The Neo-Aramaic Oral Heritage of the Jews of Zakho

OZ ALONI In 1951, the secluded Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho migrated collec� vely to Israel. It carried with it its unique language, culture and customs, many of which bore resemblance to those found in classical rabbinic literature. Like others in Kurdistan, for example, the Jews of Zakho retained a vibrant tradi� on of crea� ng and performing songs based on embellishing biblical stories with Aggadic tradi� ons.


INTRODUCTION
This book deals with three genres of the oral heritage of the Neo-Aramaic-speaking Jewish community of Zakho, Kurdistan. During the past three decades, there has been a renewed interest in research on Neo-Aramaic, and a substantial increase has been seen in the amount of research. However, the contemporary study of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA) has focused almost exclusively on aspects of the language, such as phonology, morphology, sentence-level syntax, lexicography, dialectology, diachronic development, and language contact. Content-based aspects of the study of the language and its cultures, such as folkloristic analysis, narrative structure, discourse structure, and phraseology, have been almost completely neglected. This book is but a first step in an attempt to fill this gap in NENA scholarship.
This Introduction begins by providing some background on the Jewish community of Zakho, before looking at the language spoken in that community, NENA, and previous research on it.
There follows a brief discussion of the study of folklore, and then a description of the audio-recorded database upon which this book is based. The Introduction ends with an outline of the structure of the book, after an explanation of the system of transcription and translation of the NENA texts used here.

The Jewish Community of Zakho 1
The town of Zakho is located in the northern tip of Iraqi Kurdistan, approximately ten kilometres south of the Turkish border and thirty kilometres east of the Syrian border. It is surrounded by high mountains. All roads leading to Zakho, including the main road from Mosul, go through rough mountain passes. The oldest part of Zakho, which includes maḥallət huzaye 'the neighbourhood of the Jews' is an island in the centre of the River Khabur, which flows through the town (for the geography of Zakho, see Gavish 2004, 21-26;2010, 13-14).
It appears that the Jewish community of Zakho is old, though there are few documents which provide historical information about it. The oldest historical sources which attest the presence of Jews in Zakho are letters, the earliest of which date to the 18th century. These often contain Halakhic questions about various topics directed to rabbis of other cities (responsa): marital contracts, legal disputes, and familial affairs (Ben-Yaacob 1981, 58-62;Gavish 2004, 27-30;2010, 15). Some of these letters contain requests for help from neighbouring communities after disasters, e.g., the famine of 1880 and the wave of persecutions of 1892.
Jewish travellers arrived in Kurdistan as early as medieval times-Benjamin of Tudela and Petaḥyah of Regensburg in the 12th century and Yehudah Al-Ḥarizi in the 13th century (Brauer 1947, 17-20;1993, 38-40). However, Jewish travellers first arrived in Zakho only in the 19th century (Ben-Yaacob 1981, 58-62). The first Jewish traveller to mention Zakho is Rabbi David D'Beth Hillel, who visited the town in 1827 and found approximately six hundred Jewish families living there. He describes the old synagogue and some Jewish customs unique to the community of Zakho, which he finds similar to customs described in ancient history books (Fischel 1939, 124). Based on that similarity, he concludes that the Jews of Zakho are descendants of the ten lost tribes of Israel. Israël Joseph Benjamin ('Benjamin the Second') arrived in Zakho in 1848 and found two hundred Jewish families there. He recounts that the chief rabbi of the town, Rabbi Eliyahu, asked for his advice in the matter of an ʿaguna woman 2 ; contrary to Benjamin's advice, the rabbi released her from the bonds of her marriage (Benjamin 1859, 24).
According to the mnemohistory of the Jews of Kurdistan, they are descendants of the ten Israelite tribes exiled by Shalmaneser V, king of Assyria, as recounted in the Hebrew Bible: "In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria.
He deported the Israelites to Assyria and settled them in Halah, at the [River] Habor, at the River Gozan, and in the towns of Media" (2 Kgs 17.6; NJPS [1999] English translation). 3 'Habor' is 2 A married woman whose husband is missing but is still considered married according to Jewish law, and is thus unable to remarry.
3 For a comprehensive study of the history of quests to locate the Ten Tribes, see Ben-Dor Benite (2009). For an analysis of the role of the Ten Tribes in Jewish folk-narratives recorded at the Israel Folktale Archives Named in Honor of Dov Noy (IFA), University of Haifa, see Stein (2015). generally thought to be Zakho's River Khabur. 4 According to Ben-Yaacob, it is possible that the Sambation (sometimes spelled Sabation), mentioned in the rabbinic literature as the frontier of the realm of the ten tribes, may be the Great Zab, another river of Kurdistan (Ben-Yaacob 1981, 12). 5 Nachmanides identifies the Sambation as the River Gozan (in his commentary on Deut. 32.26). In many old and modern documents, the Jews of Kurdistan call themselves ha-ʾovdim bə-ʾereṣ ʾaššur 'those who are lost in the land of Assyria', an expression taken from Isaiah's prophecy of redemption "And it shall come to pass in that day, that a great horn shall be sounded; and they shall come that were lost in the land of Assyria, and they that were dispersed in the land of Egypt; and they shall worship the Lord in the holy mountain, in Jerusalem" (Isa. 27.13;JPS [1917] English translation, with some modification).
The rabbis of Zakho were considered an important authority throughout the entire region. Its Great Synagogue could hold up to three thousand people. Another synagogue, which also contained a bet midraš 'study hall' and a ḥeder 'children's school', could hold up to one thousand people. The historian Walter Fischel, who visited Kurdistan twice during the 1930s, copied a Hebrew inscription from a wall of the Great Synagogue (Fischel 1939, 124; see also Ben-Yaacob 1981, 61;Gavish 2004, 161;2010, 162 The Jews of Kurdistan immigrated to Israel in their entirety in two waves during the first half of the 20th century. 7 Those in the first wave, during the 1920s and 1930s, immigrated mainly for religious reasons: coming to the Holy Land. Some social and political factors were also involved: World War I and its severe consequences; the British mandate over Iraq and Palestine; the deterioration in personal security of the Jews of 6 Prov. 8. 34-35 (JPS 1917), English translation, with some modification. 7 There is evidence for the immigration of Jews to pre-state Israel even before this. Mann (1931-1935, I:488) has found a letter sent from the village of Sundur to Jerusalem in the early 18th century, which shows that individuals, at least, had immigrated by then (see Hopkins 1993, 51;Gavish 2004, 147;2010, 150-51  The isolation of each of the Jewish communities in Kurdistan, spread across the many towns and villages of this rugged mountainous land, which remained largely unpenetrated by foreign 8 For the changes in the social structure of the community, see Gavish (2004, 300-19; 2010, 316-36). The internal division of the community into 'new' and 'old' immigrants has an interesting linguistic consequence: Sabar (1975) describes the NENA of the 'old' immigrants as surprisingly conservative and as less influenced by Modern Hebrew in its lexicon, phonology, and syntax. Sabar explains this as a result of the less extensive assimilation of the 'old' immigrants into Israeli society.
cultures or armies up until the 20th century, enabled the Jewish communities of the region to preserve very old traditions (see ch. 2, fn. 6). The social structure, as well as the material culture, which very much resembled those known to us from classical rabbinic literature, contributed to this preservation as well. Ancient literary and exegetical genres, such as Aggadic Midrashim and epic songs about biblical themes, which embellish the original narrative with Aggadic traditions, continued to be created and performed in the Jewish communities of Kurdistan in modern times (see ch. 2).
A simple division of the literary heritage of the Jews of Kurdistan into oral and written literature will not prove accurate, since most of this literature, including some of what now forms its written portion, has been passed down orally and bears distinctive features of oral transmission. Thus, for instance, the Jewish NENA Bible translations published by Sabar (1983;1988;1990;1993;1995a;2006;2014), were committed to writing by ḥaxamim of the community only in 20th-century Israel at the request of scholars. On the other hand, the Midrashim for the three portions of the Pentateuch, Va-Yeḥi, Be-Šalaḥ, and Yitro, also published by Sabar (1985; see also 2009), were committed to writing nearer to the time of their creation, being found in manuscripts from the 17th century; but they are also based upon traditions which were transmitted orally. Nonetheless, it will prove useful to distinguish between literature that has been preserved in manuscripts, which is literature of a religious character, and literature that is preserved only orally to this day.

