Lecture on Judeo-Arabic by Dr. Ofra Tirosh-Becker
Episode 5 of our Heritage Words podcast, highlighting Sarah Sassoon's and her words from Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic
Introduction
Judeo-Arabic is an ethnolect (a linguistic entity with its own history and used by a distinct language community) which has been spoken and written in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Timeline of Judeo-Arabic
??? - 800 CE: Pre-Islamic Judeo-Arabic
800 - 1000 CE: Early Judeo-Arabic
1000 - 1500 CE: Classical Judeo-Arabic (time of Saadia Gaon)
1500 - 1900 CE: Later Judeo-Arabic (decrease in Jewish contact with Muslims)
1900 CE - present: Contemporary Judeo-Arabic (sharp decline in speakers starting after 1948)
It is almost impossible to determine a precise date for the origin of Judeo-Arabic. There is some evidence that the Jews in the Arabian Peninsula used some sort of Arabic Jewish dialect even before the Islamic conquests (600s C.E.). Referred to as al-Yahūdiyya (Newby 1971; 1988:21-23; Gil 1984:206), this dialect was similar to the dominant Arabic dialect but included some Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, especially in the religious and cultural domains. Some of these loan words passed into the speech and writings of the Arabs, thus accounting for the Hebrew and Aramaic origins of certain Koranic words. There is no evidence that Pre-Islamic Judeo-Arabic produced any literature, especially if we examine the language of the Jewish poet as-Samaw’al bnu ‘Ādiyā’, which did not differ from that of his Arab contemporaries. His poetry is part of the canon of Arabic literature – not Jewish literature. In fact, if Arab sources had not reported that he was Jewish, we never would have known. On the other hand, there may have been some al-Yahūdiyya writings in Hebrew characters in the pre-Islamic period (Newby 1971:220).
After the great conquests of early Islam, the Jews in the newly conquered lands adopted the language of the conquerors and began to incorporate Arabic into their writings, slowly developing, at times, their own spoken dialect. In the following centuries, Jewish varieties of Arabic came to exist all around the Arabic-speaking world, from Iraq and Yemen in the East to Spain and Morocco in the West.
In the late fifteenth century, Judeo-Arabic underwent a dramatic change, as many Jews, especially in North Africa, began to associate less with Arabs and the Arabic language and culture (this was less the case in Yemen, where strong contact persisted for some time afterward. This indicates that Judeo-Arabic did not develop along exactly the same lines everywhere.). This cultural development was reflected both in the linguistic structure and in the literature. Written Judeo-Arabic at that time incorporated more dialectal elements, and more and more works appeared in Hebrew. This change is crucial in the division of Judeo-Arabic into Medieval and Late periods.
Quick Facts
Names of language
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English: Judeo-Arabic
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Judeo-Arabic: ‘Arabiya Yahūdiya ערביה יהודיה عربية يهودية, illuḡa dyalna 'our language.’ il‘arabiyya dyalna 'our Arabic'
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Hebrew: עַרַבִית יְהוּדִית Aravit Yehudit
Vitality
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North Africa
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1900: 220,000
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2025: 50,000
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- Iraqi
- 1900: 115,000
- 2025: 20,000
- Levant
- 1900: 15,000
- 2025: 10,000
- Yemen
- 1900: 50,000
- 2025: 1,000
- Egypt
- 1900: 15,000
- 2025: 1,000
Writing systems
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Hebrew script, sometimes with extra diacritics
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Arabic script was used to write Judeo-Arabic by the Karaites, mainly 9th-11th centuries
Notable Literature & Authors who wrote in Judeo-Arabic
