Saving the Aramaic of Jesus and the Jews

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Almost every year when Christmas approaches, I receive a phone call or email from a journalist, a priest, or an ordinary Christian asking very politely and with wonderment something like this: “Sir, is it true that you speak the language of Jesus?”

Usually, I answer, “Yes, I do speak a dialect of Modern Aramaic.”

A version of another question normally follows: “Sir, if Jesus were alive today, would you be able to speak with him in Aramaic and understand him?”

It is here where my answer usually gets a bit more technical: “I would probably understand him, because I am a native Aramaic speaker and a scholar of Aramaic, having studied the language of various periods and places for a half century, but he probably would not understand me. My Aramaic is quite different from his, just as our modern English is different from Middle English (c. 1150–1500 C.E.) and certainly from Old English (c. 550–1150 C.E.).”

Similarly, whenever I give a lecture at a synagogue or a Jewish book club, I am asked, “If you are so lucky to have Aramaic as your mother tongue, can you read a page in Aramaic of the Talmud like you would read a newspaper page of today?”

My answer to this frequent question is, “I wish! I wish!”

The Aramaic of the Talmud is quite inaccessible to speakers of Modern Aramaic, who may understand some individual words like bēta (“house”), rēsha (“head”), and ida (“hand”) but stumble against the Talmudic grammar. Additionally, the Talmud has a lot of loanwords from Greek, Latin, and Old Persian, whereas Modern Aramaic has many loanwords from Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish, Modern Persian, etc.

I also am frequently asked whether Jesus spoke Hebrew or Aramaic. Scholars have been debating this question for a long time, and there are clues supporting both sides. The Greek Gospels include025 some quotations of Jesus that seem to be in—or at least sound like—Aramaic, the most famous being “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachtani” (“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” [Matthew 27:46]; see table). The Gospels also contain Aramaic names, such as Golgotha, Bethsaida, Bethesda, and Martha. However, there are studies that show convincingly that some sort of Hebrew was still alive in Jesus’s time, at least in places like Jerusalem—as shown by Bar-Kokhba’s urgent letters written in colloquial Hebrew to his soldiers a century or so after Jesus (c. 135 C.E.). I tend to agree with those who assume Jesus knew and spoke Hebrew as well as Aramaic. Some argue that the original Gospels were first written in Aramaic and then translated into Greek, but this is more controversial.

In any case, Aramaic, or Syriac as it has been referred to in relation to Christians, evolved in a major language group in Early Christianity in the East, reaching southern India and beyond, where it is still used today in Christian rituals, while Greek served the same purpose in the West (Egypt, Asia Minor, Greece, etc.). About the same time, Aramaic became the second language of a vast literature in Judaism, from the Aramaic sections of the Biblical books of Ezra (c. 460 B.C.E.) and Daniel (c. 160 B.C.E.),¹ on through the Midrashic literature, the Targums (Classical Aramaic translations of the Hebrew Bible), and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds, to many Jewish prayers, such as the Kaddish, as well as documents, such as the ketubah (the marriage contract) and the get (the divorce writ).

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Until recently, places like my hometown of Zakho in far northern Iraq (now under the control of the Kurdistan Regional Government), close to the borders of Turkey and Syria, were like museums of old cultures and languages (as border towns usually are). In addition to Kurdish, Arabic, and Armenian, the local Christians and Jews spoke dialects of Aramaic, inherited from antiquity. Keep in mind, Aramaic had been the lingua franca of most of the ancient Near East and the official language of the powerful Assyrian, Babylonian, and Persian empires. It was essentially the international language before such a thing existed. Even long after the fall of these mighty empires, Aramaic remained dominant in the region, until it was superseded by Arabic with the spread of Islam (c. seventh century C.E.). But even then, Aramaic has endured until modern times in the less accessible mountainous areas of Iraq, Turkey, Iran, and Syria.

Scholars call this late Aramaic “Neo-Aramaic” or “Modern Syriac.” It has many dialects, differentiated by both region and religion, as the Jews and the Christians of even the same town (such as my027 hometown) spoke different dialects. Many times, these different dialects are mutually unintelligible.

Unfortunately, due to modernization and motorized traveling, not to mention multiple wars and nationalistic conflicts, Neo-Aramaic is becoming an extinct language—after more than 3,000 years!² All the Jews of Kurdistan immigrated to Israel beginning in the 1920s and en masse in the early 1950s. The Christians, too, have been leaving for Europe, the Americas, and Australia, where they are known as Assyrians or Chaldeans. In the U.S., there are thriving Assyrian and Chaldean communities in Chicago, Dearborn, New Jersey, and both Northern and Southern California, among other places. I have coined a new name—Aramaicans—for all Americans who speak Aramaic or are descendants of Aramaic speakers.

After our Aliya (immigration to Israel), I watched my community begin to lose our mother tongue and gradually shift to speaking Modern Hebrew, the official language of the State of Israel. First, words that were typical to life in Kurdistan disappeared or acquired new meanings typical to life in modern Israel.

