Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic
Description by Elijah Seo, Jericoh Santiago, Janelle Laflin, and Ilias Hwang, compiled for a class assignment
Quick facts
Names of language:
Baghdad Judeo-Arabic, Baghdad Jewish Arabic, Judeo Baghdadi Arabic, Jewish Iraqi-Baghdadi Arabic, haki mal yihud, el-haki malna, عربية يهودية بغدادية, עַרָבִּיָּה יְהוּדִיַּה בַּגדָאדִיַּה
Territories where it was/is spoken:
Originated: Arabian Peninsula
Heyday: Baghdad, Southern Iraq
Present: Israel, communities in London, Montreal, New York
Estimated Number of speakers:
1900: 100,000-120,000
2020: 20,000-30,000
Vitality:
Endangered
Writing systems:
Hebrew Alphabet with adjustments in orthography
Literature:
Folktales, šarh, which are translations of Hebrew Bible and liturgical texts, periodicals
Language family/branch:
Semitic, Arabic, Eastern Arabic dialects, Judeo-Arabic Dialect
Geographic Locations of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic
Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic originated in Arabic-speaking areas of Baghdad, Basra, Aleppo.
By the late eighteenth century, the language arrived in the Indian region where diaspora communities formed in Bombay and Calcutta (Roland and Gubbay 1999).
Within the Americas, the Baghdadi subvariety of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic was spoken in communities within the city of Montreal in Quebec region and the New York area (Shohat 2015).
Within Europe, Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic was spoken in communities residing in parts of London, United Kingdom (Shohat 2015).
While many Australian Jews come from Ashkenazi origin, there exist small communities of Sephardi Jews in Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales (Gale 2005).
Historical Overview
About 2600 years ago, the Babylonian empire conquered Jerusalem, and Jews in Jerusalem were exiled to Babylon. Babylon was then conquered, and many Jews went back to Jerusalem, but some remained in that area for millennia. Some scholars believe that there was a rough formation of Judeo-Arabic even before the rise of Islam called al-Yahudiyyah. This language is the one where Hebrew and Aramaic components were first introduced and mixed with Arabic. However, many centuries later, there was a major shift in the language, and it shifted even farther away from the traditional forms of Arabic (Hary 1994).
In the 1800s, many Baghdadi Jews migrated to India because British colonialism in India was much more politically stable than the situation in Iraq, where they saw a “lack of preparedness” in the government (Stein 2011: 94). Then, after migrating to India, many Baghdadi Jews received protection from the British government and became British Protected Persons (Stein 2011: 91), which increased their freedom to migrate to other parts of the world, like Shanghai, China. The popularization of the process of becoming British Protected Persons later led to a migration movement to London itself, creating the community of people who speak Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic there today.
However, the more recent history of the language, particularly in regards to Iraq and Israel, is much different than the past migrations. According to Oded, our interviewee, in 1941 there was a Jewish massacre in Iraq, so many Jews moved to Israel if they had the opportunity to and left everything behind. In 1967, Iraq lost many soldiers in the Six Day War, and the Jews were punished by placing them in jail and were considered second class citizens. In 1969, seven Jews were hanged in the public square as everyone rejoiced and danced. In 1970, some Jews were able to escape to Israel. In Israel, the diaspora continued and the Baghdadi Jews in Israel followed the patterns of the large majority of Jews and migrated to various parts of the world, leading to the current situation in which there are pockets of people throughout the world who speak or have a family connection to Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic.
Documentary Evidence and Scholarship
There are very few written records of the language, but some include select portions of the Tanakh and the Quran translated into Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. Very little of these translations can be found online, but there are some other written records of the language telling basic stories. Our interviewee has documented many songs, written sketches, performed in movies about Judeo-Arabic, and even teaches classes on the language. While there is a great deal of research on Judeo-Arabic (Hary 73), there are few books and articles that focus on the specific Baghdadi dialect of this language.
