Voices Yet to Be Heard: On Listening to the Last Speakers of Jewish Malayalam

Abstract

Jewish history in Kerala, the southernmost state in modern India, goes back to as early as the tenth century CE. In the mid-twentieth century, Kerala Jews migrated en masse to Israel, leaving behind but a handful of their community members and remnants of eight communities, synagogues, and cemeteries. The paper presents a preliminary attempt to describe and analyze the language—so far left undocumented and unexplored—still spoken by Kerala Jews in Israel, based on a language documentation project carried out in 2008 and 2009. In light of the data collected and studied so far, it is clear that the language in question fits nicely into the Jewish languages spectrum, while at the same time it fits perfectly into the linguistic mosaic of castolects in Kerala. Though the linguistic database described here reflects a language in its last stages, it affords salvaging the remnants of a once rich oral heritage and opens new channels for the study of the history, society, and culture of Kerala Jews.

Endangered Languages and Languages in Danger

“…This status seems to apply also to other surviving varieties like Judeo-Greek (Krivoruchko 2011) and Judeo-Arabic. Some varieties are long gone such as the Judeo-Czech suspected by Halle (1964, 1985) and M. Weinreich (2008) to be the language of the early glosses on medieval Hebrew manuscripts but argued by Czech linguists to be Old Czech written in Hebrew letters (Uličná & Polakovič 2013), or barely survived into the 20th century like Western Yiddish (Jochnowitz 2010;Starck 1994Starck , 2007 or Jewish Malayalam (Gamliel 2013) or Judeo-Spanish 3 (Bunis 2010).…”

“…It started to be lost as a vernacular with the Enlightenment in 18th century Germany through absorption into the standard variety of German to which its speakers easily switched, although it was still alive in the 19th century: M. Weinreich (2008: 722) notes that the German Jews who migrated to the USA between 1830 and 1870 still spoke it. However, it was no longer expanding and soon died out in Germany (Hutterer 1969); there were vestigial uses in Alsace (Starck 1994(Starck , 2007 and Switzerland (Fleischer 2005) where it was kept up especially by horse traders who increased the number of Hebrew words they used in order to keep their conversation unintelligible to German customers (Guggenheim-Grünberg 1954). In both these areas, which were highly multilingual with distinct local varieties, preservation was easier until quite recently, but there are no longer speakers.…”

“…After all, Hebrew was maintained in a postvernacular status for two millennia by an educational system. From this point of view, one wonders if the concern over the failure to persuade Māori to use their language in the home and to develop Māori language education much beyond the elementary school is as serious a tragedy as some now claim Harlow & Barbour 2014;May & Hill in press).…”

“…19 The Paradesi (White) Jews arrived in the 16th century, after the expulsion from Spain. Both groups spoke a variety of Jewish Malayalam different from (but mutually intelligible with) the language of Kerala, but the variety seems to be no longer spoken by those Jews who remain in Kerala and to be virtually extinct among those who emigrated to Israel between 1950and 1970(Gamliel 2013.…”

Non-Dravidian elements and (non)diasystematic change in Malayalam

“…While some high-caste Hindus came into contact with Sanskrit via formal religious education, this was not the primary way that Sanskrit influenced Malayalam, as the use of Sanskrit-origin words was (and is) decidedly not limited to Hindus or to those with formal schooling. In fact, Malayalee Muslims use the Sanskrit-origin word n̪ iskaːɾam for the daily prayers to Mecca (from n̪ amaskaːɾam, a Sanskrit-origin word used as a greeting but also to describe prostration), and there are Sanskrit influences in religionrelated words in Judeo-Malayalam as well: Gamliel (2013) discusses maleand female-specific strategies for translating sacred texts, the former of which are called tamsiːr (which she says is likely from Arabic), and the latter of which is called arttham, a Sanskrit-origin word for 'meaning. '…”