the diaspora which followed the Jewish-Roman wars. Some adopted the languages of their neighbors, but many developed new varieties of these languages, collectively termed "Jewish languages".[8] Various reasons led to the development of distinctive Jewish varieties of the languages of their non-Jewish host populations. Jews have often had limited exposure to non-Jewish society for various reasons, including imposedghettoization (whether self-imposed separation or the forced creation of the ghetto by the host city) and strictendogamy, and as a result, Jewish languages diverged and developed separately from non-Jewish varieties in the territories they settled in. Due to frequentexpulsions and migrations, single Jewish communities were often influenced by multiple distinct regional languages vialanguage contact. For example,Yiddish, while based onMiddle High German, has elements ofRomance andSlavic.[11] Jewish languages belong to a variety of genealogical language families, but these languages have common characteristics, making their study a distinct field of comparative linguistics known asJewish linguistics.
The common feature between the Jewish languages is the presence ofHebrew andJudeo-Aramaic lexical components, stemming from the shared use of these languages in writing and liturgy. Many Jewish languages also display phonological, morphological, and syntactic features distinct from their non-Jewish counterparts. Most written Jewish languages areHebraized, meaning they use a modified version of the Hebrew alphabet. These languages, unless they already have an accepted name (i.e. Yiddish, Ladino), are prefixed with "Judeo" (e.g.Judeo-Italian,Judeo-Arabic,Judeo-Persian,Judeo-Aramaic,Judeo-Marathi,Judeo-Malayalam, etc).[8] Bukharan Jews spokeBukhori, a dialect of Tajik, and Mountain Jews spokeJudeo-Tat.
In the early 20th century, secularism among Jews and large population shifts prompted the beginning of a shift from Jewish to non-Jewish languages. Even so, the majority of Jews inEurasia andAfrica, and many immigrants inNorth America andPalestine, still spoke Jewish languages. However, theHolocaust brought about a significant drop in the use of Jewish languages, especiallyYiddish. Later, especially since theCOVID-19 pandemic, learning Yiddish has begun to see a significant increase in popularity and interest,[12] with studies revealing a surge in registration to online Yiddish language learning resources.[13]
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Jewish languages are generally defined as the unique linguisticvarieties of Jewish communities in the diaspora in their contact with surrounding non-Jewish languages.[8] Languages vary in theirdistance and divergence from their non-Jewish sister languages.[8] For example,Judeo-Yemeni Arabic is quite similar to some non-Jewish varieties ofYemeni Arabic, whileYiddish, aGermanic language, shows a high degree of dissimilarity to modern German dialects. Due to continued liturgical and literary use of Hebrew and Aramaic, Jewish communities were naturally in a state ofdiglossia.[14] Along with their vernacular Jewish language, most Jews could read and write in Hebrew, which was necessary to fulfill the religious commandment to learnTorah and teach it. Jews were expected to also have knowledge of Judeo-Aramaic, the language of religious commentary (targumim) as well as many prayers, including theKaddish. Hebrew, the "Holy Tongue", was the highest linguisticregister in these communities, used for liturgy and study. Hebrew-Aramaic is the onlyadstratum shared by all Jewish languages.[8] Some Jewish languages have multiple registers; for example, both Yiddish andJudezmo have threelinguistic registers: colloquial, written, and scholarly-liturgical.
Some Jewish languages show the effects of the history of language shift among the speakers, including Hebrew-Aramaic influence. Yiddish exemplifies such a language. Some Jewish languages may become marked as distinctively Jewish because some shift affected some parts of the language as a whole. For example, what is today known asBaghdad Jewish Arabic (because it is theArabic variety that was up until recently spoken by Baghdad's Jews) was originally the Arabic dialect of Baghdad itself and was used by all religious groups in Baghdad, but the Muslim residents of Baghdad later adopted Bedouin dialects of Arabic. Similarly, a dialect may be perceived as Jewish because its Jewish speakers brought the dialect of another region with them when they were displaced. In some cases, this may cause a dialect to be perceived as "Jewish" in some regions but not in others.
Some Jewish language varieties may not beclassified aslanguages due tomutual intelligibility with their parent language, as withJudeo-Malayalam andJudeo-Spanish. In the case ofJudeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, linguistically it is a dialect ofSpanish, mutually intelligible with otherSpanish dialects and varieties, albeit witheach Spanish dialect having loanwords and influences from different source languages:Nahuatl andMaya loanwords and influences forMexican Spanish;Quechua andAymara inPeruvian Spanish;Italian, Quechua andGuaraní inArgentinian Spanish;Maghrebi Arabic andBerber in "Ladino Occidental" (also known asHaketia);Levantine Arabic,Greek,Turkish andSouth Slavic in "Ladino Oriental".
