The Jewish community in Baghdad used to speak its own dialect of Arabic, which was distinct from the one spoken by its Muslim and Christian neighbors. This dialect served as their mother tongue for centuries, up until the massive immigration of Iraqi Jews to Israel following its establishment. Today, a few thousand native speakers of the dialect are still alive, but, unfortunately, in the next few decades this ancient dialect will evidently become extinct. To commemorate this historical community, this volume glances into its language and culture. It provides the reader with a firsthand opportunity to read transcriptions and translations of original oral texts by native speakers. The texts cover different aspects of the community's lives, including its history, traditions, cuisine, folk stories, personal stories of immigration, absorption difficulties in Israel, and even a collection of small talks. The volume opens with a grammatical sketch of the phonological and morphological system of the dialect. It focuses on the most important features to enable readers a fluent reading.

Haim Blanc’s Communal Dialects in Baghdad is one of the most influential works ever written on the on the linguistic diachrony of vernacular Arabic. Based on original fieldwork conducted during the years 1957–1962, this book portaits the extensive regional continuum of modern spoken Arabic stretching across parts of Mesopotamia and N. Syria, evinced by the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian speech communities in Baghdad. Typos and other mistakes have been corrected in this reprint, which is accompanied by an Editorial Preamble by Alexander Borg and a Foreword by Paul Wexler, and contains references to the original page numbers.

The handbook The Semitic Languages offers a comprehensive reference tool for Semitic Linguistics in its broad sense. It is not restricted to comparative Grammar, although it covers also comparative aspects, including classification. By comprising a chapter on typology and sections with sociolinguistic focus and language contact, the conception of the book aims at a rather complete, unbiased description of the state of the art in Semitics. Articles on individual languages and dialects give basic facts as location, numbers of speakers, scripts, numbers of extant texts and their nature, attestation where appropriate, and salient features of the grammar and lexicon of the respective variety. The handbook is the most comprehensive treatment of the Semitic language family since many decades.

"Sasson Somekh's memoir takes shape like a series of telling snapshots from another time and place. The time is the 1930s and '40s and the place, Iraq, where Somekh and his family were part of the country's then-flourishing Jewish community. The book offers an intimate view of this milieu and manages both to describe vividly the young Somekh's intellectual and emotional growth and to map the now-vanished world of Baghdad's book stalls and literary cafes, its Arabic-speaking Jewish bank clerks, outdoor movies at the Cinema Diana, and bonfires by the Tigris. As the pieces of Somekh's unsentimental memoir accumulate, they also mount in meaning. The book celebrates the ups and downs of Iraqi Jewish life as it also portrays the eventual dissolution of the community in the early 1950s."--BOOK JACKET.

Originally published in Hebrew, Judeo-Arabic Literature in Tunisia, 1850–1950 will be welcomed by English-speaking scholars interested in the literature and culture of this period.

The present study is a grammatical description of the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Tripoli (Libya). Jews in North Africa adopted Arabic as their native speech during the first (pre-Hilalian) period and their dialects therefore preserve archaic features no longer present in the dialects of their Muslim neighbours. The Jewish dialects are also distinguished by the use of many words of Hebrew and Aramaic origin. In Tripoli the difference between the Jewish and Muslim vernaculars manifests itself not only in the vocabulary but also in the language type: The Jewish dialect represents the sedentary type while the Muslim dialect belongs to the Bedouin type. After the immigration of Tripolitanian Jewry to Israel the use of the Arabic dialect has become reduced, and it is estimated that the youngest generation who can still speak it is in their forties. It is obvious, therefore, that in a few decades the Arabic dialect of the Jews of Tripoli, like other Judaeo-Arabic vernaculars, will cease to exist. The present study which also contains texts and a glossary may contribute to preserving a vanishing Arabic dialect.

Iraq's Last Jews is a collection of first-person accounts by Jews about their lives in Iraq's once-vibrant, 2500 year-old Jewish community and about the disappearance of that community in the middle of the 20th century. This book tells the story of this last generation of Iraqi Jews, who both reminisce about their birth country and describe the persecution that drove them out, the result of Nazi influences, growing Arab nationalism, and anger over the creation of the State of Israel.

According to legend, the Garden of Eden was located in Iraq, and for millennia, Jews resided peacefully in metropolitan Baghdad. Memories of Eden: A Journey Through Jewish Baghdad reconstructs the last years of the oldest Jewish Diaspora community in the world through the recollections of Violette Shamash, a Jewish woman who was born in Baghdad in 1912, sent to her daughter Mira Rocca and son-in-law, the British journalist Tony Rocca. The result is a deeply textured memoir—an intimate portrait of an individual life, yet revealing of the complex dynamics of the Middle East in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her long life, Violette Shamash began writing letters, notes, and essays and sending them to the Roccas. The resulting book begins near the end of Ottoman rule and runs through the British Mandate, the emergence of an independent Iraq, and the start of dictatorial government. Shamash clearly loved the world in which she grew up but is altogether honest in her depiction of the transformation of attitudes toward Baghdad’s Jewish population. Shamash’s world is finally shattered by the Farhud, the name given to the massacre of hundreds of Iraqi Jews over three days in 1941. An event that has received very slight historical coverage, the Farhud is further described and placed in context in a concluding essay by Tony Rocca.

In "Farewell, Babylon," Naim Kattan takes readers into the heart of exotic mid-19th-century Baghdad's then-teeming Jewish community. Jews had lived in Iraq for 25 centuries, long before the time of Christ or Muhammad, but anti-Semitism and nationalism were on the rise. In this beautifully written memoir, a young boy comes of age and describes his discoveries -- of work, literature, patriotism, the joys of lazy Sundays swimming in the Tigris. He also talks eloquently of his greatest discovery: women and love. This is a story of roots and exile, of thirst for life and life's experiences. However, more than that it is a tribute to a lost world, an ancient Eastern city in which Iraq's Kurds, Bedouins, Sunnis, Shiites, Chaldeans, Catholics, and Jews all lived together in a rough, rewarding sort of harmony.