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Ishrūn Maḳālāt 'Twenty Treatises' David b. Marwān al-Raḳḳi (3rd century CE);, al-Amānāt wa-l-i’tiḳādāt 'The Book of Beliefs and Opinions' Sa’adyā Yosēf al-Fayyūmi, Gaon of Baghdad (Rav Saadia Gaon); al-Hidāya ilā farā’iḍ al-ḳulūb 'Guidance to the Duties of the Heart', Baḥyé b. Yōsēf Ibn Paḳūdā (5th century CE);;Kitāb al-Ḥujja wa’l-dalil fi naṣr al-din al-dhalil 'The Kuzari', Judah Halevi (1140 CE); Dalālat al-Ḥā’irin 'Guide of the Perplexed', Maḳāla fi ṣinā’at al-manṭiḳ 'Treatise on Logic', Moshe ben Maimon (Maimonides) (12th century CE)
Language family
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Afro-Asiatic
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Semitic
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The Structure of (Modern) Judeo-Arabic
Like other Jewish languages, Judeo-Arabic has a base language (Arabic, influenced by Classical and post-Classical Arabic, as well as local dialects) and a large Hebrew and Aramaic component. This component is not restricted to the sphere of cultural-specific vocabulary, but is also found in the whole lexicon as well as in phonology, morphology, and syntax. A morphosyntactic example is the use of Arabic ila as a calque of the Hebrew direct object marker et (Hary 1991). Hebrew and Aramaic words are incorporated in various ways:
Lenore Mizrachi-Cohen, A Donkey is Restrained By His Reigns, A Person By His Tongue الحمار بيرتبط برسانه والانسان بلسانه 2023, Ink on Paper, 11 x 14"
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The insertion of a Hebrew or Aramaic word into a Judeo-Arabic phrase or sentence, as in: ליגי וקת אל משיח liyigi wa’t il-mašiaḥ 'so that the time of the Messiah arrives' (word in bold face is Hebrew)
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A partial translation of a Hebrew name, בנאדר ברק bnādir braq 'Bnei Brak'
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A Hebrew root that takes on an Arabic pattern, זכית zakēt 'I gained'
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Orthography making the pronunciation of Hebrew words or names more similar to Arabic, including velarization: כרפׄץ karfaṣ 'Karpas' (greens for the Passover Seder); אליעטׄר eli‘eẓer 'Eliezer' and the change of the unvoiced uvular stop /q/ to a glottal stop /’/: משאה maš’e 'drink.'
For a more comprehensive treatment of the Hebrew and Aramaic component see Avishur 1993, Bar-Asher 1998:147-320, Blau 1999, Chétrit 1991, Hary 1999, Maman 1999, and Toby 1993.
In addition, Judeo-Arabic contains hyper- and hypo-corrections (Hary 1992:62-69, 313-314), and the standardization of such features (ibid 67, 294-295). The linguistic characteristics of the various Judeo-Arabic dialects throughout its history can, with the exercise of proper care, be identified from Judeo-Arabic texts. By isolating the elements of Classical Arabic, hyper- and hypo-corrections, and the verbatim translation style of the šarḥ (see below), the Judeo-Arabist can point to dialectal elements that form colloquial Judeo-Arabic. This should be done by comparison to the modern dialects.
Orthography
Like most other Jewish languages, written Judeo-Arabic generally uses Hebrew characters. Very frequently Jews adopted the spelling conventions of Talmudic orthography, employing the final forms of Hebrew letters and sometimes adapting existing consonants and/or symbols as vowel signs. Thus, the Hebrew script symbolizes the Jewish nature of the ethnolect community. It is not uncommon to use script as a religious identification for a language, as with the Arabic script of Persian and Urdu, for example, which symbolizes the Muslim nature of the language communities. The same way, the Cyrillic script of Serbian symbolizes the centrality of the Eastern Orthodox Church's presence in that language, whereas Croatian, which for the most part (until recent political developments) is the same language, uses the Latin alphabet, indicating the Roman Catholic background of its users.
Judeo-Arabic uses various traditions of orthography to transmit different political, cultural, and religious messages (Hary 1992:112-113), as can be seen in other Jewish languages. For example, Late Judeo-Arabic is written in a Hebraized orthography (Hary 1996b), helping to convey Jewish identity.
