Judeo-Iraqi Arabic

Judeo-Iraqi Arabic refers to Arabic used by Jewish communities in Iraq, but the label does not denote a single uniform variety. It encompasses regional spoken dialects and written Jewish Arabic practices; the best-studied spoken form is Jewish Baghdadi Arabic, while distinct varieties existed in other Iraqi towns and regions.[1] The distinction between speech and writing matters: Judeo-Arabic can refer broadly to Arabic written in Hebrew characters, whereas Judeo-Baghdadi commonly names the local spoken dialect of Baghdad’s Jews.[2]

The varieties formed part of a wider Jewish Arabic tradition across the Middle East and North Africa. That broader tradition is characterized as diverse, shaped by Arabic and Hebrew, and now at risk of extinction.[3] Iraqi Jewish Arabic is also a record of community life: it appears in domestic speech, journalism, literary and musical production, religious settings, and recollections of migration and family.[6][7]

Arabic use did not mean that Iraqi Jews lived monolingually. Community members used different languages in different settings, including Hebrew for liturgy, Arabic varieties for everyday communication, and—in modern Baghdad—English and French in education and other interactions. Across generations and after migration, Hebrew increasingly replaced Arabic in some families, while descendants have sought to recover the language as an element of family memory and identity.[2][4]

The terminology is not uniform: sources call the variety a language, dialect, or Jewish variety of Iraqi Arabic. The labels reflect different ways of framing a set of related but locally varied speech practices, rather than a single formal classification established in the material summarized here.[8][9]

Arabic became established among Iraqi Jews over a long period, and accounts distinguish the timeline of urban communities from that of rural and northern communities. A scholarly account says urban Jewish communities in Iraq appear to have become Arabic-speaking by the eighth century, while rural communities adopted Arabic more slowly. Some evidence indicates that Jews in Iraq continued speaking Aramaic at least until the tenth century, and isolated Jewish communities in northern Iraq retained Aramaic into modern times.[1]

A Jewish Agency educational resource says Iraqi Jews switched to Arabic with the arrival of the Arabs in the region in the seventh century and continued speaking Arabic throughout their residence in Iraq. That statement concerns Arabic generally and does not itself identify the language as Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.[10] In a broader account of Judeo-Arabic, Arabic gradually displaced Aramaic as a Jewish vernacular after the Muslim conquest, first in larger centers, with Jewish populations using Arabic in everyday interaction from about the eighth century.[11] A 2024 report gives a similar approximate age for spoken Iraqi Jewish Arabic, describing it as emerging around 1,200 years ago after the Muslim conquest of Babylonia; it says Jews in the region had previously spoken mainly Aramaic and probably Hebrew. That dating is presented as the report’s account, not as a date independently established by the other material.[9]

For Baghdad, historical descriptions distinguish what people spoke from how they wrote. In the mid-nineteenth century, Baghdad’s Jews primarily spoke Judeo-Baghdadi and wrote Judeo-Arabic; Hebrew was used for liturgy and rabbinic correspondence. By the Mandate period, most literate Baghdadi Jews wrote Arabic in Arabic script, while Judeo-Baghdadi remained the community’s de facto spoken language.[2]

The distinction was part of a larger multilingual shift. During the Mandate period, the local Muslim-Baghdadi Arabic dialect, English, and French also became important means of communication. Most literate Baghdadi Jews could read and write French or English, or both, while Hebrew remained primarily liturgical, notwithstanding examples of Modern Hebrew linguistic creativity.[2]

European-language schooling was connected to the work of foreign Jewish philanthropic organizations, including the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Anglo-Jewish Association. Community leaders pressed for more Arabic and Hebrew in schools and later for Arabic and English: French became less useful in post-Ottoman Iraq as English gained importance. The community’s educational and language choices thus involved practical and political considerations, not simply a change in home speech.[2]

