Middle Arabic and Mixed Arabic

Diachrony and Synchrony

Edited by

Liesbeth Zack and Arie Schippers

LEIDENBOSTON
2012

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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations..........................................................................................
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................

vii
ix

Introduction: Middle and Mixed Arabic, A New Trend in

Arabic Studies .............................................................................................
Johannes den Heijer

Moyen arabe et varits mixtes de larabe : premier essai de

bibliographie, Supplment no 1 .............................................................
Jrme Lentin

27

Some Remarks about Middle Arabic and Saadya Gaons Arabic

Translation of the Pentateuch in Manuscripts of Jewish,
Samaritan, Coptic Christian, and Muslim Provenance ..................
Berend Jan Dikken

51

Linguistic and Cultural Features of an Iraqi Judeo-Arabic Text

of the qia al-anbiy Genre .................................................................
Lutz Edzard

83

Deux types de moyen arabe dans la version arabe du discours

41 de Grgoire de Nazianze?..................................................................
Jacques GrandHenry

95

Prsentation du livre Le Conte du Portefaix et des Trois Jeunes

Femmes, dans le manuscrit de Galland (XIVeXVe sicles)...........
Bruno Halflants

113

Judeo-Arabic as a Mixed Language ...........................................................

Benjamin Hary
The Story of Zayd and KalA Folk Story in a Judaeo-Arabic
Manuscript ...................................................................................................
Rachel Hasson Kenat

125

145

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vi

contents

Towards an Inventory of Middle and Mixed Arabic Features:

The Inscriptions of Deir Mar Musa (Syria) as a Case Study.........
Johannes den Heijer

157

Qui est arabophone? Les varits de larabe dans la dfinition

dune comptence native ........................................................................
Amr Helmy Ibrahim

175

Perspectives ecdotiques pour textes en moyen arabe:

Lexemple des traits thologiques de Sulaymn al-azz ...........
Paolo La Spisa

187

Normes orthographiques en moyen arabe: Sur la notation du

vocalisme bref .............................................................................................
Jrme Lentin

209

Playing the Same Game? Notes on Comparing Spoken

Contemporary Mixed Arabic and (Pre)Modern Written
Middle Arabic .............................................................................................
Gunvor Mejdell

235

Middle Arabic in Moshe Dars Judaeo-Arabic Poems .......................

Arie Schippers

247

Written Judeo-Arabic: Colloquial versus Middle Arabic ....................

Yosef Tobi

265

Yefet ben Elis Commentary on the Book of Zechariah ....................

Kees de Vreugd

279

Damascus Arabic According to the Compendio of

Lucas Caballero (1709) ................................................................................
Otto Zwartjes and Manfred Woidich

295

List of Contributors ........................................................................................

Index ...................................................................................................................

335
341

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WRITTEN JUDEO-ARABIC: COLLOQUIAL VERSUS MIDDLE ARABIC

Yosef Tobi
Summary: Medieval Judeo-Arabic (MWJA) was written with Hebrew characters, and used
for the Judeo-Arabic literature shared by all Jewish scholars in the domain of medieval
Arab-Muslim culture. Its status was like that of literary Classical Arabic among the Muslim
Arabic speakers. However, MWJA had never been a living spoken language and its life
did not extend beyond four or five hundred years (tenthfifteenth centuries). Yet, Arabic
continued to function as a spoken language. Its numerous dialects also served as a written communicative vehicle, and for literature in various genres. This is true in regard to
medieval Judeo-Arabic, opposed to the notion that MWJA of the school of Saadya was the
only one used by Jews in the Middle Ages. Actually, colloquial Judeo-Arabic has existed as
a written language for almost fifteen hundred years, since pre-Islamic time. Today, one of
the important assignments is to carry out a meticulous and comprehensive comparative
examination of the ancient and later non-classical Arabic languages in order to better
understand the history of Judeo-Arabic.

