The Language and Poetic Expressions of Aleppo’s Jews
by Abraham Safdie
The Jewish community of Aleppo is one of the few among Jewish communities that, for nearly 2,000 years, preserved the original Hebrew of the Land of Israel. Their language did not evolve into Yiddish or Ladino; rather, they maintained the use of Hebrew as a sacred language and Arabic as their vernacular. This preservation of the Hebrew language earned them praise from Maimonides. Furthermore, maintaining Hebrew over such a long period facilitated the linguistic integration of immigrants from this community into Israel, as they only required minimal adjustments to adapt their Hebrew to contemporary usage.
The language of Aleppo’s Jews, like that of other Middle Eastern communities, is enriched with sayings and proverbs that form an integral part of popular culture. These expressions were transmitted from generation to generation, both within families and between them.
To preserve the linguistic tradition and expressions as they existed in Aleppo, the Aram-Zoba Heritage Preservation Center (אר״ץ) undertook hundreds of recordings by renowned cantors with faithful pronunciation of the original. These recordings included soloists and choirs and sought to replicate as closely as possible the original pronunciation and intonation in works such as Shirat HaBakashot, the hymn “Abtidá Klamaná” (The Ten Commandments), religious poems for Shabbat and festivals, Shirat HaYam (The Song of the Sea), among others. They also recorded fragments of stories, traditional customs, poetry, and liturgical hymns. Additionally, insults in Aleppine Arabic, along with proverbs and sayings from everyday life, were documented.
The Judeo-Aleppine dialect is very similar to the dialects of cities in the eastern Mediterranean basin. Although Arabic was the common language spoken in Aleppo and its surroundings, there were linguistic differences based on religious groups—Christian, Muslim, or Jewish. These differences were reflected in the pronunciation of certain sounds. For example, phrases like Tefaddal, tasa ‘ana (“Please, you are invited to dine with us”) or expressions like Kol mum bo (“Every defect is in him”) were used. The latter, a negative phrase, was ironically employed by Jews to describe someone they distrusted.
A distinctive feature of this dialect was the pronunciation of the letter Qof (ק), which was replaced with Alef (א). For instance, Baklava was pronounced Balawa, and the musical instrument Kanun became Anun. Similarly, the Latin letter Z, represented in Hebrew as ד׳ (Dalet with an apostrophe), was pronounced with the tongue between the teeth, resembling the “th” sound in English, a borrowing from Arabic. Consequently, the name of the city Dejle was frequently pronounced and written as Zajle.
Another characteristic phenomenon was the substitution of the letter Pé (פ) with Bet (ב). For example, the city of Aleppo (Halab in Arabic) was pronounced Haleb in the local dialect, although in Israel, it was known as Halab.
It is important to note that these linguistic features did not apply to the pronunciation of Hebrew during tefilah (prayer), which was always articulated in its original form.