The Arabic Language

9.3 Judaeo-Arabic
As we have seen above, Middle Arabic is not a special variety of the language, 
but a label for a category of texts with deviations from the Classical standard 
language. When Jews and Christians write in Arabic, however, it is legitimate to 
regard their language as a special variety, since their brand of written Arabic 
became a special in-group form of the language, a new norm. The Jewish variety 
of Middle Arabic is often indicated with the special name of ‘Judaeo-Arabic’. At 
the beginning of the Islamic conquests, the language of the Jews in the conquered 
territories was Aramaic; Hebrew was their language of religion and poetry, but 
was not used as a spoken language. We do not know when the colloquial language 
of the Jews became Arabic, but it must have been rather early. The first literary 
works written in Arabic by Jews date from the ninth century, and most of the 
non-literary documents date from the period after the year 1000. The majority of 
them have been found in the Geniza, the storeroom of the Ben Ezra synagogue in 
Old Cairo. Since for Jewish speakers of Arabic the Classical standard served as less 
of a constraint, their written version of the language exhibited more colloquial 
features. These are not to be regarded as mistakes or signs of deficient knowledge. 
Maimonides (d. 1204), for instance, uses a flawless type of Classical Arabic in 
letters to Muslims, but when he writes to his co-religionists his language contains 
many of the features found in other Middle Arabic texts.
The written Arabic of Jewish authors is characterised by two special features: 
the fact that it is written in Hebrew script; and the presence of a large number 
of Hebrew loans. The representation of the Arabic phonemes by Hebrew letters 
is strictly a system of transliteration, that is, every character of the Arabic text 

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Middle Arabic 
161
is represented by a Hebrew character on a one-to-one basis. Since the Hebrew 
alphabet has fewer letters than the Arabic, some adjustments were needed. The 
most ingenious invention of the Jewish scribes is their use of Hebrew allophones 
for Arabic phonemes. In Hebrew, most stops have a fricative allophone in certain 
environments, indicated by the absence of a dot in the letter (the so-called 
dāgēš
), for example, the Hebrew 
dālet
with a dot indicates 
d
, and without a dot its 
allophone 
ḏ
; similarly, 
tāw
indicates 
t/ṯ
, 
kāf
indicates 
k/ḫ
and so on. In transcribing 
Arabic words, the scribes used these letters with dots to represent Arabic 
ḏ
, 
ṯ
, 
ḫ
(in the manuscripts the dot is often omitted, so that the script retains a certain 
ambiguity). For those letters with which this device did not work, they used the 
letters for Hebrew voiceless sounds, and provided them with a dot: in this way, 
ṣādē
with a dot was used for Arabic 
ḍād
, and 
ṭēt
was used for 
ḏ̣āʾ
. The fact that the 
scribes distinguished between 
ḍād
and 
ḏ̣āʾ
suggests that we are dealing here with 
a strictly written tradition, since in pronunciation both phonemes had merged. 
Likewise, the scribes faithfully rendered the Arabic article, even when it was 
assimilated, as well as the otiose 
ʾalif
in the Arabic plural perfect 
katabū
.
There are traces of an earlier stage in which the transliteration of Arabic into 
Hebrew took place on the basis of the spoken language. Although most Judaeo-
Arabic texts date from the period after the year 1000, we have a few ninth-century 
Judaeo-Arabic papyri from Egypt, written in a transcription not influenced by the 
orthography of Classical Arabic. The most significant feature is that both Arabic 
ḍ
and 
ḏ̣
are transcribed with Hebrew 
dālet
, which for the scribes must have been 
the closest phonetic equivalent available. Moreover, the Arabic article is always 
represented in its assimilated form. This means that originally the scribes used 
a transcription system that was based on the conventions of their own Hebrew/
Aramaic script applied to an oral form of Arabic. After the year 1000, this system 
was replaced by a system based entirely on the Arabic script, possibly because 
of the influential position held by the Arabic translation of the 
Pentateuch
by 
Saadya Gaon (882–942 
ce
), in which these conventions are used. There are a few 
early texts in which the Arabic vowels are consistently transcribed with Hebrew 
Tiberian vowel signs. In a fragment of Saadya’s translation of the Bible (Levy 1936: 
18), the declensional endings are indicated, as befits a Bible translation, but other 
short final vowels have been elided. Noteworthy are the strong 
ʾimāla
(e.g., 
mūsē
for 
Mūsā
, 
Allēhi
for 
Allāhi
), as well as the 
-i-
in the relative pronoun 
illaḏī
(
allaḏī
), 
the conjunction 
wi-
and the article 
il
.
The reason behind the use of Hebrew letters is the special position of the Jews 
in the Islamic empire. Although generally speaking they were emancipated, and 
as 
ḏimmī
s lived under the protection of the caliph and could freely exercise their 
religion, the social barriers between Jews and Muslims were considerable, and no 
doubt they remained a special group. The use of their own alphabet reinforced 
this in-group feeling. Many Arabic texts were either transcribed by them in 
Hebrew letters or translated into Hebrew.

