Yevanic, also known as Judaeo-Greek, Romaniyot,[Spolsky, B., S. B. Benor. 2006. "Jewish Languages." In Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 120-124. http://legacy.huc.edu/faculty/faculty/benor/Spolsky%20and%20Benor%20jewish_languages%20offprint.pdf .] Romaniote, and Yevanitika,[Wexler, P. Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages, p. 17. 2006][Dalven, R. Judeo-Greek. In: Encyclopedia Judaica. 1971:426] The Romaniotes are a group of Greek Jews whose presence in the Levant is documented since the Byzantine period. Its linguistics lineage stems from the Jewish Koine spoken primarily by Hellenistic Jews throughout the region, and includes Hebrew language and Aramaic language elements. It was mutually intelligible with the Greek dialects of the Christian population. The Romaniotes used the Hebrew alphabet to write Greek and Yevanic texts. Judaeo-Greek has had in its history different spoken variants depending on different eras, geographical and sociocultural backgrounds. The oldest Modern Greek text was found in the Cairo Geniza and is actually a Jewish translation of the Book of Ecclesiastes (Kohelet).[Johannes Niehoff-Panagiotidis. Language of Religion, Language of the People: Medieval Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, p. 31, Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006]
Origin of name
The term
Yevanic is an artificial creation from the
Biblical word יון () referring to the
Greeks and the lands that the Greeks inhabited. The term is an overextension of the Greek word Ἰωνία (
Ionia in English) from the (then) easternmost Greeks to all Greeks. The word for Greece in
Hebrew is ; likewise, the word is used to refer to the Greek language in
Hebrew.
Geographical distribution
A small number of
Romaniote Jews in the
United States,
Israel,
Greece, and
Turkey have some knowledge of the Judaeo-Greek language. The language is highly endangered and could completely die out. There are no preservation programs to promote or to revive the language,
[Vlachou, Evangelia, Papadopoulou, Chrysoula, Kotzoglou, Georgios. Before the flame goes out: documentation of the Yevanic dialect. 2014. Sponsored by the Latsis Foundation.] but starting in April, 2022, the Oxford School for Rare Jewish languages will be offering a beginner's course.
In 1987, there were 35 speakers left in
Israel, the majority located in
Jerusalem. This population may have died out.
, a few elderly Jews in Ioannina, Greece still speak the language.
As of 2021 there is a small population of speakers in Iran.
Historical background
Greece, Constantinople, Asia Minor, Southern Italy, the Balkans and Eastern Europe had originally a Greek-speaking Jewish community. After the arrival of Jewish refugees into these areas from the Iberian Peninsula, Northern Italy, and Western Europe, the Greek-speaking Jewish communities began to almost disappear while integrating into the group of the newcomers, which did not constitute in every area of their new homeland the majority.
[Bowman, Steven (1985). "Language and Literature". The Jews of Byzantium 1204-1453. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press. p. 758.][Avigdor Levy; The Jews of the Ottoman Empire, New Jersey, (1994)]
The immigration of Italian and Spanish-speaking people into Greece in the late 15th century altered the culture and vernacular of the Greek Jews. A lot of locales picked up on Judeo-Spanish language and customs, however some communities in Epirus, Thessaly, the Ionian Islands, Crete, Constantinople and Asia Minor kept the old, so-called "Romaniote minhag" and the Judaeo-Greek language.
At the start of World War II Northern Greece alone had ten thousand speakers, but the language was almost totally annihilated during the Holocaust with only 149 speakers surviving.
Features
Yevanic is based on Greek, but it contains large amounts of influence from
Hebrew language,
Arabic, and
Aramaic. It also used a different alphabet than Greek using Hebrew letters instead of Greek letters.
The languages also has
Calque from
Judaeo-Spanish.
Current status
The assimilation of the Romaniote communities by the
Ladino language-speaking
Sephardi Jews, the
emigration of many of the Romaniotes to the United States and Israel, and the murder of many of the Romaniotes during the
Holocaust have been the main reasons of the decline of Judaeo-Greek. The survivors were too scant to continue an environment in which this language was dominant and more recent generations of the survivors have moved to new locations such as Greece, Israel, and the United States and now speak the respective languages of those countries: Standard Modern Greek,
Hebrew, and
English language.
[Robert Bonfil (2011). Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures. Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture. Brill.]
