Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations: ask thy father, and he will recount it to thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. (Deuteronomy 32:7)
This organization shall be known as HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF JEWS FROM EGYPT, and not of Egypt or of Egyptian Jews, but FROM EGYPT
THE ARABIC DIALECT OF JEWS IN MODERN EGYPT
Gabriel M. Rosenbaum
Gabriel M. Rosenbaum was born in Jerusalem and has lived most of his life in Tel Aviv. He received his Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University in 1995 and is a senior lecturer in Arabic Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research and academic publications focus on the literature, drama, language and folklore of modern Egypt, based both on written sources and on close contact with Egyptian culture and its makers. He writes fiction prose and poetry in Hebrew and has also published translations of foreign literary works into Hebrew, including two plays by Egyptian playwrights. He has visited Egypt many times and has lectured on several occasions at the Israeli Academic Center in Cairo.
INTRODUCTION
Jews living in various parts of the Arab world sometimes spoke distinctive Arabic dialects,2 differing in a number of respects from the Arabic spoken by their Muslim and Christian neighbors. As Haim Blanc has pointed out, however, until recently the Arabic spoken by the Jews of Egypt in the twentieth century has been thought to differ very little from that spoken by non-Jews. In a preliminary study of the Arabic of the Jews of Cairo, Blanc was careful not to label the linguistic variety he was describing as “Jewish Cairene.”3 Notwithstanding this guarded formulation, he laid the foundations for a description of modern spoken Egyptian Judeo-Arabic. Beyond his pioneering articles,4 however, the spoken dialect of the Jews of Egypt has received scant attention, and extremely little has been written on the basis of data collected from Jewish speakers of Egyptian Arabic. 5 The purpose of my study is to continue Blanc’s work and fill a gap in this area.
In Egypt, Muslims and Coptic Christians speak what is essentially the same dialect; local variants are geographically rather than ethnically conditioned. However, the language of the Jews of Cairo and Alexandria, while influenced by the respective local dialects, contains many common elements – in the areas of phonology, morphology, and particularly vocabulary – which are not to be found in the dialects spoken by non-Jews. From the point of view of phonology and morphology, the unique features of this Jewish Arabic speech are constant, irrespective of the circumstances of communication. The distinctive lexical features, on the other hand, usually appear only in communications among Jews. In the twentieth century, about 98% of the Jews of Egypt lived in the two large cities of Cairo and Alexandria.6 Today almost no Jews remain in Egypt, and the number of those outside Egypt who still use Egyptian Judeo-Arabic is constantly diminishing, so that this language will probably disappear in the not far-distant future. The following survey, based primarily on data elicited from informants and constrained by limitations of space, gives but a sampling of the relevant grammatical phenomena and vocabulary items.