A Jewish Neo Aramaic Dictionary

This dictionary is based on old and recent manuscripts, printed texts, literary Midrashic texts, recorded oral Bible translations, folk literature, and diverse spoken registers. It has an extensive introduction, including a brief history of the Jewish dialects and their relations to older Aramaic, detailed observations on orthography, phonology, morphology, semantics, and other related grammatical features, that will serve the users well. The source for each word is indicated, including context quotations when necessary. A special effort was made to trace the origin of each and every word, be it native (classical and Talmudic Aramaic, Syriac etc.), or a loan word (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, general European). The Dictionary includes an index to all the Jewish Babylonian Aramaic words which have cognates or reflexes in Jewish Neo-Aramaic, a very important tool for the history of comparative linguistic studies of Aramaic. The Dictionary will be useful for scholars of Neo-Aramaic as well as classical and Talmudic Aramaic and Syriac, Semitic Languages, Jewish Languages, Languages in Contact, and other Near Eastern Languages in general. It is the first scholarly dictionary of Jewish Neo-Aramaic, and is intended to be a linguistic monument to the community that spoke it for many centuries until its emigration to Israel.

"Based on Sabar's 2002 Jewish Neo-Aramaic dictionary, this dictionary serves a functional purpose for readers and scholars who would like to know the Neo-Aramaic vocabulary. It does not include grammatical or semantic details but does include the origin of the words, be it native Old Aramaic, and, in the case of loanwords, the original lending language, Arabic, Kurdish, Persian, Turkish, etc"--

Since the Middle Ages, lexographies of Talmudic and other rabbinic literature have combined in one entry Babylonian, Palestinian, and Targumic words from various periods. Because morphologically identical words in even closely related dialects can frequently differ in both meaning and nuance, their consolidation into one dictionary entry is often misleading. Scholars now realize the need to treat each dialect separately, and in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic, Michael Sokoloff provides a complete lexicon of the dialect spoken and written by Jews in Palestine during the Byzantine period, from the third century C.E. to the tenth century. Sokoloff draws on a wide range of sources, from inscriptions discovered in the remains of synagogues and on amulets, fragments of letters and other documents, poems, and marginal notations to local Targumim, the Palestinian Midrashim and Talmud, texts addressing religious law (halacha), and Palestinian marriage documents (ketubbot) from the Arabic period. Many of these sources were unavailable to previous lexographers, who based their dictionaries on corrupt nineteenth-century editions of the rabbinic literature. The discovery of new manuscripts in both European libraries and the Cairo Geniza over the course of the twentieth century has revolutionized the textual basis of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic. Each entry in A Dictionary of Jewish Palestinian Aramaic is divided into six parts: lemma or root, part of speech, English gloss, etymology, semantic features, and bibliographic references. Sokoloff also includes an index of all cited passages. This major reference work, updated to reflect the publication of new texts over the last decade, will both provide students and scholars with a tool for an accurate understanding of the Aramaic dialect of Jewish Palestinian literature of the Byzantine period and help Aramaist and Semitic linguists to see the relationship between this dialect and others, especially the contemporary dialects of Palestine.

The first new dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic in a century, this towering scholarly achievement provides a complete lexicon of the entire vocabulary used in both literary and epigraphic sources from the Jewish community in Babylon from the third century C.E. to the twelfth century. Author Michael Sokoloff's primary source is, of course, the Babylonian Talmud, one of the most important and influential works in Jewish literature. Unlike the authors of previous dictionaries of this dialect, however, he also uses a variety of other sources, from inscriptions and legal documents to other rabbinical literature. A Dictionary of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic also differs from earlier lexographic efforts in its focus on a single dialect. Previous dictionaries have been composite works containing various Aramaic dialects from different periods, blurring distinctions in meaning and nuance. Sokoloff has been able to draw on the most current linguistic and textual scholarship to ensure the complete accuracy of his lexical entries, each of which is divided into six parts: lemma or root, part of speech, English gloss, etymology, semantic features, and bibliographic references. Another important feature in this invaluable reference work is its index of all cited passages, which allows the reader of a given text to easily find the semantics of a particular word. In addition to linguists and specialists in Jewish Aramaic literature, lay readers and students will also find this comprehensive, up-to-date dictionary useful for understanding the Babylonian Talmud.

In 1951, the secluded Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho migrated collectively to Israel. It carried with it its unique language, culture and customs, many of which bore resemblance to those found in classical rabbinic literature. Like others in Kurdistan, for example, the Jews of Zakho retained a vibrant tradition of creating and performing songs based on embellishing biblical stories with Aggadic traditions. Despite the recent growth of scholarly interest into Neo-Aramaic communities, however, studies have to this point almost exclusively focused on the linguistic analysis of their critically endangered dialects and little attention has been paid to the sociological, historical and literary analysis of the cultural output of the diverse and isolated Neo-Aramaic communities of Kurdistan. In this innovative book, Oz Aloni seeks to redress this balance. Aloni focuses on three genres of the Zakho community’s oral heritage: the proverb, the enriched biblical narrative and the folktale. Each chapter draws on the author's own fieldwork among members of the Zakho community now living in Jerusalem. He examines the proverb in its performative context, the rewritten biblical narrative of Ruth, Naomi and King David, and a folktale with the unusual theme of magical gender transformation. Insightfully breaking down these examples with analysis drawn from a variety of conceptual fields, Aloni succeeds in his mission to put the speakers of the language and their culture on equal footing with their speech. The Martin Buber Society of Fellows at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have kindly supported the publication of this volume

The Neo-Aramaic dialects are modern vernacular forms of Aramaic, which has a documented history in the Middle East of over 3,000 years. Due to upheavals in the Middle East over the last one hundred years, thousands of speakers of Neo-Aramaic dialects have been forced to migrate from their homes or have perished in massacres. As a result, the dialects are now highly endangered. The dialects exhibit a remarkable diversity of structures. Moreover, the considerable depth of attestation of Aramaic from earlier periods provides evidence for pathways of change. For these reasons the research of Neo-Aramaic is of importance for more general fields of linguistics, in particular language typology and historical linguistics. The papers in this volume represent the full range of research that is currently being carried out on Neo-Aramaic dialects. They advance the field in numerous ways. In order to allow linguists who are not specialists in Neo-Aramaic to benefit from the papers, the examples are fully glossed.

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialect of Betanure, which has hitherto remained unattested, is among the rarest and most seriously endangered varieties of Aramaic spoken at the present time. One of the most archaizing Jewish Neo-Aramaic varieties and a member of the Lishana Deni dialect cluster of northernmost Iraq, the dialect is currently spoken in Israel by no more than three dozen elderly people, of whom only a small minority are pro'cient speakers. The grammatical description of the dialect is synchronic, but it includes etymological and historical comments as well as several paragraphs dealing with diachronic processes. The large and variegated corpus of texts, based on narratives furnished by the last two superb speakers of the dialect, comprises, inter alia, descriptions of the village of Betanure and its history, the fauna and ?ora of the region, agriculture and other occupations of the Jewish villagers, customs and traditions, legends, folktales, anecdotes and amusing stories. The glossary is extensively etymological and offers much comparative data drawn from numerous Neo-Aramaic varieties, apart from recourse to Classical Aramaic lexical data.