1.Introduction
Middle Arabic is the current name used by the recent two generations for
medieval non-classical written Arabic. Thus, by the recent two generations it was used for medieval Judeo-Arabic (MWJA), mostly thanks to
the enormous life work of Prof. Joshua Blau.1 This Arabic, written with
Hebrew characters, was used for the vast production of Judeo-Arabic literature of all genres and was shared by all Jewish scholars in the spacious
domain of medieval Arab-Muslim culture. In this respect, its status among
the Arabic-speaking Jewish communities was like that of literary Classical
Arabic (CA) among the Muslim Arabic speakers, which has been used for
written Arabic literature since the seventh century until today. Yet one
can distinguish MWJA because of its grammatical, syntactical, and stylistic leniency, compared to the extremely strict rules of CA, and its distance
from the highly flowery style so typical of CA.
As known, although insuffficiently heeded by its researchers, MWJA had
never been a living spoken language, and its life did not extend beyond
four or five hundred years in the centres of literary creativity in the

1
Blaus studies about MWJA are too many to be detailed here. However, two of them
should be mentioned in this context: Blau 1988 and 1999.

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Eastern lands, North Africa and Spain from the tenth through the fifteenth centuries. In some of these countries, it stopped being used for
writing after the fourteenth century (Vajda 1980; Tobi 2010: 2734). One
notable exception is Yemen, where Jews kept on with italthough not
exclusivelyfor teaching and writing up to recent generations.2 A very
significant testimony is the story of a Jewish scholar in Yemen in the first
half of the twentieth century, who came across a Judeo-Arabic translation
of a printed version of Song of Songs:3
Now even though the meaning of his words was diffficult for me in certain
places, since it was [written in] the Babylonian (Iraqi) language and not [in]
pure [Arabic], nevertheless, I corrected it according to the language of Rav
Saadia Gaon, which is almost habitual in our mouths.

Evidently, the disappearance of MWJA did not impact in any respect the
use of Arabic as a living spoken language among Jewish communities,
whose surrounding majority spoke Arabic. Nor did its existence as a written language have any impact on the use of Arabic as vernacular. Even
its invention in the tenth century was not the real reason causing those
communities to speak Arabic. Spoken Arabic was always clearly separated
from MWJA, since as a living colloquial language it was much richer than
MWJA.4 In fact, there was no common spoken Judeo-Arabic, but scores of
diffferent dialects, to such an extent that a speaker of one dialect could not
understand a speaker of another, even, and not infrequently, in the same
country. In principle, a specific Judeo-Arabic dialect is the same one spoken by the Arab or Muslim majority in a certain country, even if it difffers
in some respects, such as its Hebrew component and even phonetically,
from the majority dialect.5

See Goitein in Habshush 1941: 7281; Blau 1984; Tobi 1991; Tobi 1999: 400403.
Tobi 1991: 138.
4
This may be easily shown if we compare the only comprehensive dictionary we have
for the medieval Judeo-Arabic texts (Blau 2006) with the only comprehensive one we
have for a single new written and spoken dialect of Judeo-Arabicthat of Iraq (Avishur
20092010). Unfortunately, no such work has been carried out for another dialect of JudeoArabic. We should, however, mention M. Piamentas Dictionary of Post-Classical Yemeni
Arabic (Piamenta 19901991/1), of which Judo-Yemeni, the language of the Yemeni Jews
is an essential part (ibid., I,v).
5
Innumerable studies have been written about the Hebrew component in JudeoArabic dialects, of which might be mentioned five wide-ranging ones: Avishur 2001 (Iraq,
Syria, Egypt); Ben-Yaacob 1985; Bar-Asher 1992 (North Africa); Bahat 2002 (Morocco);
Henshke 2007 (Tunisia). The documentation and study of the Hebrew and Aramaic component in the Judeo-Arabic dialects is an important part of The Synoptic Dictionary of the
Hebrew and Aramaic Component in the Jewish Languages in the Mediterranean Basin, an
3

