LONDON — Geoffrey Khan had
almost given up. A linguist at the University of Cambridge, he was in
Tbilisi, Georgia, to find the last speakers of a rare dialect of
Aramaic. The first of his three leads, an old man in his 80s or 90s, had
a stroke the previous month, and could no longer talk. The second, an
elderly woman of nervous disposition, lived by herself with four howling
rottweilers who made conversation impossible. The next day he visited
the third address, a tall Soviet-style apartment block with dark
corridors. A tiny old woman answered the door, and as she served him tea
at the kitchen table, her hand started shaking.
“She
was exhausted just pouring. I didn’t know if she would survive the
interview,” he recalls. “I said, ‘Can I ask you a few questions about
your language? You’re one of the final speakers.’ This little frail arm
came over the table and grabbed my wrist and she said, ‘Ask me, ask me
anything you like.’ I asked her a few questions and said, ‘I don’t want
to exhaust you, have you had enough?’ She said no and gripped me
tighter, telling me to ask everything I needed to know.
“She was looking at me and I knew she felt she
had to tell me everything because she was the end of a line of language
that goes back 3,000 years. She didn’t let me go for two hours. It was
very emotional.”
For most people, that there are any native
speakers of Aramaic left at all will come as a surprise. In fact there
are half-a-million, and Khan is one of a tiny band of researchers trying
to document their speech. But it is a race against time. The most
fluent speakers are all beyond retirement age, and the language is
expected to die within a generation.
‘The final voices are with us for another 10 years, but will be silent very soon’
“The final voices are with us for another 10 years, but will be silent very soon,” says Khan.
Partially as a result, there has been a recent
surge of interest, with 11 of the leading academics in the field
spending up to 10 months this past year at the Institute for Advanced
Studies at the Hebrew University (HUJI), comparing notes on individual
projects and working together on a new book of neo-Aramaic. At the end
of May, an academic conference marking the end of the joint study year
attracted around 50 people.
“That was practically everyone in the world”
working on it, says Professor Steven Fassberg, Caspar Levias Chair in
Ancient Semitic Languages at HUJI, who co-convened the conference. “It
is a hot topic – at least in certain circles.”
What makes the effort so difficult is that
modern Aramaic is not one language but more like a family of languages,
with up to 150 different dialects. None of them sound like the language
of the Babylonian Talmud or of Jesus. According to Professor Otto
Jastrow, professor of Arabic in the department of Middle East and Asian
studies at the Estonian Institute of Humanities of the Tallinn
University, “a speaker from biblical times wouldn’t understand a single
word, or even recognize it’s Aramaic.”
‘A speaker from biblical times wouldn’t understand a single word, or even recognize it’s Aramaic’
Nevertheless, there is a direct relationship.
Aramaic emerged around 1,000 BCE in the Middle East, and spread
throughout the area nowadays known as Kurdistan – northern Iraq, western
Iran and south-eastern Turkey. Like all languages, it evolved over time
(Khan notes that modern English-speakers can barely understand texts
like Beowulf, written in old English just 1,000 years ago). It also
evolved geographically, particularly as many speakers lived in isolated
villages deep in the mountains. And for the past millennium, there has
also been a split between Christian and Jewish speakers, whose dialects
can differ radically.
Aramaic’s downfall was that its speakers –
Christians, Jews and Mandaeans — were all minorities in the Middle East,
and over the past century have suffered such persecution that they have
mostly dispersed. Jewish speakers moved mainly to Israel between the
1950s and 1970s. Christian speakers, who are by far the larger group –
perhaps as much as 85 percent, says Khan – moved throughout Western
Europe and America, but are also found in the Caucasus, Lebanon, and as
far afield as Australia and New Zealand. Turlock, California, is “the
Mecca” of Aramaic speakers.
Christian Aramaic speakers in the small village of Harbole in southeast Turkey. (photo credit: courtesy)
In Sweden there are enough people to support a
newspaper, radio show and television station, while famously, Mel
Gibson managed to film parts of his 2004 movie “The Passion of the
Christ” in Aramaic. (Khan says that he has consulted on a couple of
Exorcist spin-offs where either the devil or God spoke Aramaic.)
In Israel, a group meets in Jerusalem every
few weeks to read poetry together; one budding poet even wrote verse
about Khan. There were Aramaic plays staged in Holon but it is becoming
harder to find actors and audience members and an Israeli Aramaic
journal has folded.
As in most immigrant communities, the
difficulty is transmitting the language to the next generation, who
assimilate into the culture of the majority.
“It dies in stages,” says Khan. “The second
generation will understand and still be able to communicate, but there
is already a loss of vocabulary, particularly to do with the traditional
way of life. There is often a desire to pass it to the third
generation, but it is hard to pass on the language in all its richness.”
In fact, by the third generation, there is
usually very little Aramaic left. And after decades in the “diaspora,”
even native speakers may find that they can’t speak as well as they used
to, or that their vocabulary has been influenced by friends and family
from other regions, making it hard for researchers to find “pure”
examples of particular dialects.
