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The term Romaniot stems from the self-identification of the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christian population of the Balkans as Rhomaioi (Romans), that is, descendants of the citizens of the Roman Empire, which continued in its Byzantine incarnation until 1453. As citizens of the empire, the Jews were also Rhomaioi (Greek) or Romani (Latin), hence Romaniot (Heb. romaniotim). As a minority in a hostile Christian environment, the Romaniot Jews were subject to restrictive laws and constant harassment by the Orthodox Church, which treated them as a foil to the triumphalism of Ch…

Judeo-Greek has existed since the first encounters between Jews and Greeks recorded in the Apocrypha  and preserves lexical and morphological characteristics with the Greek language of various periods. During the Hellenistic period, Jews translated the Bible into a Judaized dialect of Attic and Ptolemaic koine, and later in the Roman period messianic Jews wrote three of the Gospels and most of the epistles of the New Testament in a Jewish dialect of koine that manifests an Aramaic substructure. …