The Jews have a place of note in the history of Modern Greek. They were unaffected by Atticism and employed the current colloquial vernacular which they then transcribed in Hebrew letters. The Romaniotes were Jews settled in the Eastern Roman Empire long before its division from its Western counterpart, and they were linguistically assimilated long before leaving the Levant after Hadrian's decree against them and their religion. As a consequence, they spoke Greek, the language of the overwhelming majority of the populace in the beginning of the Byzantine era and that of the Greek élite thereafter, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Some communities in Northern Greece and Crete maintained their specific Romaniote practices since these communities were either geographically apart from the Sephardim or had different synagogues, and because their liturgies differed greatly.[Zunz, Leopold "Ritus. 1859. Eine Beschreibung synagogaler Riten".][Luzzato, S. D. Introduction to the Mahzor Bene Roma, p. 34. 1966] At the end of the 19th century, the Romaniote community of Greece made an effort to preserve the Romaniote liturgical heritage of Ioannina and Arta, by printing various liturgical texts in the Hebrew printing presses of Salonika.[The Jewish Museum of Greece, The Jewish Community of Ioannina: The Memory of Artefacts, p. 40 (Booklet). 2017]
Yevanic has some samples on the internet but it lacks translations or spell checking, unlike larger more established languages.
Literature
There is a small amount of literature in Yevanic dating from the early part of the modern period, the most extensive document being a translation of the
Pentateuch. A polyglot edition of the
Bible published in
Istanbul in 1547 has the Hebrew text in the middle of the page, with a Ladino (
Judaeo-Spanish) translation on one side and a Yevanic translation on the other.
[Natalio Fernandez Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Versions of the Bible (2000) p 180. The Greek text is published in D. C. Hesseling, Les cinq livres de la Loi (1897).]
In its context, this exceptional cultivation of the vernacular has its analogue in the choice of Hellenistic Greek by the translators of the
Septuagint and in the
New Testament.
[Lockwood, W. B. 1972. "A Panorama of Indo-European Languages." Hutchinson. London.]
Sample text
+
!Yevanic |
| קֵאִ יטוֹן פְרוֹפִיטִיאָה קִירִיאוּ פְּרוֹשׁ יוֹנָה אִיוּ אֲמִתָּי טוּ אִיפִּין׃ אַנַשְׁטָא פּוֹרֶבְגוּ פְּרוֹשׁ נִנְוֶה טִין בּוֹלִי טִין מֶגָלי קֶדִֿיאָלָלִישֶי אִיפִּי אַפְטִין אוֹטִי אֶנֶבִין אִיקָקִיאָה אַפְטִין אֶנוֹפִּיאוֹמוּ | Ke itοn prοfitía Kiriu pros Iona iu Amitaï tu ipin: "Anásta, pοrevghu pros Ninve tin poli tin megháli ke dialálise epi aftin oti enevin i kakia aftin enopion mu." | The word of the Lord came to Jonah the son of Amittai saying, "Arise, go to Nineveh the great city and cry against it, for their wickedness has come up before Me." |
See also
Further reading
-
Balodimas-Bartolomei, Angelyn, Nicholas Alexiou. 2010. " The Inclusion of Invisible Minorities in the EU Member States: The Case of Greek Jews in Greece." In Changing Educational Landscapes, 155-182.
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BimBaum, Soloman A. 1951. " The Jewries of Eastern Europe." In The Slavonic and East European Review, 29(73), 420-443.
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Connerty, Mary C. Judeo-Greek: The Language, The Culture. Jay Street Publishing, 2003.
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Dalven, R. Judeo-Greek. In: Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 10, pp. 425–227, Jerusalem: Keter. 1971
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Davis, Barry. 1987. " Yiddish and the Jewish Identity." In History Workshop, 23, 159-164.
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Gkoumas, P. Bibliography on the Romaniote Jewry, 2016.
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Naveh, Joseph, Soloman Asher Bimbaum, David Diringer, Zvi Hermann Federbsh, Jonathan Shunary & Jacob Maimon. 2007. "Alphabet, Hebrew." In Encyclopaedia Judaica, vol. 1, pp. 689-728.
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Spolsky, Bernard, Elana Goldberg Shohamy. 1999. The Languages of Israel: Policy, Ideology, and Practice. Multilingual Matters. UK.
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Spolsky, Bernard. The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge: CUP, 2014). Ch. 11, "The Yavanic area: Greece and Italy" (pp. 159–170; notes on pp. 295 sq.).
External links
On Judaeo-Greek
On Karaeo-Greek
