The Politics of Language

In every part of the world, from historic times to the present, survival and success has depended on means of communication. Language has served as a vessel through which new ideas are conceived and actualized.

But just as language has contributed to the construction of societies, the diversity of these societies has led to the development of new languages and subcategories of languages known as dialects. Dialects develop most prominently from geographical, social, cultural or religious factors.

Benjamin Hary, director of New York University Tel Aviv and professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at NYU, studies the “religiolect” of Judeo-Arabic, a dialect of Arabic that developed from the Jewish presence in the Arab world.

Religio-linguistics is a subcategory of linguistics that focuses on the religious connection to language. Languages like Hebrew and Yiddish, spoken almost exclusively in the Jewish community, fall under this category.

Hary’s studies include Jewish languages; Jewish religion, history, society and culture in the Islamic world; corpus linguistics and modern Hebrew; and Judeo-Arabic language and linguistics. He has published two books on Judeo-Arabic and is working on a third that deals with sacred texts written in Judeo-Arabic.

The recent La Pietra Dialogue by Professor Hary on Wednesday, February 28, called “The Language of the Jews of Islam: The History and Politics of Judeo-Arabic,” focused on issues of terminology concerning Judeo-Arabic and its speakers, the historical development and political influences of the dialect and its current state.

Hary calls the language a religiolect, but it is also recognized as a sociolect or an ethnolect. It is written with Hebrew lettering and used in literature on Jewish topics written by Jews for Jewish readers. It contains elements of classical and post-classical Arabic as well as dialectical components, “pseudo-corrections” or changes to the Arabic language to suit Jewish speakers that then became standardized. It contains elements of both Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and grammar.

The speakers of the dialect include the Mizrahim, or Jews of the East, mainly located in Israel, the Sephardim, who derived from Spain and live mainly in Israel, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Turkey and Morocco, and Jews of Arabic-speaking backgrounds. The term “Arab Jews” is controversial and only used sporadically in the media and in academic settings. It refers to Jews living in the Arab world and of Arabic-speaking backgrounds, but many Jews who fall into this category object to this term for various reasons.

Some terms that Hary has used in the past are the Jews of Arab lands, which he doesn’t use anymore due to its inaccuracy in defining the lands as strictly Arabic (another term being Muslim-controlled lands), and Arabic-speaking Jews. Each term, he said, has its own historical trajectory and is associated with a different ethno-religious identity.

A lingering question is whether Arabic speakers and Judeo-Arabic speakers use the same language, as Judeo-Arabic is based on Arabic, only written in Hebrew letters. Some consider Judeo-Arabic to be a completely different Jewish language rather than a dialect of Arabic, and some Jews reject the term "Judeo-Arabic" altogether.

In Israel, many Jews have a limited familiarity with the term Judeo-Arabic, but recognize Yiddish and Ladino as accepted religiolects. There is also little awareness about the connections of Jewish dialects to medieval, classical and modern Judeo-Arabic and the Arabic language.

The near extinction of the dialect is due most prominently to migration of Jews to Israel, France and North America, where they tend to speak less in Judeo-Arabic and more in Yiddish, French and English. Few scholars in the United States and in academia acknowledge the existence of modern Judeo-Arabic, with most study focusing on medieval Judeo-Arabic instead.

Today, the dialect is sparsely spoken, mainly in the Middle East and North Africa. In Morocco, it is spoken by just under 400,000 people, who may or may not acknowledge the term, some referring to it simply as Moroccan, or choosing to speak French instead. A deliberate effort by native speakers to utilize it in films, music and other cultural products has kept it from completely dying out.

Policy recommendations proposed by Professor Hary include recognizing Arabic as a Jewish heritage language, teaching Arabic in Israeli primary and secondary schools, and increasing an effort to not refer to Arabic as the “language of the enemy.”

Political and cultural tensions and migration will likely fuel the depletion of the spoken language. Though Judeo-Arabic will probably never be fully revived, the continued study of the language and its surrounding culture is crucial to the understanding of Judeo-Arabic relations and history.

Image: 15th-century Sicilian medical miscellany in Judeo-Arabic, Hebrew, and Arabic, compiled by David ben Shalom, likely a Jewish physician. Author: Majūsī, ʻAlī ibn al-ʻAbbās, active 10th century-11th century. UPenn Ms. Codex 1649.

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