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Jewish Languages
In the ancient Middle East, the nomadic Hebrews
spoke Hebrew, a Semitic language. Judaism's oldest texts
were also
written in Hebrew, including the Decalogue, Torah, Bible and
the
Mishnah. Hebrew was used throughout Jewish history in the
liturgy as a
sacred language, as well as in religious texts.
In the nineteenth century, there was a Hebrew
renaissance, for the
most part in Haskalah centers, and later among Zionist
activists, who
modernized the vocabulary and revived it as a living
language. In modern
Israel, it is the official language, alongside Arabic and
English. From
the third century B.C., the residents of Judea and Galilee
began using
the Aramaic language, also a Semitic language. Part of the
Talmud was
written in Aramaic. In the Diaspora, the Jews have used many
different
languages. On the Iberian Peninsula, the Ladino dialect took
shape
(Judeo-Spanish), as did Judeo-Portuguese, with a strong
lexical
influence from Hebrew and Aramaic.
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After they were expelled from Spain in 1492,
Jews living in Islamic countries, primarily in the Ottoman
Empire,
continued using these languages, as did small enclaves of
refugees from
the Iberian Peninsula who were scattered throughout Europe
in the
Balkans, Italy, France and Holland. Today, these languages
have all but
disappeared. In France, the Laaz (Corfat) dialect developed,
based
mainly on Old French. This dialect, however, began
disappearing as early
as the medieval period. The Ashkenazim used Yiddish, which
has its
roots in a twelfth-century Low German dialect. Yiddish
absorbed lexical
borrowings from Hebrew, as well as a few vestiges of Old
French. By the
sixteenth century, Yiddish had become a fully-formed,
completely
independent language, with two dialects: the western
dialect, used by
German and Dutch Jews, which disappeared in the seventeenth
and
eighteenth centuries; and the eastern dialect, used in
Eastern Europe
and influenced by the Slavic languages.
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The Eastern European Yiddish dialect has
various sub-dialects, including wolynski (from Volhynia,
Wolyn), used
among Galician Jews and those in Ukraine and Moldova; the
Lithuanian
dialect of Yiddish, used in Lithuania, Belarus and the
Bialystok region;
and the central or Polish dialect, used throughout the
former Congress
Kingdom. Each of them had several varieties of local
dialect, such as
the Warsaw sub-dialect of Polish Yiddish. In the late
nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, a rich literature developed in
Yiddish.
Today, Yiddish survives as the language of everyday
communication only
among a few Chasidic groups living in the United States and
Israel.
(A.C./CM)
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