Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic

Judeo-Arabic is not a single uniform language but a cluster of regionally distinct dialects spoken by Jewish communities throughout the Arab world.[2] The term refers to Arabic used by Jews that differs in some way from Arabic used by other religious communities, while encompassing both written forms and spoken dialects rather than one homogeneous linguistic entity.[2] It has also been characterized as a group of diverse Middle Eastern and North African dialects forming a "rich fusion of Arabic and Hebrew."[1]

Within this broader grouping, the Jewish dialect of Tripoli is classified as a sedentary variety, in contrast to the bedouin-type Muslim dialect of the same city.[2] Jewish dialects from Libya to Morocco are also placed in the pre-Hilālī category, meaning that they preserve features associated with forms of Arabic established before the influx of Hilālī Bedouin migration into the Maghreb.[2] In this account, Jews in towns whose Muslim populations adopted bedouin-type speech were typically an older part of the population and resisted the influence of nomadic settlers.[2] An earlier scholarly survey also lists Tripoli among places where Arabic was spoken by Jews.[6]

Arabic was the primary spoken language of Jews in most Maghrebi regions for many centuries.[7] Jewish communities spoke different Arabic dialects depending on where they lived, often borrowing words from Hebrew and Aramaic, and Jews in Muslim-majority countries traditionally wrote Arabic using Hebrew characters rather than Arabic script.[8] The earliest surviving written Judaeo-Arabic records date to the eighth or ninth century and were written in Hebrew script; this practice continued through the Middle Ages and into modern times.[2]

Libyan Jews spoke a Jewish dialect of Maghrebi Arabic that included Hebrew words; this speech is attested at least through the late nineteenth century.[3] Arabic was also used in religious and commercial writing among North African Jews, alongside its role as an everyday vernacular.[7] North African Jewish dialects more broadly preserved older characteristics of Arabic introduced during the early centuries of Arab rule. Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and morphosyntactic structures were used for abstract concepts and in registers such as preaching, Talmudic instruction, and rabbinical correspondence.[9]

In 1948, Libya's Jewish community numbered about 38,000, including approximately 20,000 Jews in Tripoli, with other communities in Benghazi and smaller settlements.[3] Jewish peddlers sometimes used a unique argot among themselves when conducting business with Muslims because Muslim neighbors could generally understand ordinary Judeo-Arabic.[3] Community schooling for boys included learning the Hebrew alphabet and reciting Hebrew and Aramaic texts, while the everyday spoken language remained Judeo-Arabic. The source reports that most Jewish men did not understand the texts they recited or heard read in synagogue.[3]

The most precisely documented features of Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic come from comparative dialectological scholarship, particularly the work of Sumikazu Yoda and later analyses by Geoffrey Khan and Jordi Aguadé.[2] Two phonological differences between the Jewish and Muslim dialects of Tripoli stand out. For Old Arabic qāf, the Jewish dialect preserves /q/, while the Muslim dialect uses /g/. For Old Arabic rāʾ, the Jewish dialect has a uvular trill [ʀ] or uvular fricative [ʁ], whereas the Muslim dialect has an apical trill /r/.[2] These distinctions recall the communal dialect division documented in Baghdad, where Jewish and Muslim communities also developed divergent consonantal realizations.[2]

The two dialects also differ in their use of the grammatical dual. The Muslim dialect of Tripoli permits dual forms across all noun categories, including ktābēn "two books," bǝntēn "two girls," mǝftāḥēn "two keys," and bābēn "two doors." The Jewish dialect restricts the dual to nouns denoting measures of time, distance, and weight and to nouns of Arabic origin, a pattern comparable to urban dialects in Algeria and Morocco.[2]

The Hebrew component is pronounced according to the sound patterns of Tripolitanian Jewish Arabic. Documented examples include Hebrew /g/ becoming /x/, as in xnəb "he stole"; Hebrew /t/ becoming the affricate /č/, as in ḥāčān "groom"; and short Hebrew vowels reducing to /ə/, producing forms such as səkkāna "danger," ṣəddūṛ "prayer book," and ḥnəkkā "Hanukka." The change of /p/ to /f/ is illustrated by čfənnəq "to indulge oneself."[2]