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2.The Wide Variety of Written and

Oral Judeo-Arabic Literature
The numerous Judeo-Arabic dialects were not solely used for oral communication; they also served as a daily written communicative vehicle,
for instance in correspondence, and dialects were even used for literature
in various genres. Thus in liturgy, we have biblical translations (ars),
poems recited in synagogue, and halakhic material; while in the secular
field, mostly in folk literature, we have folktales, folk poems, and proverbs. This is true not only in regard to new Judeo-Arabic, but in regard
to medieval Judeo-Arabic as well. Opposed to the notion, to which the
central scholars of this domain were clinging, namely that MWJA of the
school of Saadya was the only one used by Jews in the Middle Ages, while
ignoring texts found in the Cairene Geniza written not in accordance with
the rules of this classical MWJA,6 a modified outlook is recently being
adopted by new researchers. That is to say, throughout the Middle Ages
there existed not only one, unique classical MWJA, but there existed
a variety of MWJA. This understanding was unequivocally proved in a
recent search of letters preserved in the Geniza (Wagner 2010), but, as
we shall see below, this is factual in respect to other written genres of
Judeo-Arabic. The new conception and its significance to the history of
the Arabic language and its dialects, is correctly expressed in the short
description of this recent publication:7
The Cairo Genizah has preserved a vast number of medieval and post-medieval letters written in the Jewish variety of Arabic. The linguistic peculiarities of these letters provide an invaluable source for the understanding of
the history of the Arabic language and the development of Arabic dialects.
This work compares and contrasts various linguistic features of JudaeoArabic letters from diffferent periods, and is one of the first studies to present
a comprehensive linguistic investigation into non-literary Judaeo-Arabic.
Its main focus is to provide an extensive diachronic linguistic description,
while distinguishing between features of epistolary Arabic and vernacular
phenomena. This study should be of interest to anyone working on the
Arabic language, sociolinguistics, general historical linguistics and language
typology.

all-embracing project founded by the late Prof. Shelomo Morag, which is currently carried
out at The Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
6
Classical MWJA is the variety established by Saadya Gaon and accepted as a common written (only!) language in all countries where Jews spoke Arabic.
7
As advertised by Brill: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=210&pid=30673.

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Beyond doubt, colloquial Judeo-Arabic changes when it is transferred to

the phase of a written or printed text; however, it is basically the same
language in terms of lexicon, semantics, and grammar, and its orthography reflects the particular accent of the local Jewish speakers. This kind
of popular or so-calledunjustly and incorrectlyvulgar literature, of
which only a tiny part has been documented in manuscript or in print,
is only now being widely recorded and examined by scholars whose
scientific-academic background is not Middle Eastern studies but Judaic
studies. However, some of the Judeo-Arabic spoken dialects were studied
by pioneer scholars in this field: M. Cohen (1912, Algiers), S.D. Goitein (in
Habshush 1941, Yemen), D. Cohen (19641975, Tunis), J. Mansour (1991,
Baghdad).
3.The Importance of the Non-Classical Written and
Oral Judeo-Arabic Literature for the History and Culture
of the Jews in the Islamic World
Middle East scholars generally focus on literature written in classical languages, and in principle ignore dialectal languages and their literature,
oral or written. But it is exactly this kind of literature that is exceedingly
significant for Judaic studies researchers, more specifically those who
deal with Jewish communities in Arab lands, in the Near East or in North
Africa, and not in medieval times but following the expulsion from Spain.
These researchers, whose academic field is the social and cultural history
of Jewish communities, make use of inexhaustible and diverse sources,
oral and written, which in general are ignored and neglected, if not
negated, by most Middle Eastern studies scholars. A fundamental contribution by Judaic studies researchers should be singled outthe recording
of a great many texts from the oral tradition, liturgical as well as popular.
In doing so, they have rescued valuable linguistic and literary treasures,
otherwise doomed to oblivion with the peoplemen and womenwho
carried them in their memory.8 As mentioned earlier, a tiny part of that

