A short guide

What is Judeo-Arabic?

Judeo-Arabic is the Arabic language written in Hebrew letters. For roughly a thousand years — from the rise of Islam through the early modern period — it was the everyday written language of most of world Jewry, from Baghdad to Córdoba, Cairo to Yemen.

The one-sentence version

When Jews in the Islamic world wrote in Arabic — and they wrote a lot — they wrote it in the Hebrew alphabet rather than the Arabic one. The language underneath is Arabic; the script on the page is Hebrew. That's the whole trick.

אול מא כ׳לק אללה. אלסמאואת ואלארץ׳

Saadia, Bereshit 1:1 — “The first thing God created: the heavens and the earth.”

When and where

The conventional dating is ca. 800 – 1500 CE for the classical period (with Yemenite Jews continuing to write in Judeo-Arabic well into the twentieth century). The geographic range is essentially the medieval Islamic world: Iraq, Egypt, North Africa, al-Andalus, the Levant, Yemen.

Within that range it served as the prestige written language of Jewish communities. A Jewish merchant in Fustat (Old Cairo) writing to his partner in Aden, a rabbinic court in Qayrawan issuing a responsum, Maimonides drafting the Guide of the Perplexed in Cairo — all of them wrote Judeo-Arabic.

Why Hebrew letters?

Three reasons, roughly in order of importance:

Scribal training.Jewish boys learned the Hebrew alphabet in school. The Arabic alphabet was something you'd pick up if you needed to read state documents or correspond with non-Jews — but for in-group writing, Hebrew letters were just faster.
Quotation. Almost any Jewish text quotes Bible and Talmud. Switching scripts mid-sentence would be a nightmare, so the whole document stays in Hebrew letters and the Hebrew quotations just sit there in the same script as the surrounding Arabic.
Audience. Writing in Hebrew letters quietly marks the text as Jewish — addressed to other Jews, intelligible inside the community.

What was written in it

Almost everything. To name only the genres with surviving canonical works:

Bible translation and commentary — Saadia Gaon's Tafsiron the Torah (and on most of the rest of Tanakh); the Karaite commentaries of Yefet ben Eli and Yeshu‘a ben Yehudah; Tanchum Yerushalmi's lexicons.
Jewish philosophy — Saadia's Book of Beliefs and Opinions; Bahya ibn Paquda's Chovot HaLevavot; Yehudah HaLevi's Kuzari; Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed; the writings of Avraham ben HaRambam.
Halakhah— the Geonim's responsa from Sura and Pumbedita; Hai Gaon's legal monographs; Maimonides' commentary on the Mishnah; the legal works of Shmuel ben Hofni.
Karaite legal and theological writing— Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani's Kitab al-Anwar wal-Maraqib, an encyclopedic survey of Jewish sectarian history and law; David al-Fasi's biblical lexicon.
Science, medicine, grammar — Yonah ibn Janah on Hebrew grammar; medical works by Maimonides; star tables and calendrical writing.
Letters and documents — the tens of thousands of Cairo Genizah documents that have given us the texture of medieval Mediterranean Jewish life: marriage contracts, business partnerships, personal letters, court records.

The Cairo Genizah

A staggering proportion of what survives in Judeo-Arabic — perhaps the majority of the documentary corpus — comes from a single attic room in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat. The Cairo Genizah held roughly 400,000 fragments, dating from the 9th century onward, preserved for almost a millennium and dispersed across libraries (Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, JTS, Penn, the Russian National Library, and others) starting in the 1890s.

Modern editing of the Judeo-Arabic corpus has happened mostly out of the Genizah. The standard reference dictionary for the documentary materials is Joshua Blau's Dictionary of Medieval Judaeo-Arabic Texts (Jerusalem, 2006), which is what powers the tap-to-define glosses in the readers on this site.

Why learn Judeo-Arabic today?

Because most of the major Jewish books written in the medieval Islamic world were written in it — and reading them in translation is reading them at one remove. The Kuzari, the Guide, the Chovot HaLevavot, Saadia's Tafsir on Bereshit: all of them are written in a language a Hebrew reader can pick up faster than they expect.

The script is already familiar. The vocabulary overlaps with Hebrew in the obvious ways and with Aramaic in the slightly deeper ones. The hardest part is mostly orthographic conventions and a handful of diacritic letters — which is what the alphabet lessons on this site exist to teach.

Start reading

The shortest path from here to reading Saadia is about ninety minutes of focused work.

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