When I became a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, majoring in Hebrew and Arabic028 (1959–1963), I began noticing the importance of Aramaic for the comparative study of Semitic languages. The loss of my mother tongue would be a great loss for my community’s heritage as well as for the academic study of Aramaic and other Semitic languages. I began filling my pockets with pieces of scrap paper, writing down any word I still remembered, wherever I happened to be, whether at work, on a bus or train, or on vacation at a resort. When my professors—including famous linguists, such as Chaim Rabin, H.J. Polotsky, E.Y. Kutcher, and Ze’ev Ben-Haim—realized that I was a native speaker of Aramaic, they began asking me questions useful for their comparative Semitic studies, like the proper pronunciation of various ancient words.

At the end of my undergraduate studies, two important events occurred that determined my future total devotion to Aramaic and to salvaging Jewish Neo-Aramaic oral and written traditions. First, Dr. Meir Benayahu, the head of the Yad Ben-Zvi Institute of the Hebrew University, which is dedicated to the study of the heritage of Near Eastern Jews, showed me some manuscripts from around 1630 written in Hebrew script that seemed unintelligible.029 I looked at them, and after some time I started recognizing some words and realized that they were in a dialect related to my community’s Neo-Aramaic. I was then offered a fellowship to study, translate, edit, and publish these manuscripts.³ Until then Neo-Aramaic was considered, even by scholars, a spoken language only, so seeing written Neo-Aramaic texts several centuries old was quite a revelation. The contents included Midrashic commentaries on portions of the Bible, translations (known as Tafsirs) of Hebrew ritual poetry, and other texts.

Second, after some years of my studies, younger scholars started showing interest in Jewish Neo-Aramaic. (Christian and Mandaic dialects were already a bit more familiar to scholars.) Even some older scholars of Hebrew, Arabic, general linguistics, computer science, and other subjects began shifting from their disciplines or specializations and devoting much or all of their scholarly efforts to studies of individual, little known Neo-Aramaic dialects, most of them literally on the verge of extinction. Until this “revolution,” one could find hardly any papers on Neo-Aramaic at annual conferences, even at those conferences and sessions dedicated to Aramaic. Fortunately, this situation has gradually changed: not only are papers on various linguistic and literary aspects of Neo-Aramaic now given at linguistics conferences, but, more recently, there are annual conferences in Israel and Europe solely dedicated to Neo-Aramaic.

Within academia, Jewish Neo-Aramaic belongs to the discipline of Jewish Languages (together with Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-Arabic, and others), which has been holding international biannual conferences at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Working with both oral and written texts, scholars focus on folk literature and local “community” Bible translations⁴ and comparative studies of the Hebrew068 elements in Neo-Aramaic, especially loanwords. Interesting are also Neo-Aramaic translations of old Aramaic texts, such as the books of Daniel and Song of Songs,⁵ which immediately show the linguistic changes from the old to the new.

In addition to the types of religious popular literature used in synagogue rituals and often written down because they were considered important, there are some Neo-Aramaic examples of oral literature, mostly for social home consumption. These include folktales, personal anecdotes, folksongs, and proverbs.⁶ Jews were often intermediaries between villagers and city dwellers, so they imported—in addition to merchandise—a lot of rural folklore, which was the main staple of entertainment during the long winter nights in Kurdistan. Some individual Jews were known as master storytellers, who could recount a story in several local languages and dialects. However, since speakers of Neo-Aramaic are declining in their new countries, it is quite a task and a bit of luck to locate knowledgeable informants who still remember the oral traditions. As a native speaker, I am one of the last to possess some advantage in locating suitable informants.

Returning to Christian interest in Aramaic, it seems to me that it is not only priests and learned people who have interest in the “language of Jesus,” but also lay people and the producers of popular culture. I have been asked to prepare Aramaic scripts and help actors with pronunciation of dialogues on several occasions, including for the movie Oh, God! and for the television shows The X-Files and Spartacus.

In addition to the interest of Hollywood, I am gratified by the interest of popular readers who write to me personal emails asking for help with Aramaic, such as a young couple who wanted the words “Jesus Loves Me” tattooed in Aramaic on their bodies. There was also the man who asked me to help him with a Gospel quotation that he wanted to have carved in wood as a gift for his father. Then a person from NBC069 requested an Aramaic translation of a magic spell for their TV show featuring an occult detective.

Of course, I was happy to help with these and similar challenges. It is somewhat gratifying to know that Aramaic is used in movies and television shows, as well as by individual people who use it for healing, connecting with loved ones, and for other personal needs. However, the most joyful part of my life as one of the last living native Aramaic speakers is my career teaching Aramaic at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), to mature, intelligent, and curious students, many of whom have become professors themselves. Of course, I have also benefited much from the frequent conferences on Neo-Aramaic that have provided me with precious opportunities to meet with my dear colleagues and enjoy their continuous support.

And it is this human element—the people with whom I have studied and researched Aramaic—that I cherish most. Because in the end, language is all about communicating with people, and I have been proud and honored to do my part sharing the Aramaic language of my childhood—the language of Jesus and the Jews—with so many, in the hope that this beautiful tongue will survive for another generation.

Once spoken across most of the ancient Near East, Aramaic was most likely the mother tongue of Jesus. A considerable volume of Jewish literature is written in Aramaic, including parts of the Bible, Talmud, and Dead Sea Scrolls. Yona Sabar, a scholar and one of the last living native speakers of Aramaic, gives an account of the language and one of its peoples, the bygone Jews of Iraqi Kurdistan.