Babylonian Jewish Aramaic

Much Studied, But Good Luck Finding Educational Materials

I actually intended to regale you with an article about an Early 18th Century book in German on the Ottoman Turks, in which a certain Siegreich Türckenfeind endeavoured to render insightful descriptions of the state and its subjects in a wide range of facets. Not surprisingly given the supposed author’s name, this book presents the Ottoman Turks and their system as the enemy of the Christian world, on account of which the latter is to be ready to fight the former, both defensively and offensively. But since it has turned out that this topic will take me more time to process into cogent writing that could potentially be enjoyable for some of my dear readers (I expect to have my first article on this German work published in October), I would like to shortly discuss in this article some other topic, namely learning Babylonian Jewish Aramaic (AKA the Aramaic language of the Babylonian Talmud).

Although the importance of the Babylonian Talmud in traditional (orthodox) Jewish education is out of the question, one is left with hardly any learning materials such as grammars, let alone primers, for the Aramaic language used in that essential religious text. There may be quite a sizable amount of students in yeshivas who keep trying to understand the meaning of all what is written in the Talmud, including, of course, the large portions in Aramaic, which would normally justify the publication and dissemination of textbooks and reference grammars for that target language. The general attitude towards this language in the educational context, however, is that the lerner should make sense of the Aramaic merely with the aid of the extensive knowledge of Biblical Hebrew, which he is supposed to have acquired since, ideally, his childhood. Biblical Hebrew would, as a language from the very same Semitic group, be considered close enough to Babylonian Jewish Aramaic to consider it a good enough stepping stone to it. This muddling through a new language, with some traits foreign to the more familiar Hebrew, would require a relatively large amount of time before the learner can fully attain fluency in reading it. In traditional Jewish education this state of affairs would not be considered a downside, so I have understood, quite to the contrary. I imagine the rationale behind this is as follows: While trying to make sense of the text, the student and scholar have to spend a lot of time, which is exactly what the text deserves, and once it has been understood linguistically, one would all the more be more motivated to engage with it theologically, philosophically, or legally. After all, so much time has been spent on deciphering alone, and therefore to yield satisfying returns from this investment in time, one is inclined to contemplate on and talk about the text more profoundly.

Now that I have described the common explanation for the conspicuous paucity of learning materials for Babylonian Jewish Aramaic, I would like to bring to your attention the two (!) English language main reference works for that language that have seen the light of day in the past 120 years (!) or so. Both of them refer to themselves as ‘manuals.’

The first one, authored by Max Margolis and first published in 1910, is titled A Manual of the Aramaic Language of the Babylonian Talmud - Grammar, Chrestomathy and Glossaries. It can be downloaded here. It starts with the part on grammar, which in itself is divided in three subparts, of which the one on phonology comes first, followed by the paragraphs on morphology, whilst the last one deals with syntax. Of course the grammatical features explained in this section are illustrated by sentences from the Babylonian Talmud itself. After the grammar follows the chrestomathy, which is, in this book, a rather extensive selection of short to longer texts from the Talmud in Aramaic. The final portion of the book contains the glossary, a small dictionary with, I presume, the words that occur in both the example sentences and phrases in the grammatical part as well as the texts in the book’s chrestomathy. Margolis’ manual is quite larger then the other that I am going to introduce to you, but it should be, if I may believe the commentaries on the manual online, considered outdated.

The second title is A Manual of Babylonian Jewish Aramaic written by David Marcus (University Press of America, 1981), of which I have obtained one copy. The arrangement of its contents differs from that of Margolis’ work in that it is divided in fourteen chapters, each of which always starts with a text: In the first chapter this text is a single sentence, while the chapters later on sport longer fragments (in the final chapter, the text presented is a longish excerpt consisting of 73 lines). Also this manual has a glossary of all the words appearing in the texts (and examples, I presume) in the back. The explanation of the grammar is given in a specific chapter if it is relevant to the text with which the same chapter begins, and, of course, it has not been explained previously. This may be called the inductive method, and could be more effective for learning than Margolis’ approach of describing the grammar in one part separated from the book’s collection of texts. A disadvantage of Marcus’ manual may be its incompleteness: It is shorter than Margolis’ work, and some grammatical (especially syntactical) features may be left undiscussed since Marcus only refers to a rather limited set of text fragments in Aramaic, which in his manual he consequently refers to as “the corpus.” The whole manual is called into question by the source from which Marcus has taken the Aramaic Talmudic texts and on which he based his grammatical description on: In this review here it is maintained that the “original” is in fact a rather corrupted manuscript, which indeed causes the manual to contain errors and oversights also in the grammatical explanations, according to Daniel Boyarin, the reviewer.

The dearth of accessible and reliable sources with which Babylonian Jewish Aramaic remains an obstacle for the learner who would be willing, even eager, to master it, yet would not have the time or tenacity to accomplish this in the good old yeshiva fashion. Even if this type of Aramaic would be the only one that the learner intends to learn, he may do well to study another kind of Aramaic for which there are educationally sound learning methods: Biblical Aramaic and even Syriac comes to mind. The latter is for the student who is not averse to learning a relatively young offshoot of the Aramaic branch that is normally associated with Christian texts (although many non-religious and even certain, for instance, Manichaean writings can be found in Syriac!), which would, furthermore, necessitate the acquisition of one to three other alphabets (which are not too complicated, I might add).

It remains to be seen whether we will find any change in the virtual non-existence of textbooks and primers for those who wish to learn Babylonian Jewish Aramaic in -about- the same way as one could learn Syriac, or Biblical Hebrew. Some YouTube video series, however, do suggest that also in Jewish circles a more from-the-ground-up approach of learning the Talmud (as opposed to the old “just keep trying to make sense with your knowledge of Hebrew” method) could be helpful. As a case in point I refer to this channel: Even though the teacher -rabbi Sruli Baron- does not render an in-depth analysis of the forms or sentence structures of the text he discusses, he is mindful of the need to explain the structure of the Babylonian Talmud as it normally printed, and therefore shows a clear understanding of certain aspects which may not be self-evident for learners. Perhaps he or someone else with a passion for both the Babylonian Talmud and language education would like to have a go at trying to write a solid manual or textbook whose existence could be considered long overdue?