In some cases, as with Judeo-Spanish, a register may be developed for Biblical translation and exegesis in which Hebrew-Aramaic patterns are frequentlycalqued, though the number of true Hebrew and/or Aramaic loanwords may be low. Another possibility is that Jews may speak the same language as their non-Jewish neighbors, but occasionally insert Hebrew-Aramaic or other Jewish elements. This is a transitory state in the shift from the use of Jewish to a non-Jewish language, often made in the context of assimilation. This occurred, for example, with many educated German Jews who transitioned from Western Yiddish to German. This variety of German, used between 1760 and the end of the 19th century (theHaskala), was written with theHebrew alphabet, and contained a small number of Hebrew and Yiddish loans. An example isMoses Mendelssohn's translation of the Hebrew Bible into German written with Hebrew letters.
Judeo-Papiamento, the only living Jewishethnolect endemic to theAmericas and likely the only one that is also acreole language, has lexical differences from its non-Jewish counterpart that go beyond the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic. In formal contexts, Sephardic Jewish speakers ofPapiamento tend to use extensive borrowing fromFrench andPortuguese, whereas non-JewishCuraçaoans mostly useSpanish loanwords in similar contexts.[15]
Among the most widely spoken Jewish languages to develop in the diaspora areYiddish,Judeo-Spanish, and theJudeo-Arabic group of languages.Yiddish is the Judeo-German language developed byAshkenazi Jews who lived inCentral andEastern Europe beforeWorld War II.Judeo-Spanish, also calledJudezmo andMuestra Spanyol, is the Judeo-Spanish language developed bySephardic Jews who lived in theIberian Peninsula before the expulsion by theCatholic Monarchs.Judeo-Catalan (also calledCatalanic orQatalanit), was the Jewish language spoken by the Jewish communities inCatalonia,Valencia, and theBalearic Islands.Judeo-Provençal andJudeo-Gascon were two Jewish varieties ofOccitan language as it was historically spoken byFrench Jews.[16][17]
Many ancient and distinct Jewish languages, includingJudeo-Georgian,Judeo-Arabic,Judeo-Berber,Krymchak,Judeo-Italian,Judeo-Malayalam have largely fallen out of use due to the impact of theHolocaust onEuropean Jewry, theJewish exodus from Arab lands, the assimilation policies ofIsrael in its early days and other factors.
Yiddish was the language spoken by the largest number of Jews in the 1850s, but today the three most commonly spoken languages among Jews are English,modern Hebrew, and Russian—in that order.[18] Yiddish, as well as several other Jewish languages, has contributed to the vocabulary of coterritorial non-Jewish languages, such asEnglish orFrench.[19]
Kol Yisrael, Israel's former public-service broadcaster, had long maintained short daily news and featured programming in many Jewish languages and dialects. For domestic audiences, it broadcast inJudeo-Iraqi Arabic on its Arabic network, while also producing in Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish,Judeo-Moroccan Arabic,Bukharian andJudeo-Tat for both domestic and overseas shortwave audiences in relevant areas. In addition, for over two decades starting in the late 1970s, a daily 30-minute shortwave transmission was made toYemen inJudeo-Yemeni Arabic.
Radio Exterior de España,Spain's international public broadcaster, provides programming in Judeo-Spanish, which they refer to as Sefardi.[20]
In theUnited States[21][22] as well as inBirobidzhan, Russia, there are some local radio programs in Yiddish.[23][24]
Judeo-Marathi (Marathi:जुदाव मराठी) is a form ofMarathi spoken by theBene Israel, aJewish ethnic group that developed a unique identity inIndia. Judeo-Marathi, like other Marathi dialects, is written in theDevanagari script. It may not be sufficiently different from Marathi as to constitute a distinct language, although it is characterized by a number ofloanwords fromHebrew andAramaic as a result of influence from theCochin Jewish community, as well as fromJudeo-Malayalam,Portuguese and also some influence from theUrdu language.
For centuries Jews worldwide spoke the local or dominant languages of the regions they migrated to, often developing distinctivedialectal forms or branching off as independent languages. The usual course of development for these languages was through the addition of Hebrew words and phrases used to express uniquely Jewish concepts and concerns. Often they were written in Hebrew letters, including the block letters used in Hebrew today andRashi script.
Conversely, Judeo-Spanish, formerly written in Rashi script orSolitreo, since the 1920s is usually written in Turkey in the Latin alphabet with a spelling similar tothat of Turkish, and has been occasionally printed in the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets.[25]
Also, some Yiddish-speakers have adopted the use of the Latin alphabet, in place of the Hebrew alphabet. This is predominantly to enable communications over the internet, without the need for special Hebrew keyboards.
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