The Neo-Aramaic Speaking Jewish Community of Zakho

by Aloni Oz

The Jewish communities of Kurdistan spoke various dialects of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) as their native language. All of the Jews of Kurdistan immigrated en masse to the newly founded State of Israel in 1951, gradually adopting Modern Hebrew as their language. This volume contains a selection of transcribed texts in the Neo-Aramaic dialect of the Jewish community of Zakho, recorded from Zakho-born members of that community living in Jerusalem. An attempt has been made to give representative texts for several realms of life and of the oral culture, and to provide contextualisation of each text by means of introductory notes. The chapters herein discuss the following topics: oral literature; domestic and communal life; economic life; and linguistic features of the Jewish Nort-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialect of Zakho. The transcriptions are based on recordings made by the author in course of field work.