Abstract This article presents the first comprehensive quantitative mapping of Yiddish scientific and technical literature from its medieval beginnings to the early twenty-first century. Drawing on a corpus of 595 publications, it analyzes chronological, generic, disciplinary, and geographical distributions to reconstruct the dynamics of knowledge production in a non-dominant vernacular. The findings demonstrate that such literature constituted a structurally differentiated component of Yiddish print culture, closely connected with education, professional communication, and linguistic modernization. By shifting attention from individual texts to large-scale publication patterns, the study identifies phases of growth, diversification, and institutional concentration that challenge prevailing assumptions about the marginal or episodic character of Yiddish engagement with science and technology. This analysis reveals marked asymmetries across periods and regions, including interwar expansion, postwar contraction, and selective revival in recent decades. The article also outlines the principles of corpus construction, classification, and proportional analysis within the constraints of bibliographic availability.
This article presents two Judeo-Arabic ginot, or elegies in verse, about Bathou Sfez, the Tunisian Jewish coachman whose execution for blasphemy in 1857 precipitated the intervention of the French Second Empire and the ratification of the 1857 Security Pact in Tunisia. I provide English translations, clarifications of words and phrases particular to the Judeo-Arabic dialect of Tunis, explanations of the texts' historical and literary allusions, and references to other examples of the idioms used. Though publications in the Judeo-Arabic dialect of Tunis are numerous and well documented, much scholarly work remains to be done in the domain of lexicography, to which this article makes many novel contributions. The article concludes with an analysis of the contents of these ginot, clarifying their relationship to the historical events that they ostensibly describe, pointing at once to the value and limits of such texts as historical sources.
Abstract This study analyzes sociolinguistic variation through self-reported familiarity with Jewish English lexical items among Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Australia and the United States. Using an online survey of 611 participants, we examine familiarity with six hypothesized categories of lexical items: four representing increasingly in-group Jewish English terms and two specific to Australian Jewish usage. Jewish participants from both countries were more familiar with the first four categories than non-Jewish participants, and non-Jewish Americans reported greater familiarity than non-Jewish Australians. One Australian category was more familiar to Australians than Americans, regardless of ethnoreligious identity, while the other was uniquely familiar to Jewish Australians. Overall, these results demonstrate how national and ethnoreligious identities shape lexical item familiarity and usage. We argue that socially meaningful lexical variation, especially in assimilatory or diasporic contexts, merits further study as a salient way for people to maintain distinctive identities within broader national and cultural frameworks.
This paper is the first analysis of Sarechali, also pejoratively called "Joodi," the Jewish dialect of Persian from the Sarechal neighborhood of Oudlajan, Tehran. In recent centuries, Jews from various Iranian cities and towns migrated to Sarechal, leading to linguistic influences from Iranian Jewish languages, Loterai, and Semitic languages. In addition, Sarechali is distinguished from colloquial non-Jewish Tehrani Persian by its Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords, archaic features, and distinctive phonology and prosody. This analysis, based on audio recordings from the 1970s and recent interviews with elderly Iranian Jewish immigrants in the US, counters the assertion that the community's Persian dialects are indistinguishable from those of other religious groups.
In Yazd, the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities speak languages that belong to the Central Dialects of Iranian, while the Muslim majority speaks Yazdi Persian. This divergence raises two pivotal questions: Why do the languages of Yazd's minorities differ from the majority language, and what insights do they offer into their origins and, possibly, the city's earlier vernacular? Drawing on the speech of the last speaker of JudeoYazdi in 2017 and of multiple speakers of Zoroastrian Dari, this article examines the hypothesis that JudeoYazdi and Zoroastrian Dari may both represent descendants of Yazd's pre-Persian vernacular. While they exhibit a range of phonological correspondences, their morphological similarities most notably the procliticization of personal pronouns offer the strongest evidence for a common inheritance. The analysis foregrounds morphological innovations as the key diagnostic for assessing the genetic relationship between these two minority languages.
This paper introduces the Jewish vernaculars of Nehavand and Khonsar and proposes the term "Ecbatanic" derived from Ecbatana, the ancient Greek name for Hamadan to avoid confusion with Judeo-Hamadani proper. The idea emerged during my study of Khonsar, the only Persian town in which both Muslims and Jews spoke Central Plateau-type languages. Surprisingly, these dialects differed: while Muslim Khonsari aligns with its expected areal pattern, Judeo-Khonsari shows exclusive agreements with Judeo-Borujerdi and, ultimately, with Judeo-Hamadani. Considering Hamadan and Borujerd are outliers from a "Central Plateau" perspective, and Judeo-Hamadani is not a continuation of the extinct dialect of Hamadan, I argue that the Jewish dialects of Hamadan and nearby towns formed due to migration, probably not very old, into this "Ecbatanic" linguistic zone from various localities where Central Plateau varieties are spoken. This hypothesis is reinforced by the hybrid nature of Ecbatanic in terms of both vocabulary and morphosyntax.
This article examines the linguistic and historical significance of Rakhamim, a Bukharan Jewish newspaper published in Russian Turkestan from 1910 to 1914/1916. It reconstructs the establishment of the periodical and its use of Persian, written in Hebrew script. Reflecting vernacular speech rather than classical, standardized Persian, Rakhamim features colloquial expressions and phonetic adaptations shaped by a multilingual environment of Persian, Russian, Turki, and Hebrew. As an underused source, Rakhamim offers valuable insights into the linguistic development of Bukharan Jewish Persian. The study highlights its potential for further research on the language and identity of Bukharan Jews and the history of Russian Turkestan.