8
Again, a huge amount of scholarly and unscholarly publications have appeared in the
last two generations, mostly in Israel and by scholars who were born in Arab speaking
countries or by scholars whose parents came from these countries. By and large, these
works refer to linguistic aspects of the written and oral literature in Judeo-Arabic dialects,
less to the literary and social-linguistic aspects, while rarely to the historical significance
of the Judeo-Arabic literature and to the cultural and social inter-relationship between
the Jewish minority and the Muslim majority. We may remark here four of these studies:

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oral Judeo-Arabic literature has been documented in manuscripts, but we

should draw our attention to sources about which not enough is known or
taken into account: thousands of Judeo-Arabic books, booklets, and leaflets that were printed in the Jewish print houses in the Near East, North
Africa, India, and Livorno during the past one hundred and fifty years.
Only some of these sources may be found in academic or public libraries,
while others are kept in private collections or are completely lost.9
We may conclude, then, that Judeo-Arabic vernaculars served not only
as a vibrant and developing spoken language, but also as a written, literary language. As such, they incorporated a comprehensive set of rules of
grammar, syntax, and style. As mentioned, these rules were not as strict
and pedantic as CA, and even not as MWJA itself. But nobody who has
examined texts in this vulgar language can ignore that they are written
according to a quite consistent orthography, answering all problems arising in the process of transferring an oral language to script. This should
be especially noted, as dialectal Judeo-Arabic struggled with that issue
much earlier than did the Arabic spoken by the surrounding majority.10
That happened simply because the educated class of the majority population could not agree to write the spoken language. Actually, until recent
times, no clear and easy system has been invented in Arab countries for
writing the spoken language. Scholars of Arabic language in Arab countries believe that the infiltration of the mmiyya into written Arabic is
unfavourable and should be rejected. They denounce it, warn against it,
and consequently, avoid from any step which might legitimize it. Arabic Language Academies dealt with Arabic transcription of consonants
of European languages and took quite clear decisions in this issue, but
they apparently have never dealt with transcription of the mmiyya.11
Avishur 1987 (Iraqi womens folk songs); Hary 1992 (Egypt); Tobi 2000 (Tunisia); Bar-Asher
1998; Chetrit 2007 (North Africa).
9
Unfortunately, there is only one bibliographical work, in which are listed all prints of
popular Judeo-Arabic in a certain country. We allude to Attal 2007 (northern Tunisia, 1427
items, excluding some hundred publications in popular Judeo-Arabic printed in Djerba,
southern Tunisia). This bibliography is based on Attals magnificent private collection of
Judeo-Arabic prints from Tunisia, which has recently been acquired by the National and
University Library in Jerusalem.
10
The basic study for how Hebrew characters were adapted in classical MWJA Arabic
is Blau 1980: 1756. There is no comprehensive work about how Hebrew characters were
adapted in the various, or in a specific, dialectal written Judeo-Arabic. However, partial
descriptions are included in not a few of the studies about this written Judeo-Arabic. For
a theoretical discussion of this issue see Tedghi 1997; 2002.
11
However, there frequently appear on the internet private suggestions for writing
the mmiyya, mostly for computer purposes. See for example the recently published

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Certainly, Arabic mmiyya is well represented in print, including whole

