Autochthonous Texts in the Arabic Dialect of the Jews o f Tiberias.

• Author: Hary, Benjamin
• Position: Book review

Autochthonous Texts in the Arabic Dialect of the Jews o f Tiberias. By AHARON GEVA-KLEINBERGER. Semitica Viva, vol. 47. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 2009 Pp. xiv + 229. [euro]62.

Judeo-Arabic is a religiolect (a language variety used by a religious community) that has been written and spoken in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world. Its literature deals for the most part with Jewish topics, and is written by Jews for a Jewish readership. Several features distinguish it from other varieties of Arabic: a mixture of elements of classical and post-classical Arabic, dialectal components, pseudo-corrections, and pseudo-corrections that have become standardized. Judeo-Arabic is written, for the most part, in Hebrew characters, and employs elements of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and grammar. Moreover, the religiolect frequently preserves archaic forms and makes use of migrated or displaced dialectalism, where uncommon dialectal characteristics appear in a certain region against regular dialectological expectations. In other words, it is a typical mixed language variety.

Judeo-Arabic can be divided into five periods with a linear development: pre-Islamic Judeo-Arabic, early Judeo-Arabic (eighth/ninth to tenth centuries), classical Judeo-Arabic (tenth to fifteenth centuries), later Judeo-Arabic (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), and contemporary Judeo-Arabic (twentieth century). This periodization, however, should not draw attention away from the major changes that occurred in the fifteenth and in the twentieth centuries, when the religiolect underwent two dramatic changes in its structure and use. During the fifteenth century the Jewish world reduced its contact with its Arab counterpart. Although a great number of Jews settled in the Ottoman empire after the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula in 1492, and in some ways experienced even more intense contact with the Ottoman Muslim world, many curtailed their contacts with Arabs, their language, and their culture. Jews were more separated from their Muslim (and Christian) neighbors and began to congregate in Jewish restrictive neighborhoods. Because of the change in contact between the cultures in the fifteenth century, not only did the structure of written Judeo-Arabic come to incorporate more dialectal elements, but also more works were composed in Hebrew. In the twentieth century the religiolect again experienced a dramatic change in terms of grammatical structure and literary production with the rise of Jewish and Arab nationalist movements, the outbreak of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the consequent emigration of Jews from Arabic-speaking areas, leading to the near loss of the religiolect. The book under review, then, deals with the last period, contemporary Judeo-Arabic.

In this context, studies of local varieties of later and contemporary Judeo-Arabic have been conducted and published in the last several decades. The following publications represent only a few examples: for Egypt, Haim Blanc, "Egyptian...