This paper is the first analysis of Sarechālí, also pejoratively called “Joodí,” the Jewish dialect of Persian from the Sarechāl neighborhood of Oudlājān, Tehran. In recent centuries, Jews from various Iranian cities and towns migrated to Sarechāl, leading to linguistic influences from Iranian Jewish languages, Loterai, and Semitic languages. In addition, Sarechālí is distinguished from colloquial non-Jewish Tehrani Persian by its Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords, archaic features, and distinctive phonology and prosody. This analysis, based on audio recordings from the 1970s and recent interviews with elderly Iranian Jewish immigrants in the US , counters the assertion that the community’s Persian dialects are indistinguishable from those of other religious groups.
In Yazd, the Jewish and Zoroastrian communities speak languages that belong to the Central Dialects of Iranian, while the Muslim majority speaks Yazdi Persian. This divergence raises two pivotal questions: Why do the languages of Yazd’s minorities differ from the majority language, and what insights do they offer into their origins and, possibly, the city’s earlier vernacular? Drawing on the speech of the last speaker of Judeo-Yazdi in 2017 and of multiple speakers of Zoroastrian Dari, this article examines the hypothesis that Judeo-Yazdi and Zoroastrian Dari may both represent descendants of Yazd’s pre-Persian vernacular. While they exhibit a range of phonological correspondences, their morphological similarities—most notably the procliticization of personal pronouns—offer the strongest evidence for a common inheritance. The analysis foregrounds morphological innovations as the key diagnostic for assessing the genetic relationship between these two minority languages.
This article examines the linguistic and historical significance of Rakhamim , a Bukharan Jewish newspaper published in Russian Turkestan from 1910 to 1914/1916. It reconstructs the establishment of the periodical and its use of Persian, written in Hebrew script. Reflecting vernacular speech rather than classical, standardized Persian, Rakhamim features colloquial expressions and phonetic adaptations shaped by a multilingual environment of Persian, Russian, Turki, and Hebrew. As an underused source, Rakhamim offers valuable insights into the linguistic development of Bukharan Jewish Persian. The study highlights its potential for further research on the language and identity of Bukharan Jews and the history of Russian Turkestan.
This paper introduces the Jewish vernaculars of Nehavand and Khonsar and proposes the term “Ecbatanic”—derived from Ecbatana, the ancient Greek name for Hamadan—to avoid confusion with Judeo-Hamadani proper. The idea emerged during my study of Khonsar, the only Persian town in which both Muslims and Jews spoke Central Plateau-type languages. Surprisingly, these dialects differed: while Muslim Khonsari aligns with its expected areal pattern, Judeo-Khonsari shows exclusive agreements with Judeo-Borujerdi and, ultimately, with Judeo-Hamadani. Considering Hamadan and Borujerd are outliers from a “Central Plateau” perspective, and Judeo-Hamadani is not a continuation of the extinct dialect of Hamadan, I argue that the Jewish dialects of Hamadan and nearby towns formed due to migration, probably not very old, into this “Ecbatanic” linguistic zone from various localities where Central Plateau varieties are spoken. This hypothesis is reinforced by the hybrid nature of Ecbatanic in terms of both vocabulary and morphosyntax.
Vat. Pers. 61, found in the Vatican library, is a Judeo-Persian translation of the Torah. It has been variously described as a 13th, 14th, or 15th century text. This study aims to more accurately pinpoint its age and establish whether it is a direct translation of the Masoretic Text or whether it is based on Targum Onqelos. Based on a limited corpus of this manuscript (the Decalogue and a few other verses), this study also provides a more detailed description of the language variety of the manuscript and discusses the Aramaic and Arabic loanwords found in it. The study concludes that Vat. Pers. 61 is largely based on Targum Onqelos, and the language of the text is found to be generally pre-Mongolian Early Judeo-Persian, which is rare for a religious Rabbanite text.
Three Judeo-Persian texts are presented in this article. The first and the longest is the Scroll of Antiochus, one of the para-Biblical Apocrypha, in a Judeo-Persian translation made around 1600 in Lār from a vorlage in Medieval “Biblical Hebrew,” which was, more likely, a European print or a handwritten copy of such a print (a handwritten copy from Constantinople 1504/5?). The second text is a short fragment from a pseudo-historical composition written in Early Judeo-Persian, in 947/8 CE in Afghanistan, with a style very similar to Seder ʿ Olam . This text is useful because it clarifies a critical point of the traditional Jewish chronology that appears in the Scroll of Antiochus. The third text is a fragment from an 18th or 19th century guide for disputation against Muslim claims, which used Arabic Qurʾanic verses recorded in Hebrew characters and reflected the Persian pronunciation of Arabic.
This article examines salient features of the little-known Jewish Neo-Aramaic ( NA ) dialect of Sandu (northern Iraq). These features are presented in the context of establishing the dialectological position of Sandu NA as part of the Barzani-Sandu, or Central Jewish NA , subgroup of NENA . Various isoglosses that connect Sandu NA to other Jewish NENA varieties, primarily Barzani and Lishana Deni, are presented. Some of these isoglosses likely represent areal features that diffused among NA -speaking Jewish communities across extensive regions of NENA . Additionally, the article demonstrates that beyond typical Jewish NA traits and cross-correspondences with other NENA varieties, Sandu NA exhibits unique features as a distinctive dialect of NENA .
