Judeo-Arabic was the language in which Maimonides wrote his philosophical masterpiece, Guide for the Perplexed. In literary form, it may have differed little from the written Arabic of its times other than being written with Hebrew letters. But in colloquial use, there could be greater variation. While in some parts of the Arab world, Jews might have pronounced words differently to their non-Jewish neighbours, the Arabic spoken by Jews in Baghdad displayed differences in vocabulary and grammar.
Naturally, you’d expect Jewish conversation to reflect Jewish ritual life — words like kosher or simchah which we use today in everyday speech. But Hebrew words or derivatives could pop up more widely. Among Judeo-Italian dialects, the Hebrew word macom, “place,” referred to a toilet and from mazal, “luck”, came the word, malmazallo, “unlucky”.
In Judeo-Greek, the Hebrew word rimonim, “pomegranates”, was used for breasts and chashicha, “church” was taken from the word for darkness.
With the concentration of Jewry in Israel and the English-speaking world, many of these dialects have disappeared or are close to extinction. But in Gyrmyzy Gasaba, “Red Town,” a Jewish town near Quba in Azerbaijan, children are still learning Judeo-Tat, the language of the Mountain Jews which they refer to as Juhuri (“Jewish”).
In Judeo-Tat, you would use the word heloli for kosher, derived from Arabic, halal, and nimaz for synagogue, from the Persian word for prayer. Pesach is popularly called Nisonu, after the Hebrew month Nisan.
Migration is also producing new linguistic invention. Russian-speakers in Israel, for example, have coined the verb chamorit, “to work like a donkey”, from the Hebrew word for the animal, chamor. Ethiopian Jews might call a social worker a wofe t’olt’ walit, an Amharic phrase meaning “my meddlesome bird”.
The book is full of enlightening and delightful detail. The first written record of pizza in any language is in Hebrew letters — in a 14th-century Judeo-Italian glossary of Maimonides’ legal code Mishneh Torah, when it was used to translate charara, a rabbinic Hebrew word for baked dough. The first known use of pizza in an Italian text was not till nearly two centuries later.
Sometimes religious texts were composed in the local language. A Judeo-Italian elegy for Tishah b’Av, La ienti de Zion, “People of Zion”, written in Hebrew letters, dates from medieval times. A Judeo-Greek poem celebrated “Little Purim” among the emigrés from Syracuse in Sicily, recalling their miraculous escape from a dastardly apostate called Marcus in the late 14th century.
In Hungary, in the late 18th or early 19th century, one Chasidic rebbe, Yitzchok Ayzik Taube of Kaliver composed a zemirah for the Shabbat table, Sol a Kakosh Mar, adapting the words of a local love song to give it a Jewish theme.
But one extraordinary item has survived in a Judeo-Provencal siddur from the 15th century. It was written for women, who would have been less schooled in Hebrew than men. In the morning blessings in the traditional prayerbook, men bless their Creator for having not made them a woman, while women for making them according to His will — a controversial formula for some today. But in this medieval siddur, the version of the blessing is “que fis me fenna”, “who has made me a woman”. Two siddurim in Hebrew from the same time carry the “same positive female blessing,” the authors say.
In a hundred years, perhaps a similar book may record the development of some form of Judeo-English, given the growth of the Charedi population.
Meanwhile Rubin and Kahn note the phenomenon of “Yeshivish” within the Orthodox community, where conversation is peppered with more Hebrew words than used by the average English-speaking Jew. Among the Chasidim a contemporary Yiddish is emerging with some grammatical differences to the standard literary language of the past.
One Yiddish series of stories for youth, 21 under a Roof, tells of the adventure of a large family from Israel, which includes meeting the Queen at Buckingham Palace on a trip to London for a wedding.
Jewish Languages from A to Z is published by Routledge, £29.99 (paperback)