Some educated Iraqi Jews, particularly in Baghdad and Basra, also turned toward modern literary Arabic in the early twentieth century. Sasson Somekh argued that this adoption began in the first decades of the century; the account describing his argument qualifies its scope, while noting that a generation of mainly middle-class Baghdadi Jews pursued modern literary Arabic in speech, literary ambitions, and political hopes. Alliance schools increasingly emphasized French and later English, and a Baghdad Jewish high school retained a strong English-language focus even after the Iraqi government required Arabic instruction by the end of the 1920s.[12]

Jewish Baghdadi Arabic is described as a qaltu dialect, an older sedentary Mesopotamian type, in contrast with Muslim Baghdadi Arabic, classified as gilit, a bedouin-type dialect. The names refer to contrasting forms of “I said”: Jewish qaltu and Muslim gilit. The contrast reflects different dialect histories: Jewish speech retained older sedentary features, while Muslim speech adopted bedouin-type features. Baghdad had distinct Jewish, Muslim, and Christian communal dialects until the middle of the twentieth century.[1]

Among the contrasts documented for Jewish and Muslim Baghdadi speech are the retained /q/ in Jewish qaltu and /g/ in Muslim gilit, and the Jewish first-person singular ending -tu compared with Muslim -it. The account also records a back-rhotic or velar-fricative pronunciation of historical Arabic rāʾ in Jewish speech, contrasted with the Muslim apical trill, and an imāla example: Jewish klib (“dogs”) versus Muslim clāb. These are features of the varieties described, not a diagnostic list applicable to every Iraqi Jewish Arabic variety.[1]

Iraqi Jewish speech was regionally diverse. A group of Jewish dialects in southern Kurdistan, extending roughly from Kirkuk to Khanaqin, shared features with Jewish Baghdadi, including /q/ and the -tu first-person singular ending. Jewish Mosul Arabic had a distinctive back-rhotic realization. In Arbil and Aqra, Jewish Arabic included an attached copula and a proclitic progressive marker, discussed in connection with contact with Kurdish and Neo-Aramaic.[1]

Contact also produced varieties that did not simply preserve a contrast with surrounding speech. The Karaite Jewish dialect of Hit used qilit (“I said”), described as a hybrid combining Jewish /q/ with the -it morphology associated with the Iraqi bedouin-type gilit. The account connects this innovation to the community’s openness to surrounding society and cites Arabic-script use in many Karaite writings as evidence of that openness.[1]

More generally, Judeo-Arabic writing and spoken Jewish dialects should not be conflated. Written Judeo-Arabic covered diverse regional practices, and one scholarly account describes many texts as belonging to “Middle Arabic,” with differences from Classical Arabic in vocabulary and semantics, grammar, and orthography. How strongly texts reflected local spoken Arabic varied by place.[2] Medieval writers often aimed at a Classical or post-Classical literary standard; later texts could reflect vernaculars more directly. Hebrew script was a principal medium, but written texts were not simply transcriptions of spoken dialects.[1]

Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary was especially common in religious, legal, and communal settings, and Hebrew words could take Arabic morphology.[1] A general account of Judeo-Arabic and Neo-Arabic describes broad changes from classical Arabic’s synthetic structure toward a more analytic one, including loss of case and mood endings, a tendency for the subject to precede the verb, and frequent use of mā for negation. It also notes Hebrew and Aramaic phrases in Judeo-Arabic; these observations describe the broader tradition rather than features exclusive to Iraqi Jewish speech.[13]

A reference account describes the traditional domestic language of Arabic-speaking Jews in the region as Eastern Arabic, distinguishing urban Jewish dialects in Syria and Egypt from an Iraqi urban dialect spoken in Baghdad and by eastern Anatolian Jews. It also notes Hebrew as a source of vocabulary in Jewish dialects, without providing a more detailed classification or specific sound and grammar features for the Iraqi variety.[14]

Judeo-Arabic writing was Arabic used by Jews, often for Jewish readers, and commonly written in Hebrew characters. Its idiom could lie closer to spoken Arabic than the idiom used in Muslim literature, although written forms were not necessarily direct records of local speech.[11][1] This written tradition extended to Iraq, where Hebrew characters served as a medium for Arabic texts and where later writers also used Arabic script.[11][2]

