Putting Jewish Languages on the Map

• In Event: Mapping Jewish Experiences

Abstract

How has mapping been used in Jewish linguistic studies, and how might it be used in the future? This talk addresses the role of mapping in researching and educating about the many languages spoken and written by Jews throughout history. Using theory and methods from dialectology, several projects have mapped regional diversity within Jewish languages. Dialect mapping began for Yiddish in the 1930s (Vilenkin 1931), with subsequent major accomplishments including the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (Herzog et al. 1992-2000) and the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (Bleaman and Nove 2022-2024). Recent decades have seen dialect mapping for Judeo-Spanish (Quintana Rodriguez 2006) and Jewish Neo-Aramaic (Khan 2007-2016). These mapping projects have been useful for research, offering evidence for dialects based on clusters of linguistic features, as well as isoglosses between them. The projects’ associated digital tools – especially online map portals – have made them useful for education. The HUC-JIR Jewish Language Project (JLP) has continued the educational side of this work. In 2007, the Jewish Language Website added an interactive map that enabled users to click on a color-filled location to learn about the language spoken there. More recently, the JLP’s educational resources have included several map graphics, including “Let’s Eat,” “Charoset,” “Sabbath stew,” and “Bar mitzvah/Tefillin” in multiple Jewish languages. Inspired by Diarna, GeaCron, and Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, the JLP then created multiple interactive map-based exhibits. These exhibits, in partnership with the Jewish Music Mapped platform, include women’s writings from the 10th to 21st centuries, documentation recordings of endangered Jewish languages from organizations in the Jewish Language Consortium, and an exhibit of one document from each country from each century. The JLP is also offering an ancestry mapping service, using the Felt platform, as part of a curriculum for Jewish schools. This talk discusses the utility of such collaborative mapping efforts for classroom and online education. It ends with ideas for future mapping activities, including databases of synagogue names and family names and a corpus of Jewish texts that automatically generates maps and a dictionary of Hebrew loanwords in Jewish languages.

Authors

• Sarah Bunin Benor, Hebrew Union College

• Jacob Kohn, Bandhu