literary texts, especially folk literature, but no solid system of writing has
been consolidated so far. This, as mentioned above, is in sharp contrast
to Judeo-Arabic.12
4.The Lifetime of Non-Classical Judeo-Arabic
In contrast to the relatively short life-time of MWJA, four-five hundred
years, and its complete vanishing, colloquial Judeo-Arabic has existed as
a written language for almost fifteen hundred years. There is valuable evidence, basically from early Muslim sources (Tobi 2001: 2025; Tobi 2004b),
but partially epigraphic, that Jewish communities in north-west Arabia
wrote Arabic in Hebrew characters (Noja 1979: 312fff; Hopkins 2009). This
is not surprising: first, because Jews have since ancient times been accustomed to writing in Hebrew characters the foreign languages that they
spoke, like Aramaic, which was not written by Jews in Syriac characters;
second, because prior to Islam, Arabic writing was far from being current;
indeed, the first written Arabic book was the Qurn, which certainly was
not written down in Muammads life time (Schoeler 2002). We know
from many Geniza fragments, only recently noticed by scholars, that nonclassical written Judeo-Arabic existed in the Middle Ages alongside MWJA
and even preceded it. These findings disabused the common opinion
that non-classical written Judeo-Arabic appeared for the first time only
with the Sermons (dert) of Maimonides grandson, David Ha-Nagid
(12121300) (Tobi 2006: 2133). Although MWJA had greatly reduced the
use of non-classical written Judeo-Arabic, it did not eliminate it entirely.
The evaporation, as it were, of MWJA, which resulted in part from the
loosening of direct links with Muslim Arabic literature, encouraged the
use of non-classical Judeo-Arabic as a written language alongside Hebrew.
At the other end of the historical scale, Judeo-Arabic was used for correspondence and even in publishing by the Jews of Tunisia up to the 1960s
(Tobi 2010: 274277).
suggestion, titled arqa ilwa li-kitbat urf al-laha al-mmiyya (it can be found with
Google). I thank Dr. Shlomit Shraybom Shivtiel, who studied the Arabic Language Academy in Egypt, for providing me with the information about this question. See Shraybom
Shivtiel 1999; 2005.
12
In my paper about Judeo-Arabic prints in North Africa 18501950, presented in the
Third Symposium on History of Printing and Publishing in the Languages and Countries
of the Middle East, University of Leipzig, 2427 September 2008, I dealt with the crystallization of the orthography of Judeo-Arabic in consequence of its being printed.

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5.The Ancient Judeo-Arabic

Once we are aware that non-classical Judeo-Arabic had continuously
existed as a written language, we have to inquire how it related to MWJA.
If we embrace the possibility that Judeo-Arabic already existed before
Islam, and if we take in account that Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) was the first to
summarize the rules of the orthography of CA (Haarmann 1981: 169) and
that the orthography of CA was consolidated only in the tenth century
(Robin 2001: 546), we may realize why non-classical written Judeo-Arabic,
which preceded Saadya Gaon (882942), did not adapt the orthography
of CA. My impression, based on many fragments of varied literary pieces
written in non-classical Judeo-Arabic, is that most of its orthographic distinctions are common to other languages that were current in its vicinity.13
First, naturally, were Hebrew and Aramaic, both used by Jews as spoken
and written languages, whichas clearly proved from the Qumrn scrolls
of the first century CE and from the fragments from the tenthtwelfth
centuries CE preserved in the Cairene Genizawere strictly written in
terms of consonants, but very lenient in terms of vowels (matres lectionis), In fact, the orthography of Hebrew has never been consolidated in
this respect. Secondly, however, we should not rule out the diffferent preIslamic north-Arabian languages known only from epigraphic sources,
but spoken in the areas where Jewish communities were dispersed in
the north-west of the Arabian Peninsula, that their orthography at that
time was far from being consolidated. And, of course, there was what is
called CA, which existed from the seventh up to the tenth century, when
its orthography was eventually stabilized. The study of these languages
started at the beginning of the twentieth century, but the past generation
has seen enormous advances, based on hundreds of inscriptions. Special
attention should be paid to sources from the pre-Islamic city of Fau in
southern Saudi Arabia. Of the scholars dealing with the inscriptions found
in the Arabian desert, I would cite in particular Michael Macdonald of
Oxford and Christian Robin of Paris.14
From early Muslim sources, we know that the Jews of north-west Arabia translated the Pentateuch into the Arabic they spoke, the yahdiyya

13
For a description of the orthographic distinctions of the ancient Judeo-Arabic see
Blau-Hopkins 1984; Tobi 1993: 100110; for other descriptions see the many references in
Tobi 2001: 22, n. 53.
14
See, for example, Macdonald 2000; 2004; 2009; Robin 2001; 2006; see also Eichmann
et al. 2006.

