In 1978 I delivered a paper in Hebrew at a conference in Jerusalem on the language and literature of Modern Judeo-Arabic, which was subsequently published in Issachar Ben-Ami (ed.) The Sepharadi and Oriental Jewish Heritage - Studies (Jerusalem, 1982: Magnes Press of the Hebrew University.) In this lecture I suggested that there are half a dozen types of literature in this language:
It is an ancient Jewish custom to compile paraphrases of Scripture. An example of this is the Arabic paraphrase of the giving of the Ten Commandments ascribed to R. Saadiah Gaon, written in an exalted rhetorical style, which was published in various editions. There are various paraphrases of Scripture directed at young people.
Of the second type, a charming example is the encyclopedic commentary Shay Lamora, "A Gift to Him who is to be revered," notable for its chummy and endearing style. This work is in the spirit of the much better known Me`am Lo`ez, "From a People of Foreign Speech," in Judeo-Spanish. [See Encyclopędia Judaica, vol. 11, col. 1158. The transliteration mentioned at the end must be used with great care.] Shay Lamora is an incredible mixture of traditional history, laws, customs and folklore, which yet manages to hold together. It is full of optimism and simple faith, something that must have contributed mightily to the survival of a people who underwent so much. The emphasis is placed on the deeds of mighty heroes of the past who conquered despite great odds against them.
Another category is books of folklore and wise sayings. Usually these have no specifically Jewish content, but are rather part of the common culture of the Middle East. A favorite example is The Proverb People ('hl 'lmtl, Bombay 5686, Baghdad 5704 etc.) Here are some examples of its sayings; generally they are brief and contain an internal rhyme:
Folktales bring us to a fantasy world of talking animals, utter scoundrels and shining heroes. In the story of Comeacross and Doublecross the sole Jewish element is the Hebrew phrase "May his name be blessed". Aside from this, the story how virtue is rewarded with riches and a beautiful wife, while vice is punished is part of the common heritage of the Middle East.
A story greatly beloved by the oriental Jewish communities is Nathan the Penitent or, as he is called in the Talmud (Shabbat 56b), in what is probably the correct variant, "Nathan of Sositha." This has an archetypal theme, namely whether it is permissible to prostitute a woman in order to save a life - a man's life naturally. One of the Church fathers believes that this is permissible because the woman's body belongs to her husband, and if this body can save his life, that is fine. But the wise and pious Jewish woman in this story gets out of the problem by raising convincing arguments, and successfully saves the husband from sin.
Special attention should be paid to popular poetry, which concentrates mostly on ballads and laments. The format of these is frequently four line stanzas, in which the first three lines all rhyme, and the fourth has a rhyme which repeats in every fourth line throughout the poem. (aaab, cccb, dddb etc.) This is the same arrangement as the Hebrew poem "Mi Kamokha" which is recited in Sephardi synagogues on the Sabbath before the feast of Purim.
The story of Hannah, which describes how Hannah (not the Biblical Hannah) and her seven sons sanctified the Name by giving themselves up to martyrdom rather than forswear their faith, doubtless served as a comfort to Jews living in both Christian and Muslim countries who were under constant pressure to give up their faith, and they were inspired by those among their ancestors who gave them a special example. The Hanukkah festival celebrates this period in Jewish history. No doubt the extreme mourning in which Jews indulged on the ninth day of the month of Ab, the traditional anniversary of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, involving a strict fast and many other restrictions, was a means of expression of their generalized feelings of oppression in the environment in which they lived. The lament of Hannah occurs all over the Arabic speaking Jewish world in various local dialects, and was printed from India to the western shores of the Mediterranean. Hirschfeld published a translation in the Jewish Quarterly Review, volume 8 (1894) and the Kaplan festschrift (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1953) has an article by Gershon Cohen pp.109-122 on this topic in Hebrew. The poet declares when this sad story ends: From on high a heavenly voice went forth: "Happy art thou, Hannah! /Open before you is Paradise, and before all your sons. /Soon He will build His sanctuary, and we shall dwell there as in days of old. /All our enemies will perish, he will have mercy on our people, /Elijah will come with glad tidings, with the Messiah, the son of David."
