Judeo-Persian

Dzhidi
Judeo-Persian
Native to Israel
Iran
Native speakers
 60,000 in Israel (1995)[1]
Hebrew
Language codes
ISO 639-2 jpr
ISO 639-3 jpr
Glottolog jude1257[2]

Judeo-Persian, or Jidi (/ˈdʒiːdiː/; also spelled Dzhidi or Djudi), refers to both a group of Jewish dialects spoken by the Jews living in Iran and Judeo-Persian texts (written in Hebrew alphabet). As a collective term, Dzhidi refers to a number of Judeo-Iranian languages spoken by Jewish communities throughout the formerly extensive Persian Empire. On a more limited scale, Dzhidi refers to the Judeo-Persian dialect spoken by the Jewish communities of the area around Tehran and Mashhad.

Persian words in Hebrew and Aramaic

The earliest evidence of the entrance of Persian words into the language of the Israelites is found in the Bible. The post-exilic portions, Hebrew as well as Aramaic, contain besides many Persian proper names and titles, a number of nouns (as "dat" or "daad" in current Persian = "law"; "genez" or "Ganj" in current Persian = "treasure"; "pardes" or "Pardis" or "ferdos" in current Persian= "park, which is the main root of English word "Paradise") which came into permanent use at the time of the Achaemenid Empire.

More than five hundred years after the end of that dynasty the Jews of the Babylonian diaspora again came under the dominion of the Persians; and among such Jews the Persian language held a position similar to that held by the Greek language among the Jews of the West. Persian became to a great extent the language of everyday life among the Jews of Babylonia; and a hundred years after the conquest of that country by the Sassanids an amora of Pumbedita, Rab Joseph (d. 323), declared that the Babylonian Jews had no right to speak Aramaic, and should instead use either Hebrew or Persian. Aramaic, however, remained the language of the Jews in Israel as well as of those in Babylonia, although in the latter country a large number of Persian words found their way into the language of daily intercourse and into that of the schools, a fact which is attested by the numerous Persian derivatives in the Babylonian Talmud. But in the Aramaic Targum there are very few Persian words, because after the middle of the third century the Targumim on the Pentateuch and the Prophets were accepted as authoritative and received a fixed textual form in the Babylonian schools. In this way they were protected from the introduction of Persian elements.

Literature

There is an extensive Judeo-Persian poetic religious literature, closely modeled on classical Persian poetry. The most famous poet was Mowlānā Shāhin-i Shirāzi (14th century C.E.), who composed epic versifications of parts of the Bible, such as the Musā-nāmah (an epic poem recounting the story of Moses); later poets composed lyric poetry of a Sufi cast. Much of this literature was collected around the beginning of the twentieth century by the ּּBukharian rabbi Shimon Hakham, who founded a printing press in Israel.

Biblical Epics

Mishnah and Midrash

Biblical Commentaries

Historical Texts

Religious Poems

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Dzhidi at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
  2. ↑ Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin; Bank, Sebastian, eds. (2016). "Judeo-Persian". Glottolog 2.7. Jena: Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
  3. ↑ Vera Basch Moreen (tr. and ed.), In Queen Esther's Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (Yale Judaica): Yale 2000, ISBN 978-0-300-07905-0
  4. ↑ Yeroushalmi, David. "The Judeo-Persian Poet'Emrani and His Book of Treasure." Leiden: Brill (1995).
  5. ↑ Loeb, Laurence D. Outcaste: Jewish Life in Southern Iran. Vol. 31. Routledge, 2011.
  6. ↑ נצר, אמנון. "מוסיקה של קודש ושל חול בקרב יהודי פרס." פעמים: רבעון לחקר קהילות ישראל במזרח (1984): 163-181.‎
  7. ↑ Chehabi, Houchang Esfandiar, and Sorour Sarah Soroudi. Persian literature and Judeo-Persian culture: collected writings of Sorour S. Soroudi. Harvard University Press, 2010.
  8. ↑ Vera Basch Moreen (tr. and ed.), In Queen Esther's Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (Yale Judaica): Yale 2000, ISBN 978-0-300-07905-0
  9. ↑ Vera Basch Moreen (tr. and ed.), In Queen Esther's Garden: An Anthology of Judeo-Persian Literature (Yale Judaica): Yale 2000, ISBN 978-0-300-07905-0

References

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