Langues Sémitiques

The Semitic family has not always borne this name. Its recognition as a coherent linguistic unit is the fruit of the work of European orientalists of the Enlightenment. The adjective "Semitic" was proposed in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer, in a collective work directed by Johann Gottfried Eichhorn at Göttingen, to group together languages whose grammatical kinship — system of triliteral roots, consonantal morphology, neighboring conjugations — was obvious to Hebraists and Arabists.

But this linguistic category was immediately invested with meanings that went beyond grammar. Maurice Olender has shown how, in the nineteenth century, the distinction between "Aryans" and "Semites" was constructed as a "providential couple," laden with theology and prejudices. According to Olender, the scholars of the century — philologists, historians of religions, orientalists — elaborated an opposition in which "Semitic" genius was reputed to be monotheistic, sober and fixed, while "Aryan" genius was said to have borne mythology, science and movement [Olender, 1989]. This partition, born in language studies, would fuel the racial ideologies from which modern antisemitism drew advantage.

It is therefore important to distinguish two levels: that, rigorous, of comparative linguistics, which establishes verifiable facts of kinship; and that, ideological, of the "Semitic race," a phantasmatic construction without biological reality. Languages are Semitic; peoples are not. This clarification, which Olender has made unavoidable, is the prerequisite for any honest study [Olender, 1989].

Before Hebrew, before Arabic, the oldest attested Semitic languages are Mesopotamian. Akkadian — the language of Babylon and Assyria, written in cuneiform on clay tablets — is documented from the third millennium before the common era; it constitutes the Eastern Semitic branch, now extinct. Its rediscovery in the nineteenth century, through the decipherment of cuneiform, offered science a highly archaic state of the family and made it possible to better understand the deepest strata of reconstructed proto-Semitic.

On the Syrian coast, the discovery in 1929 of the Ugarit archives revealed a Semitic language of the second millennium notated in a cuneiform alphabet, whose mythological texts shed new light on the poetic vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible. The parallels between Ugaritic poetry and the Psalms, between the Canaanite pantheon and certain biblical formulas, showed the anchorage of Hebrew in a broader Canaanite linguistic and literary world.

The Western branch of the family precisely groups this Canaanite world — Phoenician, Moabite, Edomite, Hebrew — as well as Aramaic, destined for immense fortune. The Southern branch brings together Arabic and the languages of South Arabia and Ethiopia, such as Ge'ez. This architecture, built by comparative linguistics, situates Hebrew not as an isolated language but as a branch of a dense tree, whose every branch shares a common fund of roots and structures.

At the heart of Jewishness, two Semitic languages shared the written memory of Israel. Biblical Hebrew is the language of the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings; it was in this language that the Masoretic text was fixed, with its system of vocalization and cantillation developed by the Masoretes of Tiberias in the first millennium of the common era. After the Exile, Aramaic — the vehicular language of the entire Near East under the Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires — became the second sacred language of Judaism: several passages from Daniel and Ezra, the targumin (Aramaic translations and paraphrases of the Bible), and especially the Talmud of Babylon and the Talmud of Jerusalem were composed in Aramaic.

This coexistence produced a deeply bilingual culture. The Zohar, the masterwork of the Kabbalah, was composed in an artificial and learned Aramaic. The prayer of the Kaddish, the Kol Nidrei, and many liturgical texts remain Aramaic to this day. Hebrew, however, ceased to be a common spoken language around the 2nd century of the common era without ever dying: it remained the language of study, prayer, and learned correspondence, what is sometimes called a "dormant" rather than dead language.

That Aramaic did not disappear is testified to by Kurdish Jewish communities. Geoffrey Khan has documented with precision living Neo-Aramaic Jewish dialects in the twentieth century, notably that of Sulaymaniyya and Ḥalabja, in Iraqi Kurdistan [Khan, 2004]. These dialects, direct heirs of ancient Aramaic, transmitted orally for centuries, offer a rare case where tradition and linguistic archive correspond exactly: the language of the Talmud had speakers who still spoke it, before massive emigration to Israel in the middle of the twentieth century [Khan, 2004].

With the expansion of Islam, Arabic became the language of the majority of Jews in the world, from the Maghreb to Iraq. Judeo-Arabic was then born: Arabic written in Hebrew characters, mixed with Hebrew and Aramaic borrowings, deployed in multiple registers. Joshua Blau studied the emergence and linguistic background of this Judeo-Arabic, showing that it was not a simple dialect but a structured written variety, endowed with its own orthography and learned conventions [Blau, 1965].

This language was the vehicle for an intellectual golden age. Saadia Gaon translated the Bible into Arabic and wrote his great philosophical treatise in Judeo-Arabic; Maimonides wrote in this language his Guide for the Perplexed and his commentary on the Mishna; Bahya ibn Paquda, Juda Halevi for his Kuzari, entrusted major works to it. Judeo-Arabic was thus the language of medieval Jewish philosophy, medicine, grammar and exegesis.

Benjamin Hary analyzed Judeo-Arabic as a "multiglossia" system, that is, made up of several coexisting levels of language — from the closest to classical Arabic to the most vernacular — that the Jewish speaker wielded according to contexts [Hary, 1992]. This stratification allowed Judeo-Arabic to serve both high theology and documents of daily life, of which the Cairo Genizah preserved tens of thousands of pages. Reuven Snir inscribed this long history within the broader framework of a "Judeo-Arabic literature" that runs from medieval beginnings to twentieth-century Jewish writers from Iraq and Egypt, arguing for the recognition of a continuous literary tradition [Snir, 2019].

