Judeo-Berber

What is Judeo-Berber?

Jews lived in North Africa long before the Arab conquest; whether pre-Arabic Jews spoke Amazigh widely is not fully clarified — Aramaic was their vernacular until ~7th century, Arabic from the mid-9th (JLP/Chetrit). In the High Atlas, Anti-Atlas, Sous valley, and Draa valley (Tinghir, Ouijjane, Demnate, Oufrane, Tiznit, Illigh — with evidence also in the Rif, Algeria, and Libya), Jewish communities spoke their own Amazigh varieties, usually as a SECOND language alongside Judeo-Arabic (the first language), distinguished by Hebrew loanwords and the shift š → s (shared with Jewish Moroccan Arabic dialects) and mutually comprehensible with neighboring Tashelhit. It served for oral explanation of religious texts; some prayers — including Torah benedictions — were recited in Berber (Galand-Pernet/Chetrit research). Nearly the entire speaking community emigrated to Israel in the 1950s–60s; by the 1960s only a few elderly women in Israel still spoke it as a community language (Chetrit 2018: "a dying language"). "Judeo-Amazigh" is the preferred modern term ("Berber" historically considered derogatory). The enormous gap between the 1936 survey (~145,700 Berber-speaking Jews) and the JLP 2024 figure (200 speakers of a distinctly Jewish variety) is a methodological lesson, not a contradiction. A language, not a dialect of Hebrew: Judeo-Amazigh is a Berber (Amazigh) language of the Atlas Mountains with a Hebrew loanword layer — its grammar is Amazigh, not Semitic-Hebrew.