Another poem of this type is the poem describing with interesting historical detail the horrible anti-Jewish riots in Algiers at the end of the nineteenth century fomented by the rabble-rouser pied-noir Max Régis, who later became mayor of Algiers. I published a verse translation of this in the Maghreb Review.
Apart from cathartic laments such as this there are ballads rehearsing heroic deeds of the past. There is a fine recital of the deeds of Judith, as noted in the apocryphal book which bears her name, and in some ways the poem with its conciseness and subtle humor excels the original prose account. I published a slightly abridged version of this poem in the Reconstructionist volume 42 (1976) pp. 24-31, and the full translation is available on this website. The original which I used was published in Sousse, Tunisia, in 1920, text 56 in the checklist which forms part of the documentation of my dictionary - see below.
Many translations of European works, such as the Count of Monte Cristo, were published in Judeo-Arabic, as well as other original works. Many of these were listed by Eusèbe Vassel in a series of articles in Revue Tunisienne and separately reprinted: La Littérature Populaire des Israélites Tunisiens, (Paris, 1906). Together with my checklist this provides a fair overview of this popular literature. However, it must be said that Judeo-Arabic did not develop a modern literature of high literary quality as did Yiddish. The circumstances were different. Jews for the most part had a negative attitude to their speech, which they regarded as a corrupt form of classical Arabic. Books which publish the paraphrase of the Ten Commandments attributed to R. Saadiah Gaon, and used liturgically on the feast of Pentecost, describe it as being in a "clear and refined language" - in contrast, one supposes, to their daily tongue. Per contra, Darmon and Zarqa, the authors of the charming and encyclopedic "Gift to Him who is to be Feared" apologise for writing it in the corrupt colloquial (they use the word meshubbash in Hebrew) explaining that they had to do this in order to be understood by the masses, the target of their labors. Now Yiddish was a totally different language from the major languages such as Polish and Russian which surrounded it, and Jews felt for the most part little inclination to write in the tongues of their oppressors. Jews in North Africa and the Middle East on the other hand, were speaking the same language as their neighbors, albeit with a somewhat different pronunciation and vocabulary. The spirit of the Enlightenment penetrated little to these Jewish masses, either in its broader European manifestations, or in its Hebraic equivalent, the Haskala. There is another important factor. At this time French culture and language were predominant in many parts of the world. It was widely spoken by the Russian upper classes, for example, and was the recognized international language of such varied human endeavors as diplomacy and the international postal service. Above all, it was the high language in much of North Africa, where French influence had been paramount since the early nineteenth century. The Alliance Israélite Universelle opened schools throughout North Africa and the Middle East in which the language of instruction was French, and a deliberate effort was made to modernise the culture of these Sephardic and oriental Jews, often to the regret of local Jewish religious leaders, who saw their flocks slipping away from Jewish tradition. In 1931 a Tunisian Jew won a literary prize for his work L'Enfant d'Oukala which, of course, was written in French, and not Judeo-Arabic. I try to offer here some samples of this literature in its varied manifestations, finding no need to apologise for it. It is unabashedly popular literature, expressing the soul of the people, often in an engaging manner.
Some years ago - æons in terms of computer development - I published on nine 5.25 inch disks in MSDOS format A 'Diskionary' and Chrestomathy of Modern Literary Judeo-Arabic. It was favorably reviewed, but is now unusable unless you happen to have an ancient computer in your basement. I have decided to put the texts on the Web, along with some commentary to aid in their understanding, which will replace the Dictionary. Readers familiar with standard Arabic should have little difficulty in reading the texts once they have got used to the orthography, which, incidentally, never became standardized in Judeo-Arabic. Help will be offered with Hebrew expressions which may be unfamiliar, as well as annotations of a cultural nature.
