A Thousand Years from Now, What Do We Want the World to Know About Jewish Languages?

If you had two days to compile documents and recordings for a time capsule to be opened centuries from now, what would you select?

On August 19, 2024, Jack Connor, a computational linguist who runs Lingua Aeterna, contacted the Jewish Language Project – an initiative of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion – and our partner organization Wikitongues about possible collaborations. One of them was to submit items to his endangered language collection, which he would be depositing in the Arctic World Archive for a millennium of safekeeping. The catch? Jack needed the items in 48 hours.

We at the Jewish Language Project dropped everything and spent two long days (and nights) thinking about which languages and types of materials to include. We appreciated the power to make these decisions, but we felt it was important to involve others in the process. Ideally this would be a crowdsourced enterprise; in two days, however, we would only be able to reach a few individuals.

First, we contacted our roster of experts – scholars and activists who have spent years collecting written and recorded materials in and about particular Jewish languages. In the past, we had turned to these experts many times with specific, and sometimes odd, linguistic queries, including words for “peace,” “Golden State Warriors,” and insults using names of animals. From some of our contacts we got vacation away messages (it was summer break), and others replied (understandably!) that they couldn’t help on such short notice. But we did receive materials from several colleagues around the world, including Jonas Sibony for Moroccan Judeo-Arabic, Assaf Bar Moshe for Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, Ophira Gamliel for Jewish Malayalam, and Robert Nudel-Iskhakov for Bukharian. Other contributors included Sam Miller and Alan Niku, members of the Jewish Language Project team who specialize in Jewish Neo-Aramaic and Jewish Iranian languages, as well as other organizations in the Jewish Language Consortium. Together, we compiled 100 items, including dictionaries, grammars, literature, and audio recordings.

While the stated purpose of Jack’s Arctic Archive collection is to preserve endangered languages, our team had additional applications in mind. We kept thinking of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza, treasure troves of documents that offered new answers to questions about how people long ago wrote and lived. 200, 500, or even 1,000 years from now, when the Arctic Archive is unearthed (assuming our planet still exists), this collection might be among the only surviving information about the communities and languages represented. What material will historians hope to find there?

Two hundred, 500, or even 1,000 years from now, this collection might be among the only surviving information about the communities and languages represented. What material will historians hope to find there?

We posed this question to colleagues who study Jews in various periods (who were available on short notice). Some initially mentioned the types of sources they already use, like incantation bowls, literary epics, and great works of rabbinic scholarship. We encouraged them to think more expansively: what additional written or recorded materials would they have liked ancient people to collect if they had had the technology? Then, our colleagues suggested diaries, letters, ephemera, and recordings that focus on everyday lives and family relations, recipes, songs, and conversations that include slang. We included these items in our archive as well, incorporating a combination of documents and recordings from older and newer sources, in formal and informal genres. Examples include a 12-year-old girl’s autobiography in Yiddish, a woman speaking Hebrew and Judeo-Arabic about integrating into Israeli society after moving from Algeria, a Jewish Malayalam song about a parrot, and a mother and her young adult son speaking Jewish Neo-Aramaic while preparing haliq (charoset).

As linguists, we think it’s important to document everyday language and the diversity of language use. So we also selected materials not for their historical import but because of their linguistic value. We hope that the Jewish Language Project’s archive of nine languages that are endangered in 2024 – from Semitic, Dravidian, Iranian, Romance, and Germanic families – will offer future scholars a glimpse into the vast historical diversity of Jewish languages (Yiddish is included even though it’s not technically endangered). Future scholars will also see and hear diversity within each language according to region, speaker/writer (gender, religiosity, learnedness, etc.), and genre (literary work, religious translation, diary, song, interview, spontaneous speech, etc.).

In the field of documenting endangered languages, there’s a tension regarding what type of language to record: the “pure” language as it was spoken in the past versus the way people actually speak today, which often combines two or more languages. The vast majority of items in our collection are in the second category, such as a Ladino-Hebrew dictionary, a second-grade Juhuri textbook in Russian, a North African French/Judeo-Arabic song, and scholarship in English about all the languages. This reflects the reality of multilingualism that has been the norm in Jewish communities throughout history, and it is especially a sign of the times in 2024, when most of these languages are endangered and their continued use is primarily post-vernacular.

In the field of documenting endangered languages, there’s a tension regarding what type of language to record.

The materials Jack requested are part of the long-term work of the Jewish Language Project, started in 2020, building on the work of many scholars and activists. To document and raise awareness about many languages spoken and written by Jews around the world and throughout history, we have collected dictionaries, interviews, songs, literature, and other resources, including a map interface featuring a collection of 1251 recordings of endangered Jewish languages. But there’s so much more curation and documentation to be done. Our vision is that by 2045, all known Jewish languages will be well documented, and written, audio, and video materials will be accessible to anyone with internet access. Then anyone who wants to breathe new life into a language – perhaps to reclaim it as part of their heritage – will have the resources to do so. In the coming years, we hope to work with our partner organizations, scholars, and language learners and activists like you to make this ambitious vision a reality. Then perhaps we can curate an even larger collection to deposit in the Arctic Archive – with enough time to gather input from anyone who’s interested.

Sarah Bunin Benor is Founding Director of the Jewish Language Project and Professor of Contemporary Jewish Studies and Linguistics at Hebrew Union College – Jewish Institute of Religion. Eden Moyal is a recent graduate of UCLA’s linguistics department and the Jewish Language Project’s Documentation Manager. You can learn more about the Jewish Language Project, get involved as a language learner or activist through our Heirloom program, follow us on social media, donate to sustain our work, and join our email list at www.jewishlanguages.org.