“May I treasure up the words in my heart!”: Syriac Culture in Modern Aramaic Oral Tradition

Abstract

Modern Aramaic philology is a research field that has attracted the attention of few scholars and vernacular literature preserved in manuscripts appears indeed to be a rather marginal phenomenon in comparison with both oral tradition and Classical Syriac writing (copying of the classical heritage and composition of new original texts). In the last few decades and especially in the last few years, a surprising number of grammatical descriptions of modern Aramaic varieties have appeared. All of them include the transcription and translation of oral texts, some of which are particularly valuable from a literary point of view. Both written and oral texts reveal an extraordinary tenacity of classical stories and motifs. A couple of examples will be given here: the story of the Maccabean martyrs and their mother Shmuni and of Joseph and Mary. In both cases oral transmission has preserved ancient lore in the collective memory of the community, although in rather creative and somehow distorted ways, as is typical of the oral/aural medium. The earliest written witnesses of Modern Aramaic are religious texts composed in learned varieties of Jewish and Christian vernaculars of present-day northern Iraq. Their linguistic, literary and stylistic forms attest the existence of a rich and probably much earlier oral literature in the vernacular. They are written texts that have drawn on classical literatures – Hebrew, Jewish Aramaic and Classical Syriac, but they are clearly intended for oral transmission, being homiletic texts in the case of Jewish authors and lengthy hymns to be chanted by soloists and/or choirs in the case of East Syrian Christians. The latter exhibit stylistic features and structuring devices typical of oral poetry: rhyme, rhythm, formulae, copia verborum, multilingual hendyadis, anaphora and anadiplosis. The earliest dated Christian texts originated in the Mosul plain around the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century. It was only since the 18th century, however, that Christian Aramaic vernacular literature was committed to writing in manuscripts as a marginal, quantitatively almost insignificant phenomenon in the context of that flourishing of scribal and literary activities which is known as the “school of Alqosh”. Since the 16th century, a number of authors and families of professional scribes of Alqosh, in the Mosul plain, or the surrounding region, were extraordinarily active in copying, reading, commenting Classical Syriac works and became original authors themselves in the classical language and – to a far lesser extent – in the vernacular. In the 19th century, this kind of literary production attracted the attention of the first European scholars who dealt with Modern Aramaic. They used it especially as a source of linguistic evidence and were seldom interested in literary features. After the first ground-breaking publications, almost a century elapsed before Semitic scholars rediscovered the charm of modern Aramaic tongues. This renewed interest was cultivated mostly by dialectologists who became progressively more aware of the risk of extinction that threatened what they usually label “Neo-Aramaic” dialects. Only a few scholars devoted themselves to reading and collating manuscripts containing Modern Aramaic literary texts. 5 The intense and meticulous labor of the linguists resulted in the publication of a number of grammatical descriptions of Neo-Aramaic dialects. Especially in the last few