Life
My mission to save the threatened Jewish Arabic language of my childhood
When I learnt the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic I grew up with was dying out, I wrote a book to protect its future
April 8, 2025 12:11
When I learnt the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic I grew up with was dying out, I wrote a book to protect its future
April 8, 2025 12:11I did not mean to write a book about my mother tongue going extinct – because if you’d told me, at any point in my childhood or even until quite recently, that Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, the language of my community of Iraqi Jews, was dying out, I’d have been amazed. How could it be endangered when I knew so many people who spoke it!
I still do. My mother left Iraq in 1971; she’d been one of the few thousand Jews who had stayed there after most of Iraq’s Jews (including my father) were airlifted to Israel in 1951. I was born in London in 1975 into a noisy vivid whirl of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic. As a child, the language felt so alive and crucial to me that I thought English was just a children’s language, for nursery rhymes and picture books, and assumed that when I grew up I would be fluent in Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.
After all, I already knew how to say thenbet el kalb, khellooha bel kasba, oo ukeb reb’een yom, tel’ooha oo ba’ada ma’eruja (they put a dog’s tail into a sugar cane tube for 40 days, and when they got it out, it was still curly), and to say ashteedek (long live your hands) when I liked what my mum had cooked, to which she’d reply awafi (to your health). But I only ever had a broken, kitchen Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, which I pronounced so badly my parents joked tahki kanni kebba b’thema (she talks like she has kubba in her mouth).
In Iraq there are only three Jews left who speak my language. In Israel, Jews were pressured to ditch it for Hebrew
The clock has been ticking for my language for a long time. In Iraq there are only three Jews left to speak it. In Israel, Jews were pressured to ditch the language for Hebrew. In the rest of the Iraqi Jewish diaspora, people are mostly not passing it on to their children. If a language is not transmitted, it can vanish quickly, from one generation to the next. Soon after I became a mother myself, I realised that I couldn’t speak it to my son and it felt like a kind of emergency, like a flood was coming and I needed to build an ark, to save what I could of my language, and to know more about what I was losing before it was gone.
I found it very clarifying to trace the story of my language. From when the Jews first came to Iraq in 597BCE, deported there by Nebuchadnezzar, and picked up the local language, Aramaic, infusing it with Hebrew to develop Jewish Babylonian Aramaic (the language of the Babylonian Talmud) and then carrying over some of the Hebrew and Aramaic constructions when, after the Arab conquest, they switched to Arabic. It was always a home language, an intimate language, the language you cooked in and bickered in and sung your children to sleep in. Growing up we called it just Judeo-Arabic or sometimes haki malna (our talk) or arabi malna (our Arabic).
It was always a home language, the language you cooked in and bickered in and sung your children to sleep in. We called it rabi mala, our Arabic
It was heartening to find many other people who loved the language and who were working to salvage it. You can even study it – and I did – at the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, which sounds like something out of a Jorge Luis Borges novel and which is just as magical and unlikely. Assaf Bar Moshe, who taught the course, has made his textbook available for free to anyone who wants to learn. There is also an amazing archive made by Eli Timan, who originally started interviewing Iraqi Jews to capture the language. But, because they remembered Iraq at different times, he told me, “it became a history”.
I also could not think about the language in isolation: I had to put the stories on my ark too, the recipes, even the things whose names are being lost. And so I dug into stories about my community that I hadn’t known much about before such as the magic demon bowls Jews (and some others) used to make in 6th century Babylon, which you turned to read the curses and vows written in spirals on the clay. And the story that amba (mango pickle), the Iraqi Jewish condiment, may have been invented by Siegfried Sassoon’s great-grandfather. I pinned down the recipe for makhboose, date biscuits also known as baba bit-tamar.
I also had to reckon with some trauma because, of course, languages don’t just die. It was hard to think about the forces that drove my language into extinction, and the difficult history that is still unresolved, but I also started seeing how in the rituals, in the recipes, in the love and the zest for life, strategies for generational healing, and even for joy, were being passed down too.
Writing this book has felt like I was looking back down the generations but also forward, becoming a bridge to a future descendant. This has made me feel more settled, and more connected. I’ve also let go of the second generation angst that I didn’t know enough, couldn’t speak in case I made mistakes, couldn’t cook because it wouldn’t be proper or authentic. I let myself experiment now, and explore; my relationship with my heritage is more tender than it was.
I am still not fluent – and may never be – but in Ross Perlin’s radical book on language loss, Language City, I discovered the idea that you don’t necessarily have to be a speaker. You can also be a “keeper”. I find it comforting to think that I could become an archivist of my own family story.
This book I did not mean to write has become more meaningful than I could ever have imagined.
Chopping Onions on my Heart: on Losing and Preserving Culture is published by Chatto & Windus