Non-Jewish Correlate
While there are a variety of different spoken dialects of Arabic based in various regions, the co-territorial language is Muslim and Christian dialects of Baghdadi Arabic. We can also compare Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic to Classical Arabic, which is used in diglossia with spoken Baghdadi Arabic. One of the biggest differences between Jewish and other varieties is that the glottal stop that is usually used in Arabic is completely lost in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic pronunciation.
On top of this, the rules for using long vowels are mostly different. For example, in Classical Arabic, the long ‘a’ sound can become like the long 'e' or ‘i’ sound, but this does not occur in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic. Another example is the vowel sound ah in Classical Arabic. This sound in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic turns into gah (Bin-Muqbil 2006). We also see differences in morphosyntax. In Classical Arabic, singular verbs come before the plural subject, but in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, a plural verb will always come before a plural subject. Despite these differences, Classical and Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic are mutually intelligible to a certain extent. This tells us that on the continuum of distinctiveness in Jewish languages, Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic falls on the side where the languages are very similar and like a dialect rather than a separate language (Blanc 1964).
Distinctive Jewish Linguistic Repertoire
Like other Jewish languages, Judeo-Arabic has many Hebrew loanwords. One thing that is important to note is that in Jewish communities with a non-Semitic vernacular, the diglossia between the local language and Hebrew is very distinct, but that is different in communities that speak Arabic because the languages are similar (Henshke 2013: 646). In Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, the main semantic domains that Hebrew influenced were related to religion and Judaism. The majority of influence is seen in nouns, and more specifically in proper nouns like the names of biblical characters or places (Henshke 2013: 649). There are significantly fewer influences from Aramaic than from Hebrew. However, particularly in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, since the Babylonian Jews’ original spoken language was Aramaic, the influence is much more evident. For example, there are even a lot of common words that come from Aramaic in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic like dara, 'a row of students in a classroom.'
Similar to a lot of other Jewish languages, the Hebrew-related portions of the language have ties to the specific descriptions of life as a Jew. Words that have to do with faith, Jewish traditions and festivals, and many other Jewish functions are referred to with Hebrew loanwords (Henshke 2013: 650). Some examples of such words are imuna, 'faith' and comes from the Hebrew word אֱמוּנָה and Šifər, meaning 'Torah scroll,' which comes from the Hebrew word ספר תורה.
There are also influences from European languages, mainly Turkish. Other languages that have influenced Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic are Italian and Persian. Some examples of loanwords are jandarma, which is from Italian and means 'police', and meez which is from Turkish and means 'table.'
Beyond loanwords, Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic demonstrates a unique structure within its phonology, morphology, and syntax from its Muslim and Christian Iraqi Arabic counterparts of the surrounding area, imbuing its own distinct heritage into the language of Arabia (Bar-Moshe 2019).
Orthography
Similar to other Jewish languages, the Jewish communities within Baghdad wrote Judeo-Arabic using a “modified form of the oriental cursive” Hebrew alphabet (Schramm 1955: 114), authoring a sizable number of religious literature pieces translated in this particular writing system. Written expressions of the language employ linguistic components from Classical Arabic, or Quranic Arabic, and Old Arabic (Bar-Moshe 2019).
Example of written text
Transliteration and Translation
Sociolinguistic Variation
Judeo-Arabic expresses grammatical differences when speaking to or about opposite genders, similar to masculine and feminine forms in other languages. In terms of acknowledgment of authority, respect is shown to adult figures by children and also the people of a higher socioeconomic class by people of a lower class. Children are never allowed to address any adult by their first name. Some examples of ways that children show respect in a more casual manner are by addressing their friends’ fathers as Abu ___, meaning “the father of ____.” To address a teacher, children use the word Ustad. In addition to the differences in language, our interviewee Oded mentioned that the culture surrounding the use of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic has a very strict respect hierarchy. One tradition that goes along with the great sense of respect is the practice of children kissing adults’ hands in greeting, usually if the child’s parents are friends with the other adult.
