Adding another major language

This book has so far traced the adoption and development of the first three major languages of the Jews: Hebrew, from its misty origins until its loss as a spoken language about the second or third century CE; Aramaic, added as a vernacular language and becoming semi-sacred during the years after the Babylonian captivity; and Greek, which was introduced during the period of Hellenization and greatly strengthened under Roman and Byzantine rule. It has also noted the change of balance in population from Palestine to the Diaspora, as, starting with the Babylonian Diaspora, many Jews fled to other places that seemed safer or economically more desirable.

These developing Diaspora communities were in place and waiting, as it were, for the Muslim conquest; in fact, Josephus reported that Jews lived everywhere in the world as he knew it. It was migration and conversion, however, that first added Arabic to the Jewish sociolinguistic ecology, as some Jews moved as traders and settlers through the Nabatean lands in the south and on into the Arabian Peninsula. The number of migrants is not clear, and may not have been large; indeed, with the evidence of the conversion of local pagans, it seems at times that it was Judaism rather than Jews that moved to the Arabian Peninsula and crossed into Ethiopia, the two forming – according to some – the Land of Cush. There, Arabic was adopted as a language of the Jews by migration and linguistic assimilation into Arabic-speaking regions, and by the conversion of indigenous peoples; later it was spread, as a result of the Muslim conquest, by the diffusion of Arabic throughout the rapidly growing Arab Empire, from the Indus in the east to Andalusia in the west. Other languages were added too as a number of African groups adopted Judaism, although the dating is in doubt: while their traditions claim early conversion, the African groups emerge as Jewish only in the nineteenth century and later.