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(Newby 1971; Newby 1988: 2122).15 We may conjecture that this translation was done for students in the Jewish schools, about which we know,
again, from early Muslim sources (Lecker 1998, III:259). It is noteworthy,
that in Muammads entourage there were people who could read and
understand the Judeo-Arabic translations, such as Zayd ibn bit who
studied in a Jewish school in Yarib (ibid.), and even the Old Scriptures in
Hebrew, such as Waraqa ibn Nawfal, the cousin of Xada, Muammads
wife, who,16
during the pre-Islamic Period became a Christian and used to write the
writing with Hebrew letters. He would write from the Gospel in Hebrew as
much as Allah wished him to write.

It is also said about him, that he used to read the Gospel in Arabic.17
However, we could just as well assume the existence of the JudeoArabic translationoral or writtenbased on the tradition of all Jewish
communitiessince ever to modern timesto translate the Scriptures,
especially the Pentateuch, into the local spoken language. As all Jews were
literate at least since the second century CE, we may assume that the
Judeo-Arabic translation in Arabia was written down there, and was later
transferred to Iraq by Jews who were expelled from north-west Arabia
after the advent of Islam. The use of the Judeo-Arabic translation spread
not only throughout Iraq, but also to other countries where Jews changed
their colloquial language from Aramaic to Arabic. It spread to such an
extent that there was more than one translation of the Pentateuch as well
as translations of the books of the Prophets and the Hagiography (Tobi
1996; Tobi 2006: 31). The didactic goal of the translation is proved by a
later kind of translation, known as alf; namely, a translation or explanation of selected words according to their occurrence in a certain biblical
book.18
With the passage of time, the texts of additional genres that existed
among the Jews of Iraq and neighbouring countries, the main Jewish spiritual and national centre during the Fimid Caliphate, were translated
from Hebrew or Aramaic into non-classical Judeo-Arabic and written
down for the benefit of the younger generations, who became more
15

See also Tobi 2001: 21 and the references in n. 17.

a al-Buxr, vol. 1, Book 1:3 (http://www.theholybook.org/content/view/9258/16).
17
Ibid., vol. 4, Book 55:605.
18
For this special sort of commentary on the Bible and other canonical texts written in
the ancient Judeo-Arabic see Tobi 1998; 2006: 3132, 5566; Polliack-Somekh 2000; Eldar
2001.
16

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familiar with Arabic than with the traditional national languages (Tobi
2006: 32, 5154, 6773). An on-the-mark illustration of this trend is a
responsum by Rav Narunai Gaon from the mid-ninth century in regard
to the congregants of a certain Baghddi synagogue who requested substituting the recited traditional Aramaic translation of the weekly portion
with an Arabic rendition (Narunai 1994: 152154; Tobi 2001: 2627).
The non-classical Judeo-Arabic and its orthography were used for any
text composed in or translated into Arabic, such as private correspondence (Blau-Hopkins 1984; 1987), religious law, folkloric essays, and even
a philosophical composition (Tobi 2006: 32). Admittedly, the orthography
of ancient Judeo-Arabic did not propose an exact and stable system of
graphical signs for writing. But this is not exceptional: first, because no
language attains perfect matching between its phonetics and orthography; secondly, all other non-Hebrew orthographies used for Arabic since
pre-Islamic times, including Arabic script itself, were not exact and stable.
Thus, for instance, during the Medinese Caliphate (622661), four essential principles were established for Arabic script: (a) one, two, or three
diacritical points to distinguish between similar letters; (b) a special sign
to indicate the long vowel ; (c) the t marbah; and (d) signs to indicate
short vowels, the absence of a vowel, and the doubling of a consonant
(Robin 2006).
6.Saadya as Stabilisator of Judeo-Arabic
The stabilisation of the orthography of CA in the second half of the ninth
century probably gave Saadya, the most eminent Jewish scholar of his
time and for some generations thereafter, his main incentive to develop a
new system of Judeo-Arabic orthography, one that matched CA as much
as possible. But it should be stressed that he did not change the traditional
Hebrew script used for writing Arabic for many generations, and this in
accordance with his general philosophy regarding Arabic cultureproximity and distance. That is, his determination to raise Jewish culture to its
highest level, but at the same time to protect its distinctiveness and validity
in comparison with other, false cultures (Tobi 2004a: 107fff). Abraham ibn
Ezra somewhat vaguely refers to this determination:
[=( Saadya] translated the Pentateuch into the language of the Ishmaelites using their script). Some scholars tend to deduce
that Saadya wrote his biblical translation (tafsr) in Arabic characters
(Blau 1999: 3941), but no evidence has been found for this contention.