Contemporary Status
At its current state, Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is best considered as an endangered ethnolect approaching extinction status from a linguistic perspective. The majority of the Jewish population from Baghdad who learned the language firsthand have scattered and emigrated elsewhere. These geographic locations include but are not limited to the North American region, several parts in the United Kingdom, and Israel where the minority’s ethnic heritage slowly began to be absorbed into the dominant culture (Endelman 2015: 16).
Educational policies and growing assimilation pressures to adopt the local languages spoken by the regional majority has forced many of these immigrants to drop their native language, resulting in the diminishing interest to preserve/pass forward their distinctive dialect.
Despite the growing audience of individuals engaging with Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic in post vernacular ways (music, theatrical performances, language classes), the active population of speakers are continuing to age with the passage of new generations, and the language usage for everyday affairs is slowly diminishing.
Song
Singer Oded Amit performs an original song, “El-Bohi Kentu,” in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic alongside several other musicians.
Direct language translations provided by Oded Amit.
Shortened version with subtitles included.
Discourse
Interviewee Oded Amit recites a short joke in the Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic Dialect.
Joke explanation/translation provided by Oded Amit at the end of the video.
Interviewee Background
Oded Amit’s family is originally from Baghdad, and he was born there in 1947. In 1951, when many Baghdadi Jews (about 150,000) moved out of Iraq, his family decided to stay along with about 3,000 other Jews because Israel had so many immigrants that they could not support the people with shelter, running water, or food and the immigrants had to leave everything behind.
Oded Amit grew up in Baghdad and went to a Jewish school and participated in Jewish clubs, separating him from non-Jewish Arabs. Jews were considered to be second class citizens and dealt with hate and a lot of antisemitism that had caused many massacres in the Arab countries. When the Arabs lost the Six Day War in 1967, the Iraqi government decided to punish the small Jewish community that could not defend themselves. Oded Amit was a part of this community, and many of his friends, including himself, were put in jail for several years merely because of their Jewish identity. In 1970, Oded Amit and his younger sister escaped jail and went to a smugglers camp that took them to Iran, where they underwent investigations to prove they did not mean any harm to Iran, where they eventually got papers to move to Israel in December of 1970.
Oded Amit now calls Israel his home, where he has three adult children and five grandchildren, who also live in Israel. He is a trained civil engineer, but when he went into retirement, he decided he wanted to revive and maintain Iraqi Judeo-Arabic because it is his mother language and the language that he spoke until he was in his 20s. He has taught many courses in different locations in Israel, as well as connected to the rest of the world through social media, such as Facebook, in order to teach the language. He has also created many sketches, songs, and documentation of the language, as well as being a part of several movies about the language that can be found very easily by many people.
Elicitation Data
*Hebrew loanwords are underlined.
Insights from a Descendant
Granted the opportunity to speak directly with a descendant of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic native speakers, interviewers were able to gather notable insight in regard to the current status of the endangered language. This exclusive 1-on-1 interview with Yifat Mukades sheds light upon the growing interest and community of Judeo-Arabic enthusiasts as she emphasizes her internal desire to reconnect with her cultural heritage and roots in spite of her early disinterest at a young age. Surprisingly enough, the language itself has slowly become “mainstream” within Israel as Mizrahi traditions were granted equal opportunity and celebrated amongst local communities. Additionally, post-vernacular engagement has been achieved through performative art forms such as songs and theatre/comedy shows.
Collaborating with cultural interest groups with the primary goal of “preserving the Iraqi language,” Yifat’s ongoing efforts sought to save the language spoken by not only her family members but many others as well. Through consistent support from Facebook and surrounding communities, there exists an expanding collection of educational opportunities and resource documents available for those interested in exploring the intricacies of the Judeo-Arabic language all around the world. Despite this overwhelming enthusiasm toward the language, Yifat remains wary of its future vitality for those subsequent to her generation of speakers.
Bibliography
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