Jewish languages — Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic

There is no single Jewish language, but rather a constellation of Jewish languages, born wherever a community settled long enough to shape a speech of its own. The mechanism is almost always the same: a substrate of the local language (Germanic, Romance, Arabic, Persian, Greek…), a lexical and liturgical contribution from Hebrew and Aramaic, and most often a script in Hebrew characters.

These languages are not mere dialects: they carry a literature, a press, a theater, a humor, a way of praying and thinking. Each is the condensed memory of a world — and when one of these worlds disappears, a way of inhabiting reality is extinguished along with it.

This Great Book surveys them one after another: from the two matrix languages (Hebrew and Aramaic) to the great vernaculars of the diaspora, all the way to contemporary revivals.

Hebrew (lashon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue") is the language of the Bible, the Mishna, and the liturgy. Its everyday spoken use declined after the biblical era; by the end of Antiquity, it ceased to be a mother tongue. Yet it did not die: for nearly two millennia it remained the language of study, of prayer, of poetry — the Sephardic golden age, with Ibn Gabirol and Yehuda Halevi — and of scholarly correspondence between distant communities.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a linguistic event with almost no parallel took place: the resurrection of Hebrew as a spoken language. Carried forward by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and the Jewish national movement, Hebrew acquired a modern vocabulary and, within one or two generations, once again became the mother tongue of millions of speakers.

This twofold history — a language never quite dead, then revived — makes Hebrew the common thread running through all the other Jewish languages, each of which borrows from it its sacred foundation.

Aramaic was, for more than a millennium, the great lingua franca of the Near East — from the Assyrian and Persian empires down to the Roman era. The Jews adopted it widely: entire passages of the Bible (Daniel, Ezra) are in Aramaic, and it is in Aramaic that the Babylonian Talmud, the Targumim (translations of the Torah) and, later, the Zohar were composed.

Several dialects coexisted: the Babylonian Aramaic of the Talmudic academies, Galilean Aramaic, and the Neo-Aramaic vernaculars still alive in the twentieth century among the Jews of Kurdistan, who carried them to Israel.

The language of the Oral Law and of mysticism, Aramaic remains present in daily liturgy — from the Kaddish to the Kol Nidre of Yom Kippur.

Born in the Rhine Valley around the 10th–12th centuries, Yiddish is the language of Ashkenazi Jews: a tongue of Germanic foundation, written in Hebrew characters, enriched by a Hebrew-Aramaic substratum and, after the migration eastward, by numerous Slavic borrowings. A distinction is drawn between Western Yiddish, gradually erased by assimilation, and Eastern Yiddish, which became the language of millions of Jews in Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, and Russia.

Yiddish carried an entire civilization: a great literature (Mendele Moykher Sforim, Sholem Aleichem, I. L. Peretz, then Isaac Bashevis Singer, Nobel laureate in 1978), a thriving press, a theater, a cinema, schools, and political parties. On the eve of the Shoah, it was spoken by more than ten million people.

The extermination of the communities of Eastern Europe shattered its mass transmission. It survives today as a living everyday language in Haredi circles, and as the object of an intense cultural and academic revival.

Judeo-Spanish — ladino, djudezmo — is the language of the Sephardic Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. Carried into exile, this form of Old Castilian became fixed and then enriched through contact with Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, and Italian, and was preserved for centuries in the great communities of the Ottoman Empire: Salonika, Istanbul, Izmir, Sarajevo. In Morocco, a closely related variant, haketía, lived its own history.

Ladino possesses a rich tradition: the romances (ballads inherited from medieval Spain), the coplas, a lively press in Salonika, and the Me'am Lo'ez, a vast biblical commentary of the eighteenth century.

The destruction of Salonika during the Shoah — one of the largest Ladino-speaking communities — dealt a fatal blow to the spoken language. Today it is the object of a preservation effort: academic chairs, recordings, festivals of Sephardic song.

Judeo-Arabic designates the whole of the Arabic vernaculars proper to the Jews of the Muslim world, from the Maghreb to Iraq and Yemen. It was far more than an everyday speech: in the golden age, it became a great language of culture. Saadia Gaon (10th century) translated the Bible into Judeo-Arabic; Maimonides composed his Commentary on the Mishna and the Guide for the Perplexed in Judeo-Arabic. Arabic was then written in Hebrew characters.

In daily life, each region had its dialect: Judeo-Moroccan, Judeo-Tunisian, Judeo-Tripolitan, Judeo-Iraqi, Judeo-Yemenite — bearers of songs, proverbs and a popular literature.

The near-total departure of the Jews from the Arab countries in the 20th century, toward Israel and France, severed these languages from their land. Transmitted ever more rarely, they are the object of scholarly documentation before the generation of the last speakers dies out.

Alongside these major languages, many other Jewish vernaculars existed, some now extinct: Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Provençal (shuadit), Judeo-Greek (Yevanic), Judeo-Georgian, and even the Judeo-Malayalam of the Jews of Cochin, in India. Each one bears witness to an ancient settlement and a symbiosis with a host culture.

The 20th century was a century of rupture: the Shoah, the exodus of Jews from Arab lands, the adoption of Hebrew in Israel and of national languages in the diaspora hastened their decline as mother tongues.

Yet none has vanished entirely. For several decades now, we have witnessed revivals — academic chairs, dictionaries and linguistic atlases, festivals, recordings of the voices of the last speakers. To document these languages is to hold together the archive and living memory.

Jewish languages alone recount the geography of the diaspora and its genius for adaptation: a fidelity — the preservation of Hebrew and the sacred characters as a common foundation — and an openness — the adoption of the world's languages.

To gather them, to record them, to teach them is no scholar's luxury: it is to save ways of being in the world, forms of humor and prayer that exist in no other language. When a language dies without having been transmitted or documented, a thread in the memory of the People of the Book is severed — and it cannot be rejoined.