Final Jewish speaker from Kaledez in northern Iraq. (photo credit: courtesy)
Tracking them down, says Jastrow, can be like
“a detective novel.” The German professor was one of the pioneers in
neo-Aramaic, specializing in the 1960s after realizing how rare it was
to be able to study a language that had been spoken continuously for
3,000 years. In the early years he conducted fieldwork among Christian
speakers in Turkey without the requisite research permit, which he felt
was unlikely to be granted because the community was oppressed. He was
eventually arrested, interrogated and expelled from the country.
He is particularly proud of finding two “final
speakers” of Aramaic dialects, including one, in Syria, to whom he was
introduced while searching for an Arabic dialect also nearing
extinction.
“He was afraid to talk to me, but I got enough to write a book,” he says.
The last speaker died in 1998.
The death of the dialect, says Jastrow, “is
very sad but you see it coming. The process stretches over years or
decades. But you also care for the people. In Western Europe where
neo-Aramaic is dying, but the people are well-established and
integrating into Western European society, it is a linguistic tragedy
but you don’t feel sorry for the people themselves. It’s a different
story when the people are massacred and dispersed around the globe.”
Jewish speaker from Almaty in Kazakhstan. (photo credit: courtesy)
Fassberg has never needed to venture further
afield than Beit Shemesh, between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, for his
Aramaic research, as there are strong concentrations of speakers in the
moshavim surrounding Jerusalem and in its suburbs. But even in this
limited region, finding good speakers can be a lengthy process. Fassberg
recalls how one man originally from the village of Challa in Turkey
referred him to a friend’s Aramaic-speaking father-in-law, who in turn
led him to a retired policeman who came to Israel in the 1930s on a
donkey.
“He already wasn’t a very good speaker but he
had a cousin who came to Israel in 1951 as an adult. He spoke to me
freely and when he died a few years ago, with him died the entire
Aramaic of his village,” Fassberg says.
He finds the process emotional from a national-religious perspective.
‘It’s an unbroken tradition from the days of the Talmud. They have been there since the Babylonian exile’
“It’s tracing Judaism back to its roots,” he
says. “It’s an unbroken tradition from the days of the Talmud. They have
been there since the Babylonian exile.”
Inevitably, he is exposed to harrowing stories
of life back in Kurdistan, including stories of siblings being
kidnapped by Muslims, converted and married off. As an American-born
oleh who grew up in a safe environment, this can be difficult to listen
to.
“I heard of one person who went back to
Kurdistan to meet up with his sister, who had [willingly] converted and
brought her children up as Muslims,” he says. “He was very upset to
talk.”
On the whole, however, his sources are not overly emotional about their histories.
“A lot of the things are over 50 years old.”
Fassberg says that the native Aramaic speakers
know that their language is nearing its end, but are too old to do
anything about it themselves. But Khan says that the Aramaic-speaking
community needs to take a role in the language’s preservation. He has
fundraised among them in the States to pay for a research assistant, who
ran sessions in Iraq training Aramaic-speakers to record their own
language. He is also in the process of building a
website with recordings of different dialects, for the communities themselves to use.
Khan – who is a Christian Briton with Indian
heritage – fell in love with neo-Aramaic after 10 years of studying the
manuscripts of the Cairo Genizah. After a month looking at microfilms in
a dark room in Jerusalem in the early 1990s, he decided to venture into
the sunshine and find an Aramaic speaker “for fun.”
Christians in the village of Ishshi in southeast Turkey (photo credit: courtesy)
“Trying to investigate a spoken language with a
living speaker blew my mind,” says the Regius Professor of Hebrew from
his Cambridge office, which is lined with mostly Hebrew books, including
the Mishnah. “Instead of a manuscript, I had a human being, and
language was part of them. It really brought it to life.”
Ironically one of the peculiarities of
studying neo-Aramaic is that there are very few manuscripts; it is a
largely oral tradition, which makes documenting modern speech even more
important.
“The Talmud is a record of oral discussion,”
Khan notes. “They were not writing books, they were writing law. The
Talmud is in vernacular language and our knowledge of the modern
vernacular helps us understand that – although I’m not sure yeshiva
bochurs would be very excited about this.”
Worryingly, he says that Jewish Aramaic is
even more vulnerable to extinction that its Christian counterparts,
partially because of the ideal of speaking Hebrew in Israel. He urges
Jews around the world not to be complacent about the impending death of
the language and to do what they can to support research and
documentation, financially and otherwise.
‘When one talks about Jewish heritage, language is critically part of that’
“When one talks about Jewish heritage, language is critically part of that,” he says.
Jastrow notes that academic research into
neo-Aramaic began far later in Israel than elsewhere and that although
it has now caught up, there is still particularly low awareness in
Israel.
“Kurds in Israel are not regarded as a Jewish
group of high culture or education – rather the opposite, they are
looked down upon,” he says. “This is completely unjust, and is based on
ignorance of the public who haven’t realized they spoke extremely
interesting languages and had a very elaborate popular culture.”
So can the entire family of languages be documented in time?
Fassberg says that the Aramaic of the larger
villages and towns has largely been recorded, the grammars written and
the texts published, but there is still much work to be done on the
languages of the smaller villages. They will continue going, he vows,
“till the last native Aramaic speaker is gone.”