Baghdad’s Yeshurun provides a specific example of Judeo-Arabic journalism. The National Library of Israel catalogs it as a weekly newspaper published in Baghdad; its online run covers 19 November to 17 December 1920 and consists of five issues and 88 pages.[15] Jewish cultural activity in Iraq also included Arabic-language literary, journalistic, and theatrical work, though such activity should not automatically be equated with Judeo-Arabic texts. Newspapers and magazines named in an account of Iraqi Jewish cultural life include al-Misbah (1924–1929) and al-Hasid (1929–1937), and Jewish performers participated in Iraqi theater in Arabic from the 1920s. Some works of the Jewish intelligentsia are described as Arabic in essence and expressive of the country’s cultural life.[7]

Arabic also figured in Iraqi Jewish folk and para-liturgical music. Babylonian Jewish poets produced a substantial repertoire over medieval and later periods, with songs in Hebrew and in a Judeo-Arabic dialect. Some manuscripts included a maqāma, or musical mode, or named the melody for which a poem was intended; Ms. Sassoon 485 is cited as an example.[7]

The Kunag was a distinctive group of Judeo-Arabic pilgrimage songs performed at pilgrimages to the graves of Ezekiel and Ezra. Jews from different parts of Iraq spent several days at these gatherings, where music and dance were prominent. Because of their religious content, the songs were classified as piyyutim and treated as sacred songs.[7]

Many Iraqi Jewish folk songs opened with Hebrew, usually a prayer or laudatory passage. The public commonly repeated the introduction as a refrain after each verse sung by a soloist; the account says that almost all the folk songs used this responsorial form. Manuscripts could indicate a musical mode or identify the melody to which a poem should be sung.[7]

Surviving archival materials document further uses of the language. The Iraqi Jewish Archive includes Judeo-Arabic manuscripts alongside Torah scrolls and mantles, children’s primers, photographs, and letters. Its earliest item dates to 1568, while most of the other materials are from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The collection was discovered in Baghdad in 2003, later transported to the United States, and freeze-dried, conserved, and photographed; the account says it remained in the charge of the National Archives and Records Administration and the Center for Jewish History.[16]

A National Library of Israel catalog record for Iraqi Jewish Archive material dated 1955–1975 includes Judeo-Arabic among the keywords for a file concerning legal documents and property matters of the Baghdadi Jewish community. The file is described as including correspondence involving Jewish religious courts and Iraqi citizens, as well as communal property and endowment documents; the catalog does not identify which individual documents are in Judeo-Arabic.[17]

In Baghdad, a specifically Jewish spoken Arabic was part of ordinary community life, but Arabic use varied by setting and person. One account quotes Sasson Somekh describing the Jewish dialect specific to Baghdad and southern Iraq as fundamentally different from the idiom of the region’s Muslim population. Naim Kattan recalled that differences in speech could make religious and regional origins audible.[12]

A family account illustrates multilingual practice. In Somekh’s recollection, his father spoke Jewish Arabic at home, shifted to Muslim Arabic on the street, used English with British bank managers, and spoke other Arabic dialects with customers. The same discussion describes homes and schools where French and English were important, while Arabic literacy could be limited.[12] A historian interviewed about Iraqi Jews, especially those in large cities such as Baghdad, likewise connects their integration into Iraqi society with speaking Arabic and with Jewish participation in Iraq’s transition to modernity.[6]

Expressions remembered by descendants convey the intimate and social registers of the language. In an interview, memoirist Samantha Ellis gives fudwa (“I would die for you”), abdalek (“may I be your sacrifice”), and ayouni (“my eyes”), as well as ashtidak or ashtidek, a blessing for someone who has cooked or made something, and awafi, glossed as a response meaning “eat it in health.” She also records ash aku, ash maku (“What is there? What isn’t there?”) as a way to ask how someone is, and buma (“owl”) as an insult meaning someone is silly. These are interviewee-provided examples and transliterations, not a comprehensive dictionary.[4]

