Guarding their languageThere's lots more. Worth reading in full.
By Aviad Segal
Tags: Hebrew, Aramaic, Israel News
"If Jesus returned to the Holy Land," wrote journalist Julian Borger in The Guardian in 1998, "probably one of the few places he would be understood in his mother tongue would be a basement beside the central bus station in Tel Aviv."
That basement houses the recording studio of music arranger A.B. Kazes, and often hosts successful musicians and singers. It was here that the Nash Didan band was born. "It all began thanks to my mother," says Arik Mordechai, 57, a soloist and the founder of the band, which has produced eight albums, all of them sung entirely in Aramaic.
"She came to me and asked why I didn't do something for 'our people' [nash didan in Aramaic]." A few weeks later the band recorded its first song, "Nash Didan Idaylu" (Our People Have Arrived). A first album, bearing the same name, was released shortly thereafter, and Mordechai claims that it sold 50,000 copies.
"Audiences attended our performances out of curiosity and were surprised to discover something different, something new," Mordechai continues. "Very soon we started getting phone calls from all over the world, from people who were surprised to find Israelis speaking the language. One day a fax arrived from Syria, informing us of the existence of communities there that spoke Aramaic. Another day a journalist working for a Mormon paper in Utah visited. What we did with Aramaic was like taking an archaeological finding, wrapping it in cotton wool and presenting it to the public."
Nash Didan is also the name by which the community of some 5,000 Aramaic-speaking Jews from Urmia, a city in Persian Azerbaijan (contemporary Iran), refer to themselves. Like the band, which rarely meets these days , the Aramaic spoken by Urmia's Jews has become almost extinct. Community members believe that very soon the general public will only revive the language of the Talmud, the language of Abraham and Jesus, on Passover eve, with the reading of the Haggadah, when Jews recall "ha lahma anya" the "bread of affliction" eaten in Egypt and sing Had Gadya. Aramaic references will also remain in idioms that have become rooted in Hebrew, such as treisar (dozen) and bar mazal (lucky person).
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[Ora[ Jacobi continued researching the language and the community from her home in Ramat Gan. "I started writing down anecdotes from my mother-in-law's life, as a hobby. I never imagined they would grow into a book, but that is exactly what happened, based on her stories and things I learned about the Nash Didan from other people."
"Almos," the novel Jacobi published, follows the lives of two women, one Jewish and the other Assyrian, through the events in Urmia between 1914 and 1950. Musician Arik Mordechai's mother is among the book's other characters. "The things we have done - the band and Ora's book," he says, "made people stand up and feel pride in our Nash Didan identity."
There is no better way to explain the flood of calls Jacobi received after the publication of "Almos," which to date has not appeared in English translation. The positive feedback encouraged her to team up with Avraham Hachami, head of the association of Urmians in Israel, to write "Nash Didan," a historical book.
"People suddenly started coming out of the woodwork, wanting to help," recalls Jacobi, who has been working with the community and its language for a decade. "There was a sense of urgency, that if we didn't do this now, the opportunity would be lost. After all, in addition to this being an interesting community, my children also happen to belong to it."
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UPDATE: Plus, there's another article on Maaloula (Ma'aloula, Malula) and its new Aramaic Institute. Apparently it was first published in the Guardian (I must have missed it) but here it's at UTV News.
Endangered Aramaic language makes a comeback in SyriaBackground here.
Syrian President Assad has set up an institute to revive interest in the language of Christ
Tuesday, 14 April 2009
Tags:
* International News
Ilyana Barqil wears skinny jeans, boots and a fur-lined jacket, handy for keeping out the cold in the Qalamoun mountains north of Damascus. She likes TV quiz shows and American films and enjoys swimming. But this thoroughly modern Syrian teenager is also learning Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus.
Ilyana, 15, is part of an extraordinary effort to preserve and revive the world's oldest living tongue, still close to what it probably sounded like in Galilee, now in Israel, on the brink of the Christian era.
"In Nazareth when Jesus was born they spoke more or less the same language as we do in Maaloula today," said teacher Imad Reihan, one of the pillars of this picturesque village's Aramaic Language Academy, where Barqil is studying.
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachtani" ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me") – Christ's lament on the cross – was famously uttered in Aramaic.
Recognised by Unesco as a "definitely endangered" language, Aramaic is spoken by 7,000 people in Maaloula, dominated by Greek Catholics (Melikites) whose churches and rites long pre-date the arrival of Islam and Arabic. Western Neo-Aramaic, to use its proper linguistic title, is spoken by about 8,000 others in two nearby villages, one now wholly Muslim.
[...]