Jewish Berber

chapter 4 Jewish Berber Joseph Chetrit 1 Historical Introduction 118 2 Jewish Berber Literature 120 2.1 Verbal Art 120 2.2 Narration of Communal Events and Personal Anecdotes 120 2.3 Satirical Texts 120 2.4 Oral Calque Translations 121 2.5 Specially Commissioned Translations of the Passover Haggadah 121 3 Linguistic Profile of Jewish Berber 122 3.1 Phonology 122 3.2 Morphosyntax 123 3.3 Lexis 124 4 Text Samples 125 4.1 Satirical Story 125 Ḥad Gadya ‘One Kid’ 127 אידגדח 4.2 5 Further Study 127 6 Bibliography 128 1 Historical Introduction Jewish Berber was spoken until recently by thousands of Jews in Morocco, and for some time after their emigration. It continues to be spoken by some old immigrants from Morocco in Israel and France. It was particularly used as a second language by Jewish men and women in hundreds of bilingual rural and semi-rural communities scattered in the High Atlas and Anti-Atlas ranges and their valleys, as well as in the large Sous Valley in southwestern Morocco (Fla- mand 1959), and in the communities of Ghardaïa and their dependencies in Southern Algeria. In the villages of those areas, Jews lived in either small Jewish quarters or in isolated streets in the immediate proximity of the Berber popula- tion, or in mixed streets, where some Jewish families inhabited houses or rooms that Muslim Berbers rented to them in exchange for certain services. Jews used Berber and Jewish Berber (in addition to Judeo-Arabic) for petty commerce and other professional activities conducted among their Berber clientele. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2016 | doi: 10.1163/9789004297357_006 jewish berber 119 Jewish Berber was also used by monolingual speakers in small and isolated communities of the Tifnout region in the Anti-Atlas range, in the territories of the Ait Wawzgit (Ouaouzguite) tribes (Zafrani 1970; Chetrit 2007: 230–232). It would appear that the small Jewish rural communities of Ait Bu Ulli were comprised of monolingual speakers too; these Jews settled in the impenetrable mountains of the High Atlas range near Demnate and to the north of Mar- rakesh. These monolingual communities gradually became bilingual during the first half of 20th century, due to the roads and paths constructed by the French Protectorate between 1920 and 1940 in order to extend its domination of the Berber tribes residing in the High, Middle, and Anti-Atlas ranges. The new facilities allowed isolated rural Jews to strengthen their contacts with the urban Jews who spoke Judeo-Arabic; as a result, they became bilingual too. It is not clear when Jewish Berber first arose. Apart from an early 20th- century Hebrew chronicle (Chetrit 2007: 230–232), we do not actually have any written documentation that would allow us to determine this. What is known, however, is that Berber was the native language of several North African populations, and that it still serves as a first language for millions of speakers in Algeria and Morocco. Likewise, Jewish communities settled in North Africa in ancient times, and archeological sites dating from the 3rd century BCE in Libya, from the 3rd century CE in Morocco, and from the 1st century BCE to the 2nd century CE in Tunisia and Algeria testify to that effect (Hirschberg 1974: 1–86; Schroeter 1997; Chetrit and Schroeter 2003). As a rule, Jewish communities around the world generally adopted the language of the dominant populations in order to interact with them and conduct their commerce and other professional activities among them. However, unlike other Jewish areas, where numerous oral and written Jewish languages developed over time, North African Jews used Berber and Jewish Berber dialects for spoken interaction and for oral literature only, emulating the Berber populations, whose culture was and still remains fundamentally oral. These uses are well documented for Moroccan Jews, but some sources indicate that this was the case in Algeria too, where rural Jewish communities living in the Grande Kabylie spoke Jew- ish Berber in the 19th century (Chaker 2004). Likewise, and besides their native Judeo-Arabic, numerous men from the Jewish community of Ghardaïa in the Algerian Sahara also used, as said above, local Berber dialects in order to interact with their Berber neighbors until their community departed for France in 1962. We thus have no direct indications of the uses of Berber and Jewish Berber dialects in Morocco before the 19th century. However, the hybridized Judeo- Arabic of some southern Moroccan Jewish communities, which includes hundreds of Berber and Jewish Berber lexemes and expressions, despite the fact.

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