Judeo-Arabic in Mizrahi Jewish Life
By RAYMOND SCHEINDLIN
At the beginning of the Islamic period, which dates to the
seventh century, the Jews of the Middle East and North Africa generally
functioned in two languages: a local vernacular, which was used for ordinary
conversation, and Hebrew, which was learned as the language of prayers and the
classic religious texts, but was used for little other than the composition of
liturgical poetry. As the Islamic conquests took root and unified the entire
region linguistically, Arabic gradually replaced the local languages as the
vernacular.
The Arabic spoken by the Jews did not differ markedly from that spoken by
Muslims in this period, except insofar as it included terms specific to Jewish
religious and legal practice; even these terms were sometimes replaced by words
borrowed from Islamic ritual terminology. How far Arabic penetrated the inner
life of the Jewish community may be judged by the fact that Arabic words were
sometimes even used to describe religious ideas and institutions. Thus, when
Jews wrote in Arabic, they ordinarily referred to God as “Allah” and to the
pulpit as minbar (later distorted to almemar in Sephardic usage). They often
referred to the leader of prayers as imam,
to the Torah as qur’an (though the
Hebrew word Torah exists in classical
Arabic in the form taura), to
rabbinic traditions as hadith, and to
the halakhic practice as sunna.
One peculiarity of Jewish writing in Arabic is that the Jews normally used
Hebrew characters rather than Arabic script. It is this peculiarity, supported
by the tendency of Jewish writers to employ a certain amount of Hebrew
vocabulary in their writing, that has caused the Arabic of the Jews to be
referred to as Judeo-Arabic.
The reason for the Jews’ use of Hebrew script was probably that it came to them
most naturally. Elementary education at
the time was nearly always identical with religious education; as the first
thing a Jewish child went to school to learn was the prayers and the Torah,
Jewish children learned the Hebrew alphabet before they learned the Arabic
alphabet. Because Hebrew and Arabic are
closely related languages and very similar in their phonetic structures, Hebrew
script was well suited to representing Arabic sounds. Thus, when Jews wanted to
communicate in writing with other Jews, they wrote in their native
language—Arabic—using their native script: Hebrew.
Saadiah was the first rabbinic leader to make Arabic his main language for
scholarly writing, and thus he may be considered the founder of Judeo-Arabic
literature. Thanks partly to his influence, and partly to natural development,
Arabic took over many of the functions of Aramaic as the language of
scholarship, and, as one vernacular replaced another, the original state of
diglossia was restored. Arabic now served both as the vernacular and as the
language of most scholarly writing and ordinary correspondence; Hebrew
continued to be studied as the language of the Bible and other classical
religious texts, especially the liturgy, and was actively employed for the
writing of liturgical poetry, the few midrashim
that were composed during the gaonic period, and other ceremonial purposes. As
the Jews came under the spell of Arabic literature, they adopted some new
literary genres from Arabic, using Arabic for some and Hebrew for others.
Both the attitude toward Hebrew and the role of language expanded in the course
of the seventh to 16th centuries. It may seem paradoxical, but just as Saadiah
was establishing Arabic as the language of rabbinic writing, he was also
propounding a new and exalted view of the Hebrew language. From his time, and
beginning with his work, a shift can be discerned not merely in Jewish writers’
use of Hebrew, but in their attitude toward it.
Saadiah’s focus on language was a response to the status of Arabic in the
Islamic world, and his writing reflects the attitudes that originated in the
world of Arabic scholarship. For the Islamic learned classes, the study of
language was considered the cornerstone of all scholarship; great emphasis was
placed on mastery of classical Arabic, and elaborate rules were propounded for
writing it with elegance. This attitude is summed up in the doctrine that
Muslim scholars called ‘arabiyya, the
principle that classical Arabic (i.e., the language of the Koran and of
pre-Islamic poetry) is the most perfect of languages and the model for all
writing of importance and prestige. The principle of ‘arabiyya made a clear distinction between the classical Arabic
used for formal purposes and the ordinary Arabic used for normal,
informational, written communication.
The concept of 'arabiyya, as
Hebraized by Saadiah and his contemporaries, gave rise to a division of
functions: Hebrew was used for ceremonial communication, where style was most
important, and Arabic was used for ordinary communications in which conveying
concrete information was paramount.
This distribution of functions—Hebrew as the ceremonial language and Arabic as
the language for communication of specific information—is exemplified by letters
of condolence or congratulations, which often begin with flowery preambles in
Hebrew and then deliver the substance of the message in Arabic, and by
collections of Hebrew poetry, in which the poem is in Hebrew but the copyist’s
introduction explaining the circumstances under which the poem was written is
in Arabic.
With this division of functions between Arabic and biblical Hebrew firmly
entrenched in Saadiah’s circle and reinforced by the Hebraized concept of ‘arabiyya, the stage was set for the introduction
of Arabic literary genres into Jewish scholarship and of secular poetry, a
literary type adopted from Arabic, into Hebrew.
This
excerpt, from Cultures of
the Jews: A New History, is reprinted
with permission. For more on Cultures of the Jews click here.
Copyright (c) 2002 by David Biale. Reprinted by permission of Schocken Books,
a division of Random House, Inc.