I started with the intention of printing these materials using the Xerox Diablo printer, which had the possibility of using a Hebrew/English printwheel. This printwheel (also known as "daisy-wheel" from its shape) had the English upper case letters in their usual position in the ASCII character set (octal numbers 101-132) but the lower case letters were replaced with the Hebrew letters in order, with the five final letters preceding the medials. Since this requires twenty-seven characters, one more character than the English set, the Hebrew alphabet occupied the octal numbers 140-172, sacrificing the grave which immediately precedes the lower case English set. This gives the awkward correspondences ` = aleph, "a" = bet, etc. through "z" = tav. I therefore designed a more manageable code for the keypunch machine then in use, a = aleph, b = bet etc. to copy the texts from right to left. It was a simple matter to program this data such that each line was reversed to go from right to left, the readable code was automatically converted to the printwheel code, and an ID for each line was entered on the left. In addition diacritics on, in and under the letter were marked by a symbol (such as the asterisk for a diacritic inside the letter) to precede the relevant letter, with the idea that the Diablo would backspace and double strike the letter. Hertsel Corech did this data entry with great accuracy. Oftentimes the texts themselves are poorly printed, and it may be difficult to determine whether in fact there is or is not a diacritic. In almost all cases I have followed Hertsel's intuition in this which is generally quite sound. The checklist of texts was printed in this fashion, all the English information being in upper case letters.
Before the project was finished the microcomputers came along, so I devised a special character set on a 5x7 matrix, using an assembly language program for the PC, to create a special Judeo-Arabic character set in the upper segment of the extended ASCII character set in which characters octal 200-232 inclusive were the twenty-seven Hebrew characters in the same order as for the printwheel, with the finals preceding the medials (a kind of QWERTY effect.) The characters 233-265 then had a pixel added above, 266-320 had a pixel added in the middle and 321-353 had a pixel added below. All this gave an exact representation of the texts, and Martin Miller converted the original punched cards to an online format with an ID for each line, the text going right to left, and the letters now in the upper ASCII character set as indicated. These were used in the Diskionary and Chrestomathy for the PC.
In placing these texts on the Internet I decided against spending my time in devising yet another representation. Fonts have become much more sophisticated in the intervening years. So I have pressed into service the Jerusalem font available for my Macintosh, which is very legible and pleasant to look at, but certain sacrifices have to be made, which in my view are not serious. The texts that Martin produced are still available, and when read with the Emacs editor are presented in their octal form, and they give a complete record of each text. The octal form is easier to follow than their representation by various symbols. These may be obtained by ftp (file transfer protocol) as follows.
The changes referred to above which are required by the nature of the font used are as follows:
Since the copy of the text here is not an exact copy of the original, copying of these texts is not allowed for. However, you may download the encoded exact copy as detailed above. In one or two places I have corrected slips, so the encoded text should be compared with the text offered here.
Words or phrases that are annotated are underlined with a colored underline.You must look carefully for these as the underline is rather thin. Double-click on the word or phrase to bring up the annotation. It will normally appear on top of the item being annotated. You may dismiss the annotation by clicking on the top left corner, even if no close box shows there. Alternatively, simply hold the pointer over the word, and after a moment the annotation will appear. When you move the mouse it will vanish. Annotations are listed in the pane which appears by clicking on the comments tab to the left of the text pane. Occasionally, the fact that the text runs from right to left makes it difficult to underline the entire phrase being annotated, but this should cause no difficulty. Since a knowledge of Arabic is assumed on the part of readers of these texts, only items requiring special explanation are included. All Hebrew phrases and abbreviations are annotated since the reader is not expected to know more Hebrew than the alphabet.
Occasionally there will be a link to some other site. This is indicated by an oblong around a word or phrase. Click on the word or phrase to follow the link. There may be a note related to this link in the margin indicated by an electronic "sticky note" in the margin.
