The Arabic Language

part of the Hebrew words, for example, 
bēt al-kneset
‘the synagogue’ or 
al-bǝrīt 
qodeš
‘the holy covenant’. There is one text from the Cairo Geniza in which the 
Arabic components are written in Arabic and the Hebrew ones in Hebrew, so that 
it is easy to see which elements were regarded as Hebrew. In this text, the combi
-
nation of Arabic article with Hebrew noun is written in Hebrew characters. As an 
example illustrating the mixed character of Judaeo-Arabic, we may quote from 
Blau (1965: 152; Hebrew written words underlined) the phrase 
al-ʿiqār wǝ-ʾaf ʿal 
gab
 ʾin lam yuktab šǝṭār
‘the immovable property, in spite of the fact that no note 
was written’.
The 
ad hoc
character of the use of Hebrew words instead of Arabic words is 
demonstrated in texts in which both alternatives are used in an arbitrary pattern; 

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Middle Arabic 
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thus, we may find in one line 
zawj ṯānī
‘a second husband’ and in the next 
baʿluhā 
ṯ-ṯānī
‘her second husband’, or 
dīney gōyīm
‘laws of the Gentiles’ alternating with 
maḏhab al-gōyīm
. This happens even with proper names, so that the same person 
may be indicated within one text alternating as 
Šǝlomoh ben Dāwid
and 
Sulaymān 
ibn Dāʾūd
. Most of the integrated loanwords, but by no means all of them, belong 
to the sphere of religion and religious practice, for which there were sometimes 
no corresponding Arabic words. 
It is difficult to distinguish regionally defined categories within the group of 
Judaeo-Arabic texts. In the first place, the use of written Arabic by Jews tended 
to become conventionalised, and a kind of standard Judaeo-Arabic developed all 
over the empire. In the second place, the patterns of migration among the Jews 
in the Islamic empire often disturbed the picture, so that, for instance, Egyptian 
Jews wrote in a markedly more Maghrebi Arabic than their Muslim compatriots. 
Finally, as in all varieties of Middle Arabic, even Judaeo-Arabic could not escape 
entirely the attraction of the Classical standard.