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Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism (termed
lashon ha-kodesh, "the holy tongue"), the language
in which the Hebrew scriptures (Tanakh) were
composed, and the daily speech of the Jewish people
for centuries. By the fifth century BCE, Aramaic, a
closely related tongue, joined Hebrew as the spoken
language in Judea.[41] By the third century BCE,
Jews of the diaspora were speaking Greek. Modern
Hebrew is now one of the two official languages of
the State of Israel along with Arabic.
Hebrew was revived as a spoken language by Eliezer
ben Yehuda, who arrived in Palestine in 1881. It
hadn't been used as a mother tongue since Tannaic
times. For over sixteen centuries Hebrew was used
almost exclusively as a liturgical language, and as
the language in which most books had been written on
Judaism, with a few speaking only Hebrew on the
Sabbath. For centuries, Jews worldwide have spoken
the local or dominant languages of the regions they
migrated to, often developing distinctive dialectal
forms or branching off as independent languages.
Yiddish is the Judæo-German language developed by
Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to Central Europe, and
Ladino is the Judæo-Spanish language developed by
Sephardic Jews who migrated to the Iberian
peninsula. Due to many factors, including the impact
of the Holocaust on European Jewry, the Jewish
exodus from Arab lands, and widespread emigration
from other Jewish communities around the world,
ancient and distinct Jewish languages of several
communities, including Gruzinic, Judæo-Arabic, Judæo-Berber,
Krymchak, Judæo-Malayalam and many others, have
largely fallen out of use.
The three most commonly spoken languages among Jews
today are English, modern Hebrew, and Russian. Some
Romance languages, such as French and Spanish, are
also widely used. |
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