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Now, with the discovery of not a few Geniza fragments of pre-Saadya,

non-classical Judeo-Arabic biblical translations, which Saadya unquestionably had right before his eyes while composing his translation, we
have to render the Hebrew word , not in their script, but in their
orthography (Tobi 1993: 113114).
7.The Survival of Non-Classical Judeo-Arabic
Despite the swift dissemination of Saadyas new orthographic system
and despite the almost complete cutting offf of Arabic-speaking Jewish
communities from non-classical Arabic, pre-Saadya non-classical JudeoArabic did not disappear, as its literature was copied and re-copied. As
mentioned, the first non-classical Judeo-Arabic work indisputably composed after the tenth century is David Ha-Nagids Sermons in the thirteenth century; but we cannot ignore the fact that other works of that
kind have been discovered in the Geniza collections. Since Ha-Nagids
work, the non-classical language form had gradually taken priority in
Judeo-Arabic literature.19
The conclusion is, then, unambiguous: non-classical Judeo-Arabic was
a permanent phenomenon as a written language among a proportion of
the Jewish people over the course of fifteen hundred years, at least from
the sixth century in pre-Islamic Arabia through the mid-twentieth century, excluding the period from the tenth through the fourteenth century,
when MWJA predominated. Our knowledge about ancient non-classical
Judeo-Arabic is incomplete, because only its remnants were saved in the
Geniza and, in general, they did not draw the attention of researchers,
many of whom even rejected these sources.
The general impression arising from a comparison of the orthography
of ancient and medieval non-classical Judeo-Arabic with the later orthography of non-classical Judeo-Arabic after the expulsion from Spain is that
the two are analogous. In principle, they similarly solve problems involved
with writing Arabic in Hebrew script, not to speak of their relation to the
colloquial language. Their common platform, which clearly distinguished
19
This kind of texts from what is usually depicted as the late Geniza are examined by
Ms. Rachel Hasson Kenat in her doctoral dissertation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In the third conference of the International Association for the Study of Middle and
Mixed Arabic (AIMA), Florence, October 2010, she presented a paper titled Popular literature written in late Judaeo Arabic from the Firkovitch collection. See also Hasson 2010.

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them from Saadyas MWJA, is their independence of the orthography of

literary CA.
*
Today, one of the important assignments for students of Judeo-Arabic
is to carry out a meticulous and comprehensive comparative examination of the ancient and later non-classical Arabic languages in order to
better understand the history of Judeo-Arabic in its diffferent and diverse
appearances and exposures. Of course, non-classical Judeo-Arabic and its
literature should not be referred to as vulgar and defective when judged in
relation to CA and its literature. The starting point of the study on written
Judeo-Arabic, non-classical and classical, should be completely diffferent,
and their interrelationships have to be examined in an unbiased manner
by avoiding granting priority to CA.
References
Attal, Robert. 2007. Un sicle de littrature judo-arabe tunisienne (18611961): Notices bibliographiques. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi Institute [Hebrew].
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