Sarah Sassoon also describes ashtidek as a way to bless or compliment someone who prepared a meal, and ayouni as an endearment meaning “you are my eyes.” She says some Iraqi Jewish people of her generation do not know these expressions because the language was not necessarily passed down.[18] In a first-person recollection, Lyn Julius gives family examples including woudja! for pain, Wi Abel! for dismay, bezoona for “cat,” and darboona for “corridor.” She connects Wi Abel! (“O mourning”) with Hebrew evel. These are family-reported examples rather than a complete linguistic inventory.[19]

Julius also recounts an anecdote about 'esh lonek?, which she says her family used to ask “how are you?” Her brother asked it of a Sudanese man, who answered aswad (“black”); the anecdote turns on the possibility that the question could be understood in Muslim Arabic as asking “what colour are you?” It illustrates how similar-sounding expressions across communal varieties could be understood differently.[19]

The language remained present in family life after migration. Carol Isaacs, recalling her Iraqi Jewish family, called Judeo-Arabic “a language we spoke” at home and described growing up with stories of her parents’ life in Baghdad.[6] Ellis describes Judeo-Iraqi Arabic as her ancestral language and the language she heard her parents use. Her father left Baghdad for Israel in 1951, aged 11, during the mass migration of Iraqi Jews; her mother remained in Iraq until 1971 and later moved to the United Kingdom. Her parents did not teach the language directly to their children, partly because they wanted to assimilate and believed it was dying. Ellis learned to understand some of it by overhearing them; at about nine, she understood it but had hardly ever spoken it.[4]

Migration also led to different linguistic trajectories. Ellis says Iraqi Jews who went to India retained Judeo-Iraqi Arabic alongside local languages. She describes some descendants’ speech as an “archaic form” compared with her family’s variety, likening it to speaking with someone using Victorian-era English, while emphasizing that it was authentic to the community that spoke it and developed differently from the variety used by Jews who remained in Iraq.[4]

Judeo-Iraqi Arabic is endangered as intergenerational transmission has weakened. A broader account describes Judeo-Arabic dialects across the Middle East and North Africa as threatened with extinction in modern times.[3] Ellis says that her children’s generation generally does not speak Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, although relatives sometimes use words with children so they can hear them. She doubts it will survive as a widely spoken community language, while allowing that it may continue to be spoken to some extent.[4]

Accounts of families in Israel describe language shift across generations. One interviewee said his parents spoke Hebrew to each other and only occasionally used a word or two of Iraqi Arabic; he mainly encountered the language at his grandparents’ home, and his exposure fell substantially after his grandmother died. He later joined an online preservation group and began learning through the words and discussions shared there.[8] Another interviewee recalled feeling ashamed when her parents spoke Iraqi Arabic at school and trying to avoid association with them. She later became interested in her family’s roots through her daughter’s school family-history project and relatives’ stories, and joined the same preservation group.[8]

These recollections are individual accounts of language, identity, and experience in Israel, not a comprehensive survey of Iraqi Jewish families. A course participant and teacher recalled speaking Arabic with her parents after arriving in Israel at age four and a half, but said they stopped speaking it at some point; she also remembered changing her pronunciation after starting school. She described teaching the language as passing on a cultural world as well as a practical means of communication.[20]

Preservation efforts include formal instruction, archival work, and digital exchange. A course described in 2024 by a Babylonian Jewish heritage center aimed to teach speaking and understanding rather than reading and writing. Its planned content included pronunciation, everyday vocabulary, songs, proverbs, stories, jokes, blessings, and historical and cultural subjects; its director was described as a native speaker of the Iraqi dialect.[9] Other learning and documentation efforts identified in Ellis’s interview include the Oxford School for Rare Jewish Languages and an online archive of speaker interviews. The interview also reports that the Jewish Language Project piloted a mentor-learner program specifically for Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic in summer 2024.[4]

Community use has also been visible in Israel. A 2015 account named Or Yehuda, Tel Aviv’s Hatikva Market, and gatherings around Orde Square in Ramat Gan as places where people involved in a language course said Iraqi Jewish Arabic could still be heard. These are examples reported by participants, not a survey of all speakers.[20] In 2017, a feature described Zehava Barka’s Facebook group “Preserving the Iraqi Language,” which had nearly 50,000 members at the time. Members shared language questions and translation requests alongside jokes, performance videos, songs, and family stories.[8]