Distinctiveness
Arabic is a language that includes a multitude of varieties and dialects. In the Arabic-speaking world, there is a standardized language used for formal and written communication and literature that differs significantly from local spoken Arabic dialects. Historical written Arabic is known as Classical Arabic, and its current equivalent is Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Each Arabic-speaking region has its own spoken dialect, with varying degrees of distinctiveness both from MSA and from one another. Because of this, a comparison of Judeo-Arabic dialects needs to show the diversity of Judeo-Arabic dialects across regions as well as the distinctiveness between the Jewish and non-Jewish (usually Muslim) dialects of spoken Arabic within a particular region. A separate comparison can also be shown between standard Classical Arabic and Classical Judeo-Arabic.
Common across Jewish dialects, but different from Muslim Arabic
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Use of some Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, both as loan words and loan roots adapted into Arabic paradigms
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Disappearance of grammatical case markers
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In Arabic, case is marked with vowels at the end of words. These appear consistently in Classical and Modern Standard Arabic and often in Muslim spoken dialects, but disappeared for the most part in Jewish Arabic dialects
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The direct object, which is marked with a case marker in other Arabic varieties is sometimes marked with a preposition /li-/ in Judeo-Arabic dialects
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Arabic distinguishes between long and short vowels, but this distinction is lost in most Judeo-Arabic dialects.
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Because Arabic and Hebrew are both Semitic languages and have major parallels in their grammatical structures, Hebrew loanwords are often fully incorporated into Arabic morphology and syntax.
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For example the Hebrew root s-d-r of סדרי משנה ‘the sections of the Mishna’ adopts the Arabic plural form /faʿāʿil/, resulting in Judeo-Arabic סדאדר sadādir ‘sections (of the Mishna)’.
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mizmor ‘song’ → mazamir ‘songs’, following Arabic pluralization pattern
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Hebrew words with Arabic definite article al, e.g. al-iša ‘the woman’, al-baʕal ‘the husband’
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When Hebrew words are adapted into Judeo-Arabic, they are usually adapted to the phonology of that particular Judeo-Arabic dialect. This is not always the case, however, such as in words like Judeo-Egyptian Arabic il-pilaġšīm ‘the concubines’, or חופה ḥuppa ‘marriage’. Non-Jewish variations of Egyptian Arabic do not have the p sound, while Judeo-Egyptian Arabic retains it for words borrowed from Hebrew.
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Many regional Arabic dialects have different sub-dialects for the urban population and the rural and nomadic population. In almost all cases, the Judeo-Arabic dialects are much closer to the urban Muslim dialects, as Jews primarily lived in larger cities.
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There was also a sub-dialect of Judeo-Arabic intended to be opaque to outsiders to the Jewish community. This sub-dialect included many more words from Hebrew and Aramaic and avoided common Arabic morphology, syntax, and lexical items.
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It was known by many names, including lasun or lasuniya ‘language’, lusun qodeš ‘holy tongue’, lasun rakka ‘soft language’, ʕəbri ‘Hebrew’, luġa ʕbriya ‘Hebrew language’, luġat al-yahud ‘the language of the Jews’, taqullit ‘speech’, slaġot ‘jokes’, slumiyya ‘the language of our own people’, l-iṣoraniya ‘the language of the Jews’.
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This sub-dialect was commonly used in religious settings to create a barrier between Judaism and Islam, as well as in business and trade, and to conceal information from children.
