Jewish languages: Juhuri is dying

When we lived in Teheran, I was always interested in how some relatives and friends spoke in what seemed to be an undecipherable language. Although I was fluent in Farsi, I couldn't understand a word that some of these people said.

Along the way, I learned that Persian Jews also spoke dialects. Isfahani is used for comedic impact. There was Kashi (from Kashan), of which I know only one two-word phrase. Regardless of where their families originated - be it Hamadan, Shiraz, areas around the Caspian Sea, or the Aramaic-speaking Jews from Urmia - each group had its own language.

However, most of these were lost after decades of living in the big city of Teheran. My husband's grandmother knew only a few words of the original Isfahani Jewish dialect, and her children and grandchildren recognized even fewer words and their meanings.

When I was involved in the US working with new immigrants from Russia, I had an immediate connection with those from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Many spoke Bukharan or Kavkaz, both with roots in Farsi, so it was easy to communicate - well, much better than in my non-existent Russian.

Years ago, I visited a newly-resettled family from Uzbekistan in Tucson, Arizona. They were religious and invited me for Shabbat. I was surprised to see that all their siddurim and other religious books were printed in Cyrillic.

At an international Jewish genealogy conference in London several years ago, I met a Baku (Azerbaijani Iran) University professor - a Mountain Jew from the city of Kuba, home to several thousand Mountain Jews who speak Tat, also called Juhuri. We were also able to communicate, once I got my ears around the different accent.

Haaretz had a recent article on Juhuri, another Iranian dialect spoken by the Jews of the Eastern Caucasuses and how the people are trying to preserve it.

Juhuri - an Iranian language sometimes called Judeo-Tat - is the language of the eastern Caucasus Mountain Jews, who live mainly in northern Azerbaijan and Dagestan.

Traditions indicate that the Jews of the Caucasus are descendants of the Kingdom of Judea's exiled tribes after the destruction of the First Temple by Nebuchadnezzar. The exiles settled in Persia, where they acquired a Farsi dialect and preserved Hebrew words.

Until the 20th century, Juhuri was the common spoken language, while Hebrew was written and for prayer and study. When Juhuri began to be written, the typeface was like Rashi. A prayerbook (1908) and a book about Zionism (1909) were the first two printed in Juhuri using Hebrew script.

Russia annexed the area in the 1850s, and the Russian language became more commonly used. It was also bolstered by business ties with Russians and increased as people moved from small population centers to cities, where more Russians lived.

The communist government, in 1929, tried to supress religion and people stopped using Hebrew to write Juhuri. A decade later, they were writing Juhuri in Cyrillic, which caused problems as the transliteration was difficult.

Although the Jews had preserved Juhuri for centuries, the new developments nearly killed the old language. An expert quoted in the article says the language will be extinct in 40 years.

Until the outbreak of WWII, there were schools in which Juhuri was the language of instruction. This stopped during the war. In 1988, a poet organized a Jewish cultural center in Derbent and convinced the government to renew Juhuri lessons.

"Beginning in the 19th century, the prestige of the Russian language increased steadily, and fluency in it was considered a path to success. The Mountain Jews found themselves in an uncomfortable situation. Although they gave the Russians a friendly welcome, certainly compared to other communities in the Caucasus, the attitude of the Russian government toward them was not significantly different than its attitude toward the other inhabitants of the region. The Russians considered the Jews, like the other Caucasian communities, uneducated, inferior and lacking professions.

"The main reason for this attitude was the Mountain Jews' ignorance of Russian. Even the Ashkenazi Jews in Russia [Jews of European origin] looked down on them. The key to success in the new world in which they found themselves was the ability to speak Russian without a trace of a foreign accent. Knowledge of Juhuri was considered an obstacle that was liable to prevent the people of the Caucasus from speaking perfect Russian. The attitude of the speakers toward their language changed, and they even stopped speaking to their children in Juhuri."

Today, in Israel, there are some 100,000 immigrants - about half still speak Juhuri - who are trying to preserve their culture and language, through theatre, music and poetry.

Read the complete article at the link above.

Tablet: A fine young criminal

Tablet magazine is presenting a series of articles based on historic newspaper accounts.

The introduction to the series reads:

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the intellectuals. That began to change in the late 19th century, when the Yiddish press hit the streets, for the first time recounting the lives of the unwashed masses of Jews in the public record. Tablet Magazine offers some of their stories, reconstructed from century-old newspaper accounts.

Tablet previously carried the Benjamin Nathan case, and today's piece is the story of Yitzhok Farbarovitsh, a yeshiva boy who became a gang member and then wrote about it in plays which "portrayed the street life of Jewish pimps, prostitutes, and criminals in its own raw reality, complete with nasty language and foul behavior."

Read Eddy Portnoy's story about Farbarovitsh, later known as Urke Nahalnik (Yiddish, brazen master criminal).

Yitzhok Farbarovitsh was known as a good kid in the shtetl of Vizne, a small town in Russian-ruled Poland, in the years just before World War I. He excelled in cheder, Jewish elementary school, and, when he reached his tweens, was sent to another town in the Pale of Settlement to attend a yeshiva. Yitzhok was on track to fulfill his mother’s dream that he become a rabbi. But not long after his bar mitzvah, his mother died, sending the Farbarovitsh household into a depression, and throwing Yitzhok’s life onto a different track.

The detailed story contains blockbuster elements: sex, crime, religion, jail, bad boy makes good, theater, spicy Yiddish slang and mentions YIVO along the way.

About one of his plays, the story relates:

Warsaw’s Jewish underworld was not the only group dissatisfied with the play. The socialist Bund’s arts magazine fulminated angrily against what they called theatrical “trash.” On the front page, an editorial griped that “when the prostitutes are on stage, talking their dirty talk, and the thieves are doing business in their pubs and hideouts, it’s ugly, it’s disgusting…. For three hours, the audience and the theater is dragged through the mud.”

The critics didn't like it, but the people did and it was a minor hit.

Farbarovitsh was also involved in some of the first attacks on the Nazis, according to the article, and demanded funding from Jewish underground leaders to organize attacks against the Nazis. Although they refused, he returned to his town of Otwock, outside Warsaw, where he sabotaged rail lines to Treblinka and helped Jews escape the trains and hide in the forest.

He was caught by the Germans in 1942. As he was being led to his execution in Otwock, he attacked his guard and nearby soldiers fatally shot him.

Read the complete story at the link above. Tracing the Tribe is waiting for the next article in the series.