Libyan Judeo-Arabic more broadly contained many Hebrew and Italian words, a pattern connected in one account to Libya's position as a cultural bridge between continents.[10]

Written Judaeo-Arabic in Hebrew script encompassed translations of sacred works, religious and legal writings, letters, stories, songs, and newspapers.[2] It was not necessarily a direct representation of spoken vernacular: its literary models varied by historical period, and later texts generally incorporated more local dialect features than medieval compositions.[2]

A prominent example of Judeo-Arabic literary activity in Libya is the work of Rabbi Mordechai Ha-Cohen of Tripoli, active from 1897 to 1926, whose archive is cataloged in Judeo-Arabic and Hebrew.[11] Ha-Cohen used unpublished Judeo-Arabic manuscripts by Abraham Khalfon (1741–1819) as sources for his history of Libya and its Jews. His own letters were mainly in Hebrew, with some in Judeo-Arabic.[12] Around 1925, he composed a work about the medieval authority Rabbeinu Gershom in Judeo-Arabic and Rashi script for the Jewish community of Benghazi, intending to explain Rabbeinu Gershom's historical significance to local readers.[12]

The dialect also sustained a periodical press. The National Library of Israel's catalog identifies Degel Tsiyon as a Judeo-Arabic newspaper from Libya, with archived issues dating from 3 June 1920 through 28 October 1924.[13] Sumikazu Yoda's chapter "Libyan Judeo-Arabic: the Arabic Dialect and the Judeo-Arabic of the Jews of Tripoli," published in the 2018 collection Jewish Libya: Memory and Identity in Text and Image, represents a major scholarly treatment of the dialect.[14]

A Jewish-Arabic dialect has also continued to be used in a magazine produced by Or Shalom, a Libyan Jewish congregation in Bat Yam, Israel, although the report does not establish that this is specifically the Tripoli variety.[15]

The displacement of Libyan Jewry occurred in stages. About 95 percent of the community emigrated to Israel between 1949 and 1951. After anti-Jewish riots in June 1967, most of those remaining left, largely for Italy and Israel. Several hundred Jews were still in Libya after the September 1969 coup, and about 90 remained at the end of 1970.[3] These departures removed the dialect from its original geographic and social setting. Judeo-Libyan is distinct from other Judeo-Arabic varieties: speakers of Judeo-Libyan and Yemenite Judeo-Arabic would not necessarily understand one another.[5] An earlier survey of Levantine Jewish immigrants in the United States also identifies Arabic as the vernacular of Jewish immigrants from Tripoli, alongside those from Cairo and Tangier.[16]

Judeo-Arabic dialects broadly have been characterized as "on the verge of extinction due to mass migrations and upheavals."[4] Migration and language shift have led younger generations to stop speaking their grandparents' languages, and a language may disappear within less than a generation.[5] Researchers at the University of Haifa, led by Prof. Yehudit Henshke, have recorded speakers of Jewish languages and made processed and translated materials available online. Nearly 500 videos and recordings had been collected when the project was reported, although the number specifically documenting Judeo-Libyan was not stated.[5]

The boundaries and definition of "Judeo-Arabic" as a linguistic category remain contested. Scholars have debated whether Jewish Arabic speech constitutes a distinct language or is better understood as locally rooted colloquial Arabic with Jewish-associated features that vary by region.[4] Differences between Jewish and neighboring forms of speech can range from a few Hebrew loanwords to mutual unintelligibility, leaving the language-versus-dialect question theoretically unresolved.[4]

Philologos, writing in Mosaic, presents Ella Shohat's argument that Jewish speech in Arabic-speaking lands consisted of local colloquial Arabic with regionally varying and comparatively minor Jewish-associated features rather than one distinct Judeo-Arabic shared by all Jewish communities. Shohat connects its treatment as a separate language to what she calls a "separationist thesis."[17] This interpretive debate concerns Judeo-Arabic as a whole; the cited discussions do not apply the argument specifically to the Tripolitanian variety.[4][17]