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North African Judeo-Arabics (Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Tripoli, Algeria)
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North African Judeo-Arabic dialects include a significant amount of loanwords and influence from French, including journal, commander, franc, bureau, monsieur, prezidan, l-kumitē, timbr ‘stamp’, l-gato ‘cake,’ due to French control over the area in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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North African Muslim Arabic dialects include significant borrowings from Tamazight (derogatorily known as Berber), although this is primarily limited to rural and nomadic populations. Because Jews primarily lived in larger cities, these borrowings did not appear in Judeo-Arabic dialects in North Africa. Exceptions include a few words related to agriculture and a handful of other words, such as šlāġǝm ‘mustaches’, fǝkrūn ‘torture, suffering’, aznun ‘a ceiling window’, taʕṛabat ‘explicitly’
Moroccan Judeo-Arabic
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Moroccan Arabic includes an extensive amount of Spanish loanwords, many of which have made their way into both the Muslim and Jewish dialects in Morocco.
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In some cities, Judeo-Moroccan Arabic also includes loanwords from Judeo-Spanish such as banyo ‘wash basin’, küna ‘cradle’, rodiyya ‘table napkin’, ǝl-mizirja ‘misery’
Tunisian Judeo-Arabic
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Judeo-Tunisian Arabic includes many loanwords from Italian due to Italian interest in Tunisia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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bukāṭu ‘lawyer’, šušīta ‘society
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Egyptian Judeo-Arabic
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One of the more distinctive markers of Judeo-Egyptian Arabic is the strong preference for the u vowel in place of a and i, where the local Muslim and Christian Egyptian ethnolects do not have this change.
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JEA: כׄולוץ xuluṣ | MEA: xiliṣ ‘be finished’
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JEA: תוקול tuʾul | MEA: tiʾil 'become heavy'
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Arabic generally does not include the sound /p/, but Judeo-Egyptian occasionally does include the sound in words borrowed from Hebrew such as חופה ḥuppa ‘marriage’. However, there are also exceptions, such as פסח 'Passover' pronounced besaḥ.
Tripolitanian Judeo-Arabic
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Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic includes many loanwords from Italian due to Italian control over Libya in the early- and mid-20th century.
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žornāle ‘newspaper’, bandyēra ‘flag’, baninu ‘sandwich’, činma ‘cinema’, familya ‘family’
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Judeo-Arabic in Tripoli pronounces the Hebrew tav /t/ as a /č/, in accordance with Arabic phonological rules.
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Hebrew ḥatan)'groom' > JA ḥāčān
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Algerian Judeo-Arabic
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Judeo-Algerian Arabic includes significant borrowings from French.
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Examples of Judeo-Algerian Arabic words from Hebrew, both religious and secular:
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kašer ‘kosher’ (from Hebrew כשר kasher) and rešāna ‘Rosh HaShanah’ (from Hebrew השנה ראש rosh ha-shana).
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kaʿas ‘anger’ (from Hebrew כעס kaʿas), afellu ‘even’ (from Hebrew אפילו ʾafillu).”
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Levantine Judeo-Arabics (Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Syria)
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The Judeo-Arabic dialects of the Levant share many common features. The overwhelming majority of speakers moved to Israel and transitioned to speaking only Hebrew in the 20th century.
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In Syria, Judeo-Arabic is somewhat different in Damascus versus Aleppo, though Damascene Judeo-Arabic has been found to contain several significant differences from the non-Jewish variety as well (Matsa 2024).
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Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic (which will be discussed below) displays many similar features to Levantine Judeo-Arabic, and especially the Aleppo dialect of Syria (Werner and Bar-Moshe, 2017). This is leading scholars to infer contact between the two regions in the medieval period.
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Some of the Jews who had been exiled from Spain in 1492 passed through North Africa on their way to the Levant, bringing some features of North African Judeo-Arabic with them.
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Modern Palestinian Judeo-Arabic was a dialect of Arabic spoken by Jews living in Palestine up until the early 20th century. It was related to the non-Jewish dialect of Arabic spoken in Palestine, but also had heavy influence from Maghrebi (North-African) Judeo-Arabic, sometimes called Maghrebisms (Geva-Kleinberger 2018).
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MPJA also includes elements of Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, such as šabbāt di nōvyo.
