Joseph Chetrit – författare

Moroccan Judeo-Arabic Dialects as Jewish Languages provides an in-depth analysis of the diachrony and synchrony of the Judeo-Arabic dialects formed in Morocco from the 16th onwards, their diversity, their constituents, their forms, their categories, and their uses in community and family life.Drawing on extensive linguistic data from a wide range of sources, including manuscripts and oral performances, this book examines the phonetics, phonology and morphology of the Judeo-Arabic dialects to offer insightful analyses and discoveries. Framed by a theoretical and methodological introduction, this book combines the findings of fieldwork with hundreds of informants from over 130 urban and rural Moroccan Jewish communities, for whom Judeo-Arabic is their mother tongue and primary language, with the advantages of modern linguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-pragmatic analyses that allow for a better understanding of natural dialectal phenomena and their interpretation.The book will be relevant to scholars of Arabic dialectology, sociolinguistics, and Jewish languages.

Multiple traditions of Jewish origins in Morocco emphasize the distinctiveness of Moroccan Jewry as indigenous to the area, rooted in its earliest settlements and possessing deep connections and associations with the historic peoples of the region. The creative interaction of Moroccan Jewry with the Arab and Berber cultures was noted in the Jews’ use of Morocco’s multiple languages and dialects, characteristic poetry, and musical works as well as their shared magical rites and popular texts and proverbs. In Jews and Muslims in Morocco: Their Intersecting Worlds historians, anthropologists, musicologists, Rabbinic scholars, Arabists, and linguists analyze this culture, in all its complexity and hybridity. The volume’s collection of essays span political and social interactions throughout history, cultural commonalities, traditions, and halakhic developments. As Jewish life in Morocco has dwindled, much of what is left are traditions maintained in Moroccan ex-pat communities, and memories of those who stayed and those who left. The volume concludes with shared memories from the perspective of a Jewish intellectual from Morocco, a Moroccan Muslim scholar, an analysis of a visual memoir painted by the nineteenth-century artist, Eugène Delacroix, and a photo essay of the vanished world of Jewish life in Morocco.