Every line is followed by an identification [ID] between parentheses, based on the page and line arrangement of the edition used. Reading from left to right, the first three digits of this ID give the page number (with leading zeroes if necessary) followed by two digits representing the line number (with a leading zero if necessary). Some books use the older "folio" system of pagination, where the entire physical page has one number, and the first side (the "recto") is indicated by the Hebrew letter aleph appended to the page number, and the other side (the "verso") is indicated by an appended Hebrew letter bet.
If transliteration is needed, the following 22 symbols are used in the order of the Hebrew alphabet. Final letters are not specially marked:
Note that the distinction between shîn and sîn is significant only in Hebrew words, and is not specially marked. Words commonly used in English such as shadda are so rendered.
I decided to use Acrobat software at this time. This makes it possible to embed the Hebrew font, making unnecessary special software to read these texts. However it is necessary to have the free Acrobat Reader which you probably have already. If you do not have it, you can easily download it without charge.
It should be stressed again that these texts are popular literature: folk-tales, ballads, biblical commentaries, sermons. This does not detract from their significance or their human value. There are indeed classical "high" texts in Judeo-Arabic; Moses Maimonides composed texts in this language which are still studied in modern universities, but you will not find those here.
In the early 1970's I thought of preparing a dictionary of popular Judeo-Arabic. I learned of a computerized project on Italian texts being carried out by Professor Alinei of the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, and it occurred to me that using the computer might save the myriad slips of paper which dictionary makers have used for many years. I visited Professor Alinei in Utrecht in 1975, and he graciously showed me his project. The data was punched onto IBM cards which had been specially fabricated for the purpose, and he had a FORTRAN program which organized his data. I decided to try to use the computer for Judeo-Arabic. This was before the time of microcomputers of course. It was far from easy for humanists to secure information how computers worked, let alone initiate projects for them. However, I received help from a number of quarters. Hertsel Corech is a native of Iraq who was raised in Israel, and trained in the use of computers. He was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at the time and cheerfully agreed to help me with data entry. I devised a transcription system for Judeo-Arabic with a one-to-one correspondence of the Hebrew letters, to be entered from left to right on punch cards. Letters with a diacritic over, in or under the letter were entered with a preceding symbol indicating where the diacritic was. The idea was that this would alert the printer in any eventual printout to print the diacritic, then backspace so that the next letter would be over it.
The Diablo Printer cost in five figures, but could achieve less than an inexpensive printer today. It had changeable printwheels, including one in which the Hebrew Alphabet replaced the lower case Roman letters. Since Hebrew has one more letter than English, the Hebrew letters began at the letter before lower case a in the ASCII character set, namely the grave, decimal 96. So the English lower case a was replaced by the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet, bet. This enciphered the alphabet, but the computer was able to sort this out and produce documentation and a checklist, by backspacing for diacritics. When added to Eusèbe Vassel's list in his La Littérature Populaire des Israélites Tunisiens, (Paris, 1906) it provides a good, although by no means complete, insight into the scope of this literature. I thought to produce the dictionary in this form, but in the meantime the Apple II+ appeared and then the PC, so I modified the results to appear on the screen of the PC, and it was published on nine 5.25 inch disks, which, as I said above, are now unusable, unless you still have a PC running MSDOS.
There are a number of texts in manuscript. I reproduce here one in full, the Homily on the Talet and Tefillin of which I published a translation on my website some years ago. Thanks to the Hebrew Union College Klau Library for allowing me access to it. It is written in the Sephardic cursive, which is essentially the same as the Rabbinic script used for traditional Hebrew Bible commentaries, often known as the Rashi script, because the most famous commentary written in that script is by R. Solomon Isaac of Troyes, known to the generations as Rashi.
This section of my website is dynamic, in that I will place additional texts on line as I finish editing them. However, the material already available should be quite usable. Your comments are welcome.
Alan D. Corré