Judeo-Baghdadi / Judeo-Iraqi Arabic
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Arabic in Baghdad diverged enough that a speaker’s community could usually be identified by the way they spoke.
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Jews in Baghdad retained Aramaic as their spoken language far longer than Jews anywhere else in the world. As such, Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic has a high amount of loanwords from Aramaic in its lexicon.
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deʕabad ‘after the fact’, sitra ʔaḥra lit. ‘the other side’ referring to the devil, ʕina biša ‘the evil eye’, damax ‘sleep’, gandar or kandar ‘rolled’
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Judeo-Baghdadi is also one of the most distinct varieties from its non-Jewish counterpart, compared to other varieties of Judeo-Arabic.
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The word for 'I said,' qəltu in Judeo-Baghdadi and gilit among Muslims, shows an unvoiced vs. voiced distinction in the uvular plosive.
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Another phonetic difference is that Judeo-Baghdadi preserves an Old Arabic sound rāʾ as the velar fricative /ɣ/ while Muslims pronounce an apical trill /r/.
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Judeo-Yemeni Arabic
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Related to their pronunciation of Judeo-Arabic, the Jewish community in Yemen was uniquely conscious of the pronunciation of all six plosive/fricative pairs of letters in Hebrew, known as the BeGeDKeFeT letters (ב, ג, ד, כ, פ, ת). In most other pronunciations of Hebrew, a distinction based on the presence of a dagesh (e.g. ב vs בּ) is maintained for the letters bet ב, kaf כ, and peh פ. Without a dagesh, these letters are pronounced /v/, /x/, and /f/ respectively, and with a dagesh they are pronounced /b/, /k/, and /p/. The Jewish community of Yemen was one of the only communities to preserve a difference in pronunciation for the other three letters as well. Gimmel, dalet, and taf were pronounced /ɣ/, /ð/, and /θ/ without a dagesh and /g/, /d/, and /t/ with a dagesh.
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Yemeni Judeo-Arabic contains sounds for /b/ and /p/, which do not have counterparts in other local Arabic dialects, Jewish or otherwise.
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Yemeni Judeo-Arabic pronounces the Hebrew consonant quf ק as a voiced uvular stop /ɢ/ rather than the Hebrew /q/, and the /e/ and /a/ vowels as /a/ and /o/ respectively, when borrowing Hebrew words (Kahn 2017).
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Yemeni Judeo-Arabic has a phrase to tell others to be quiet specifically when non-Jews are approaching the conversation so as not to be overheard:
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zarrir fummak ‘button your mouth!’
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Songs in Judeo-Arabic
Moshe Habusha with a song of Um Kalthoum in Egyptian Judeo-Arabic
The Kawati Brothers singing the pilgrimage song in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic visiting the memorial for Ezra the Scribe
A-Wa, a band that sets Yemenite Judeo-Arabic poetry to contemporary beats. Click on the image to watch a sample video.
The Shema prayer in Yemenite Judeo-Arabic
Literature
Judeo-Arabic has been written by Jews for Jewish readership usually on Jewish topics. However, there have also been translations of non-Jewish literature into Judeo-Arabic, often incorporating Jewish imagery. This can also be seen, for example, in Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish.
Jewish ethnolects around the world share an important literary genre: the verbatim translation of sacred and liturgical Hebrew/Aramaic texts (šarḥ in Judeo-Arabic, taytš in Yiddish, ladino in Judeo-Spanish, šar‘ in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, for example). The translations included the Bible, the Siddur (prayer book), the Passover Haggadah, Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers), and more. The šarḥ tradition involves word-for-word translation into the Arabic lexicon, maintaining the syntax of the original Hebrew/Aramaic text (see Hary 2000 for a description of these and other features of the šarḥ).
