What languages did Jews speak?

Hebrew – the holy tongue

The Torah and most of the Bible are in Hebrew, called leshon hakodesh, “the holy tongue”. Prayer, blessings and Torah study have always been in Hebrew, even when it was not the language of the street.

Aramaic

During the Babylonian exile and after, Jews adopted Aramaic, the international language of the time. Parts of Daniel and Ezra are in Aramaic, as are the Talmud, the Targum (Onkelos’ translation of the Torah), the Zohar, the Kaddish and the ketubah. Nehemiah already complains that some children could no longer speak “Judean” (Nehemiah 13:24).

Jewish languages of the diaspora

Wherever they lived, Jews spoke the local language and often turned it into a Jewish one, mixed with Hebrew words and written in Hebrew letters:

Judeo-Arabic was the language of Jews in the Muslim world; Rabbi Saadia Gaon, Rabbi Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari and Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed and Mishnah commentary were written in it. Yiddish, based on medieval German with Hebrew and Slavic elements, became the language of Ashkenazi Jews; in 1939 it had some eleven million speakers. Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) was carried by the exiles from Spain to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. There were also Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Italian, Judeo-Greek, Judeo-Georgian and others.

The revival of Hebrew

From the 1880s, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and others revived Hebrew as an everyday language. Today it is the language of millions in Israel, while English, French, Russian and Spanish are the main languages of Jews elsewhere. Many families keep a few words of Yiddish or Ladino – mensch, mazal tov, kvell – as part of their heritage.