A Lexicological Study of Arabic and Judaeo-Arabic in Iraqi Hebrew Novels

Abstract

Sami Michael (b. Baghdad, 1926), Shimon Ballas (b. Baghdad, 1930) and Eli Amir (b. Baghdad, 1937) are three Iraqi Jewish authors who immigrated to Israel, having left Iraq during the mass migration of Jews from Arab countries during the 1950s. Although their mother tongue is Arabic, these three Iraqi Jewish authors felt that they needed to write in Hebrew if they were to have successful literary careers in Israel. Nonetheless, Arabic still appears in their literary works. Yet, the Arabic variety employed in their literary works belongs, in many aspects, to the so-called Iraqi Judaeo-Arabic. This study investigates the Judaeo-Arabic lexical items used in six modern Hebrew texts written by the three Iraqi Jewish authors mentioned above. The novels were published between 1964 and 1993. A semantic field analysis is applied to a corpus of six hundred pages, in which the first 100 pages of each novel are taken as a sample. The study shows in numerical statistics the portion of each semantic field used in the corpus followed by a discussion of the data in the view of the linguistic analysis of the phonological, morphological, syntactic and ethnographic aspects of the Iraqi Judaeo-Arabic lexical items in accordance with the texts.