Semitic languages did not only produce Jewish vernaculars; they also permeated non-Semitic languages adopted by Jews. Judeo-Persian is the most striking example: Persian written in Hebrew characters, nourished by Hebrew and Aramaic, which served as a literary language for the communities of Iran and Central Asia. Vera Basch Moreen explored this corpus in her anthology of Judeo-Persian literature, revealing religious and secular poetry of great richness, often inspired by the great Persian models while drawing from biblical and midrashic sources [Moreen, 2000].

This phenomenon is observed everywhere the diaspora encountered a new language. The Hebrew-Aramaic fund — vocabulary of law, prayer, calendar, kinship — was deposited in Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Provençal, marking each with a recognizable Semitic imprint. Thus, even where the language of communication was not Semitic, the sacred Hebrew and Aramaic layer remained the foundation of Jewish identity.

These Jewish languages share the same logic: to preserve, in a specific graphic and lexical form, the memory of the holy languages while embracing the surrounding linguistic environment. They testify to a creativity that made each exile a language laboratory, where the Semitic and the local answered each other without ever merging.

The most spectacular linguistic fact of modern times is the resurrection of Hebrew as a spoken language. Dormant for nearly seventeen centuries as a language of daily life, Hebrew became, within a few decades around 1900, the living language of an entire society in the land of Israel. Benjamin Harshav traced this "revolution of language," which he considers a quasi-unique event in human history: the passage from a language of texts to a language of the street, the home, and the State [Harshav, 1993].

This renaissance was not the work of a single man alone, but Eliezer Ben-Yehuda embodied its steadfast will. Harshav emphasizes the role of national ideologies, schools, the press, and a population of immigrants ready to make Hebrew a common language beyond their original vernaculars [Harshav, 1993]. Modern Hebrew, while drawing abundantly from biblical, Mishnaic, and medieval strata, had to forge new vocabulary for technology, administration, and modern life.

Thus a classical Semitic language became, in the twentieth century, the official and native language of millions of speakers — an unprecedented case that closes, in a certain sense, the cycle opened by Akkadian: the oldest written family in the world now counts, with Israeli Hebrew and Arabic, among the most living languages of the present.

Saadia Gaon (882–942) — סעדיה גאון — Born in Egypt, head of the academy of Soura in Babylonia, he was the great founder of Judeo-Arabic culture. He translated the Bible into Arabic, composed in Judeo-Arabic his treatise The Beliefs and Opinions, and defended Rabbinic Judaism against the Karaites. Grammarian, liturgist and philosopher, he made Arabic a language of Jewish learning, opening the way to the entire Eastern and Andalusian intellectual golden age.

Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) — משה בן מימון — Born in Córdoba, died in Cairo, physician and greatest Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages. He composed in Judeo-Arabic his commentary on the Mishna and his Guide for the Perplexed, reserving Hebrew for his code of law, the Mishneh Torah. His work illustrates the precise division of Semitic languages in Jewish culture: Arabic for philosophy, Hebrew for halakha.

August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) — German historian and orientalist of Göttingen, he forged in 1781 the adjective "Semitic" to designate the family of Hebrew, Arabic and Aramaic, after Shem, son of Noah. This terminological gesture, modest in appearance, durably fixed the framework of comparative Semitic linguistics and, despite itself, one of the key words in nineteenth-century debates on languages and peoples.

Eliezer Ben-Yehuda (1858–1922) — אליעזר בן־יהודה — Born in Lithuania, settled in Jerusalem, he devoted his life to making Hebrew a spoken language. Journalist, lexicographer, he undertook a vast dictionary of ancient and modern Hebrew and campaigned for its use in family and school settings. An emblematic figure studied by Harshav, he symbolizes the revival of a classical Semitic language to everyday life [Harshav, 1993].

Joshua Blau (1919–2020) — יהושע בלאו — Israeli linguist, prominent specialist in Judeo-Arabic and Middle Arabic. Born in Hungary, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he analyzed the emergence and linguistic background of Judeo-Arabic and established its reference grammar [Blau, 1965]. His work founded the scientific study of this variety and illuminated the relationships between Classical Arabic, Middle Arabic and Jewish vernaculars.

Geoffrey Khan (born 1958) — British linguist, professor at Cambridge, he is one of the great documenters of living Semitic languages and the Masorah. His work on Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects, notably from Sulaymaniyya and Ḥalabja, saved from oblivion speech forms inherited from ancient Aramaic, spoken until the twentieth century by Jews of Kurdistan before their emigration [Khan, 2004].

Maurice Olender (1946–2022) — Historian and publisher, he uncovered the ideological construction of the "couple" Aryans/Semites in the nineteenth century. His work The Languages of Paradise shows how comparative philology was invested with theology and prejudice, sharply dissociating linguistic facts from racial fantasies [Olender, 1989]. His work remains a critical milestone for any honest history of Semitic languages.

Semitic languages run through Jewish history like a continuous thread: from biblical Hebrew to Talmudic Aramaic, from Maimonides' Judeo-Arabic to the Neo-Aramaic of Kurdish Jews, from the Judeo-Persian of Iranian poetry to the resurrected Hebrew of the modern state. This family of languages was first a reality of grammatical kinship, recognized late by philology; it was then, alas, the pretext for ideological constructions whose mechanisms Olender dismantled. But it remains above all, for the Jewish people, the living material of its Memory.

The history of these languages teaches a paradoxical lesson: fidelity to sacred languages never prevented invention. Each exile produced its language, each century its register, until the unlikely renaissance of a language of texts become a language of the street. In this, the Semitic languages of Judaism illustrate a rare capacity to preserve and to recreate — to make of an ancient heritage a living present.