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162
The Arabic Language
The second feature that sets the Judaeo-Arabic texts apart from the rest of 
Middle Arabic literature is the extensive use of Hebrew loans. Through the use 
of these loans, the language of Jewish literary and scientific writings became 
in fact incomprehensible or unfamiliar to Muslims. Thus, although structurally 
Judaeo-Arabic is quite similar to Muslim Middle Arabic or to Christian Arabic, the 
presence of Hebrew words immediately marks a text as having been written by a 
Jewish author. The use of Hebrew words is not restricted to the written language 
only, as we know from the evidence of the modern Judaeo-Arabic dialects, for 
instance, the Arabic of the Jews of Tunis, or that of the Jews who emigrated from 
Iraq to Israel. In their colloquial speech, one finds many Hebrew words, especially 
in typically Jewish domains such as religion and worship.
In some Judaeo-Arabic texts, Hebrew passages alternate with Arabic ones, for 
instance, in explanations of the 
Talmud
, where first the Hebrew (or Aramaic) text is 
quoted and then explained in Arabic. But exclusively Arabic passages also abound 
in Hebrew words. When Hebrew words are used in their Hebrew form, that is, not 
as loans but as instances of code-switching, they are integrated syntactically; in 
most cases, however, the Hebrew words are also integrated phonologically and 
morphologically, thus showing that they have become part of an Arabic vocabu
-
lary. The writers of Judaeo-Arabic were aware of equivalences between Hebrew 
and Arabic, and this enabled them to Arabicise Hebrew words, for instance, by 
shifting them from the Hebrew 
hitpaʿēl
measure to the Arabic 
tafaʿʿala
, or from 
the Hebrew 
hifʿīl
to the Arabic 
ʾafʿala
: 
hitʾabbēl
becomes 
taʾabbala
‘to mourn’, 
hisdīr
becomes 
ʾasdara
‘to organise a prayer’. Hebrew verbs may be inflected as Arabic 
verbs, for example, 
naḥūšū
‘we fear’ (< Hebrew 
ḥ-w-š
‘to fear’ with the Maghrebi 
Arabic prefix of the first person plural 
n-…-ū
).
Hebrew substantives may receive an Arabic broken plural, for example, 
rewaḥ
, 
plural 
ʾarwāḥ
‘profits’ instead of the Hebrew plural 
rǝwāḥīm
; 
sēder
‘order of the 
Mishna’, Hebrew plural 
sǝdārīm
, receives an Arabic plural 
ʾasdār
; 
maḥzōr
‘prayer 
book for the festival’, Hebrew plural 
maḥzōrīm
, receives an Arabic plural 
maḫāzīr
. 
The Arabic article replaces the Hebrew article sometimes even when the entire 
context is Hebrew, thus demonstrating the fact that 
al-
was regarded as an integral