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forthcomingDavid M. Bunis

The Jewish communities of medieval Spain were among the most productive and influential in Europe. Documents preserved from those communities demonstrate that Iberian Jews employed numerous Hebraisms in their Ibero-Romance vernaculars, at least in writing. Among their descendants, the written as well as oral use of Hebraisms is widely documented in the Judezmo (Judeo-Spanish) of the Ottoman Empire and Ḥaketía of North Africa into the modern era. And yet, unlike the Hebraisms employed in the lang…

In medieval Iberia the Jews used Hebrew, and to a lesser degree Aramaic, as their primary languages of liturgy, high-level rabbinical writing, and communal record-keeping. In Muslim Spain they commonly spoke and wrote Judeo-Arabic. Perhaps from as early as the 11th century, as parts of Iberia under Muslim domination were retaken by Ibero-Romance-speaking Christians, Judeo-Arabic-speaking Jews in those regions judaized the Ibero-Romance—primarily Castilian—they had adopted as their everyday langu…

At the end of the 15th century, one way in which the Sephardim who arrived in the Ottoman Empire after the expulsions from Iberia began to acclimate themselves in their new home was by acquiring some familiarity with Turkish—the official language of the Ottoman administration and that of the empire’s Turkish Muslim population, as well as the principal lingua franca enabling communication between members of the empire’s linguistically diverse minorities. From the rabbinical responsa in Hebrew as …

In both the Middle Ages and the modern era, varieties of Hebrew existed in states of diglossia (Ferguson 1959) with other varieties of Hebrew, as well as in states of ‘out-diglossia’ (Kloss 1966) or ‘extended diglossia’ (Fishman 1967) with Jewish Diaspora languages. 1. Biblical and Other Varieties of Hebrew Throughout medieval and modern Jewish history, the text of the Bible was read and studied in synagogues and study halls. The Torah in particular was chanted in each community according to its interpretation of the Masoretic טעמים ṭeʿamim ‘accents’, which were included in medie…