The varieties of Literary Written Judeo-Arabic can be seen as existing along a continuum of influence (see Hary 1996a):
Literary Judeo-Arabic contains, among other elements, many colloquial features from the right end of the Arabic continuum (Dialectal Spoken Judeo-Arabic). The other extreme of the Arabic continuum (standard Arabic) is not found in full in Literary Judeo-Arabic, but it is a resource for style shifting, as many authors attempted to use it with mixed success. In other words, Judeo-Arabic authors only approached Standard Arabic. If they wrote too much in Standard Arabic, they would lose solidarity and such texts would not be considered Judeo-Arabic. On the other hand, Standard Arabic is still the anchor for the left side of the Judeo-Arabic continuum, as it is in constant contact with the ethnolect and influences its structure and development. An example of this influence can be seen in the pseudo-corrections of some Judeo-Arabic authors attempting to write in the more prestigious variety of Standard Arabic (Hary 1992:62-69).
Several Judeo-Arabic authors mastered Standard Arabic and wrote in it. When they did, their writings in Standard Arabic were not considered Judeo-Arabic. Maimonides (1135-1204) serves as a good example in the period of Classical Judeo-Arabic. He was certainly capable of writing in Standard Arabic, and indeed did so, but he was able to switch between that and the different varieties of Judeo-Arabic, thus adapting to his readership. As a result, some of his works, such as his medical writings, which were aimed at non-Jewish readers, are in Standard Arabic and cannot be considered part of Classical Judeo-Arabic. In other works, such as his letters to his co-religionists, he used varieties of Judeo-Arabic, and therefore they are in Literary Written Classical Judeo-Arabic.
A Judeo-Arabic story about a princess.
The Cairo Geniza, where many documents in Judeo-Arabic and other languages were stored for centuries, enabling subsequent analysis
Oded Amit sings an original song in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic (see subtitled version of excerpt here)
Joseph "Yusuf" speaking Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic
Comedy in Judeo-Arabic
Current Status
Today, the ethnolect is approaching extinction, mostly due to the large emigration of Arab Jews, or Jews of Arab lands, in the late forties and fifties of the last century. Most of these Jews moved to Israel, where the Zionist Israeli pressure to drop Judeo-Arabic and adopt Hebrew was immense. Others immigrated to France, North America, and elsewhere, where they tended to assimilate to the local languages. Today there is still a sizeable Jewish community in Morocco but most of the Jewish speech community there uses French rather than Moroccan Judeo-Arabic. There are still speakers of Judeo-Arabic in Israel (and elsewhere) and a show in Moroccan Judeo-Arabic is broadcast on Israeli radio. However, the population of its users is aging, and its use as a native ethnolect will probably disappear in the near future. Even so, there is some postvernacular engagement, in particular with Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. For example, some descendants of speakers take Judeo-Arabic courses, discuss and celebrate the language, and consume and produce new music, mostly in Muslim varieties of Arabic.
Audio Recordings: Prayers, Stories, Psalms, and More
The text is chanted on Tish'a b’Āb (Ninth of Ab) in the Baghdad Judeo-Arabic tradition. An annual fast, it is considered to be the saddest day in the Jewish calendar. Hakham Sasson Hougi is the vocalist in this recording made by Sara Manasseh, 1992. This video shows a transcription and translation of the first minute of the audio. For more information about the recording, click here. A scan of the full text, from which this lament is read, can be found here.
Online Resources
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The Language of the Jews of Islam: The History and Politics of Judeo-Arabic. Lecture by Benjamin Hary, 2018.
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Oxford and the Printing of Judeo-Arabic. Lecture by Brad Sabin Hill, 2017.
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Facebook group regarding preservation of Iraqi Judeo-Arabic.
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Virtual keyboard in Judeo-Arabic
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Transliterator: Judeo-Arabic to Arabic
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Online exhibit by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz including Moroccan Judeo-Arabic women's songs
To cite: Hary, Benjamin. n.d. Judeo-Arabic. Jewish Language Website, Sarah Bunin Benor (ed.). Los Angeles: Jewish Language Project. https://www.jewishlanguages.org/judeo-arabic. Attribution: Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 International.