The Myths and Misconceptions of Jewish Linguistics

Abstract

David M. Bunis, ed. Language.) and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews: Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress for Research on the Sep hard i and Oriental Heritage. Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute and Misgav Yerushalayim, 2009. Pp. 482 (in English, Spanish, French) and 434 pages (in Hebrew).Frank Alvarez- Pereyre and Jean Baumgarten, eds. Linguistique des langues juives et linguistique generale. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2003. Pp. AA7 (with two articles in English).John JVIyhill. Language in Society: Towards a New Understanding . Clevedon-Buffalo-Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2004. Pp. ix + 239.The three books here under review consist of two collections of studies in a number of and one discussion of the role of in societies. All three, especially the two collective works, make ample reference to Max Weinreich 's Geshikhtefun der y id L) her shprakh. 1 The two collective works continue the tradition of comparative treatments of that began in the 1930s.2The three volumes also contain numerous mentions of my article Jewish Interlinguistics: Facts and Conceptual Framework Language 57 [1981]: 99-149), which was inspired by Weinreich 's magnum opus. However, since 1981, I have radically altered my views on languages. In my 1981 article, I accepted Weinreich 's premise that most were connected to each other through successive acts of language shift, leading back to colloquial Hebrew, for example, Yiddish replaced Judeo-French and Judeo-Italian which in turn replaced Judeo- Latin and Judeo-Greek, the successors of the Judeo-Aramaic and Hebrew speech communities of the biblical period. It is true that there are unique (Judeo-) Romance elements in Yiddish and a handful of Judeo-Greek elements in some Judeo-Romance languages, but these facts can reflect language contact as well as substratal influences. There is also no reason to think that the presence of a community in a single location in successive historical periods automatically implies generational links between those very communities. For example, there is no evidence that Romance-speaking Jews in pre-eighth-century Spain are the ancestors of Romance-speaking Jews in Spain in the thirteenth century. A consequence of the assertion that cannot be placed on an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to old colloquial Hebrew is that the Hebrew component of cannot provide straightforward clues to the reconstruction of old colloquial Palestinian Hebrew. I also accepted Weinreich's assumption that were acts of linguistic creativity intended to support the unique religion and culture of the Jews and to replace obsolete colloquial Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic.I now believe that the importance of an unbroken chain of language shift leading back to Hebrew was grossly exaggerated, since it emerges that most were created independently of preexisiting (e.g., Judezmo [Judeo- Spanish] arose centuries after the demise of colloquial Latin, and there are doubts about the very existence of a Judeo- Latin). Moreover, my research in Yiddish and Judezmo have convinced me that they were in fact created by recent Irano-TurkoSlavic and Berber converts to Judaism, respectively. If that is the case, then the big question is whether collective studies of Jewish languages have any raison d'etre; if they do, what should the goal of such collective studies be?The use of the Biblical Hebrew term adhkenaz (Scythians) as a selfdesignation of Yiddish-speaking Jews is a dramatic clue to the largely Iranian ethnic origin of the biggest community in the world, yet the historical facts are almost universally denied. The term has in fact gone through a number of semantic changes: (a) ashkenaz = Iranian: David ben Avraham ai-Fasi, a Karaite philologist from Fez, wrote in the tenth century that Ashkenaz was the man from whom the Khazars descended, while another Karaite, Josef ben Burhan, wrote in the same century that Khazars were Ashkenazim. …