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Abstract The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of \"Mock Jewish,\" or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which \"Jewish\" (yahūdī) or \"Israelite\" (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly \"Jewish\" stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader \"ideologies of linguistic differentiation\" that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.

The vowels ē and ō in the Jewish dialect of Baghdad (JB) mostly originate from diphthongs. When unstressed they are realized in certain cases as i and u, whereas in others they are realized as short e and o. This article aims to sketch the diachronic development of ē and ō in JB, as well as to explain the mechanism that dictates the choice of their different allophones in an unstressed position.

The collection of Elazar's poetry is impressive and contains more than four hundred compositions with a striking preponderance of panegyrics, laments, homonymic poems, and epigrams. Elazar was strongly involved in promoting the Baghdadi-Jewish elite, dignified people who held high office in the city, either as government officials or as leaders of the Jewish community. This critical edition of a manuscript offers much literary and historical information about Baghdadi Jewry in the days before and during the Mongol invasion of 1258.

This volume represents the interdisciplinary nature of Judeo-Arabic studies. There are articles on Jewish thought, philosophy and mysticism, language and linguistics, religious studies, intellectual and social history, law, biblical exegesis, and more. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of Judeo-Arabic society in the Middle Ages.

This is a first-time presentation of the initial section of the Toledot Yeshu (TY) narrative describing the birth and early life of Jesus in Judeo-Arabic, a text with important implications for current research on TY. First, the origin of the birth narrative has been debated in recent scholarship on the Hebrew versions of TY. The existence of this lengthy Judeo-Arabic birth narrative, preserved in two manuscripts belonging to the Russian National Library, as well as the identification of other, earlier Judeo-Arabic manuscript fragments that include the TY birth narrative, demonstrates that the birth narrative formed part of TY significantly earlier than has been previously suggested. Second, the narrative preserved in the Russian manuscripts also demonstrates the relevance of the Judeo-Arabic versions of TY for the understanding of the development of this protean work. Examination of their textual tradition reveals interesting connections with particular Hebrew versions of TY from Europe and can shed light on the question of how the work moved between East and West. Finally, this Judeo-Arabic version of TY is significant in its demonstration of a clever adaptation to its linguistic and cultural surroundings. It incorporates a lengthy introduction—the only one currently known in all of the TY literature—which is a literary tour de force employing contemporaneous Arabic style together with a well-known rabbinic dictum, thereby situating Toledot Yeshu simultaneously in its Islamicate milieu and in Jewish textual and even ritual tradition. The discussion concludes with a transcription and translation of the birth narrative as preserved in these two Russian manuscripts.

Medieval letters from the Cairo Geniza can be broadly classified into private, official, or mercantile correspondence, and all use particular linguistic registers. Official correspondence, for example, shows abundant code switching into Hebrew and the employment of high-style versus lower-style prose. Mercantile letters actively avoid Hebrew and emulate supraconfessional Arabic writing standards. Private letters typically display more colloquial and less standardized forms than other genres and are more often written in crude handwriting. Among these private letters, we find one written by or for women that share common features of colloquiality and less standardization even when they are transcribed by male scribes. Linguistic registers are also influenced by the time and place in which they are written, and comparing Geniza letters from different areas and time periods exposes geographic and chronological characteristics. For example, North African letters tend to be linguistically more conservative, and Babylonian and Egyptian letters show differences in layout and style. Throughout the medieval period, orthographic, grammatical, lexical, and stylistic changes in the letters reflect social and economic evolution over time. The principal trend is a distinct move away from prescriptive Arabic linguistic norms from the late twelfth century on.

Scholars generally read Documentary Arabic according to the norms of Standard Arabic, the constructed ideal language of Abbasid literati. But this essay shows that the nonstandard features of Documentary Arabic were not spontaneous creations by the unlearned but rather scribal traditions carefully transmitted from one generation to the next. Umayyad Documentary Arabic was first and foremost the language used by state officials to display, in public, the authority of the Muslim state and, secondarily, the insider language that the small Arabic elite used to communicate on business and private matters. Given the nature of this elite, it is not surprising to find that this language was fairly uniform. Abbasid Documentary Arabic was the language used to display and administer the authority of the many loosely interacting and for the most part rival rulers but mainly became the language of choice that learned people used to communicate on business and private matters as well as in academic exchange. To mark provenance and affiliation, scribes most probably used not only whole words and formulas and distinctive scripts and layouts but also minor variants in orthography, form, and government. The Arabic of Fatimid Documentary Judeo-Arabic documents found in the Geniza is, this analysis demonstrates, nothing more than mainstream Fatimid Documentary Arabic, albeit continuously transliterated from Arabic into Hebrew characters. Geniza documentary materials must therefore be read as part of a continuous tradition of Arabic derived from state administration rather than as a Jewish sociolect or a variant of standard Arabic.

This essay is a contribution to this issue's forum on French Jewish studies.

This work is one of the first studies presenting a comprehensive linguistic investigation into non-literary Judaeo-Arabic. Its main focus is the diachronic description of letters from the Cairo Genizah, while distinguishing between features of epistolary Arabic and vernacular phenomena.