More recent projects use social media and family-to-family teaching. In a 2026 profile, Guy Shoval Shaul said that after studying spoken Arabic he recognized his grandfather’s distinctive Iraqi Jewish variety and began learning it with a teacher. He now teaches Arabic to his father, who had not previously known it. The profile presents the language as endangered and describes Shoval Shaul’s use of online videos to share family and cultural material.[5] It reported about 30,000 followers on his Instagram page when it appeared, with most comments on his videos in Arabic; one video of him speaking Judeo-Iraqi Arabic with a 90-year-old Iraqi Jewish man had received about 4.3 million views.[5]

The National Library of Israel’s collections preserve both recordings and later-life testimony. In 2008, Eli Sawdayee narrated short children’s rhymes from Iraqi Jewish folklore in Judeo-Arabic at his studio in Ramat Gan; the recording is held in the Library’s Sephardi Voices Collection.[21] The same collection catalogs a five-part telephone interview with Emad Levy, recorded in March 2021, in Judeo-Arabic. It concerns his schooling and life in Baghdad, the shrinking Jewish community, and his eventual escape to Jordan and move to Israel; the catalog describes the language as Judaeo-Arabic, “a dialect of Iraqi Jews.”[22]

Judeo-Iraqi Arabic carries evidence of Jewish life in Iraq beyond the record of formal institutions. Its spoken regional varieties make audible distinctions among communities.[1] Texts, songs, family expressions, recordings, and interviews preserve aspects of religious practice, daily interaction, education, migration, and memory.[7][4] Arabic also connected Iraqi Jews to wider Iraqi society: a historian links Arabic speech among urban Jews with social integration and Jewish participation in Iraq’s transition to modernity.[6]

For some educated, middle-class Jews in Baghdad and Basra, Arabic was also bound up with a political hope: participation as Jews, Christians, and Muslims in a modern Iraqi national identity. The discussion of this history argues that command of Arabic did not guarantee Jewish acceptance as equal members of Iraqi society and presents the relationship among Arabic, Jewish identity, Arabism, and Iraqi nationalism as historically contentious.[12] This was one political project among varied experiences, not a description of every Iraqi Jew or every speaker.

The category itself is debated. One interpretation emphasizes distinctive Jewish dialects, including a specifically Baghdadi and southern Iraqi variety; another, presented in a 2024 article through Ella Shohat’s argument, holds that Jews in Arab lands spoke regional colloquial Arabic with relatively minor Jewish-associated peculiarities, rather than a common language shared across countries. Baghdad and Cairo are cited as examples of regional variation. This argument disputes treating Judeo-Arabic as one language comparable to Yiddish or Ladino; it is a debate about classification and political framing, not a detailed account of Iraqi grammar or vocabulary.[12][23]

The sources also use “language,” “dialect,” and “variety” in different ways, and the material does not settle on one formal classification.[8][9] The historical evidence presented here supports attention to both dimensions: Judeo-Iraqi Arabic belongs to a broader Jewish Arabic tradition, yet its spoken forms were regionally specific and distinct communities could have different linguistic histories.[1][2]

The principal dispute concerns whether “Judeo-Arabic” should be understood as a language shared by Jewish communities or as a broad label for locally varied Arabic speech and writing. Some accounts emphasize distinctive Jewish communal dialects, while the interpretation reported by Mosaic stresses regional colloquial Arabic with comparatively minor shared Jewish features. The terminology in the sources likewise varies among language, dialect, and variety; the reviewed material does not establish a single formal classification.[12][23]

The relationship between Arabic, Arab or Arab-Jewish identity, and Iraqi nationalism is also interpreted differently. Some educated Jews pursued a modern Iraqi identity that promised equal participation, while the account discussing this aspiration argues that Arabic fluency did not ensure acceptance. These interpretations should not be generalized to all Iraqi Jews.[12] Finally, an approximate origin date of 1,200 years and claims about linguistic influences are reported in a 2024 news account, but are not independently verified by the other sources summarized here.[9]