North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic (NENA)
The Aramaic language is-or more accurately, the Aramaic languages are-one of the longest-lived, continuously spoken and documented living language groups, and one of the oldest languages spoken today. 9 The oldest Aramaic documents still extant date back to the 9th century BCE. Aramaic, initially the language of the Aramaean tribes in modern-day Syria, gained historical prominence after it was adopted as the administrative language of the Neo-Assyrian empire, together with the Assyrians' own language-Akkadian-in the 8th century BCE. It retained this status in subsequent empires, the Neo-Babylonian and the Persian Achaemenid empires. It seems that this unlikely historical occurrence-the adoption of a local language as the administrative language of what was the largest and strongest empire at the timewas due to the relative simplicity of the Aramaic writing system, compared to the Akkadian one. 10 Aramaic became the lingua franca of the ancient Near East. Most of the Aramaic texts in the Hebrew Bible, written in what is usually called Biblical Aramaic, 11 belong to this period of the language's history: Imperial Aramaic. 9 The leading contender for the title of the oldest living language is Coptic, a descendant of Ancient Egyptian. 10 Akkadian cuneiform included thousands of signs, and many years of training were required to master it.

The Study of Folklore
An important part of the present study centres around folkloric texts. This section, then, offers a brief discussion of the preliminaries of the discipline of folkloristics.

Form of Creation'
Given that this study analyses verbally performed items of folklore, a question arises: is there anything that marks off folk-texts and distinguishes them from other forms of verbal or literary expression? That is, is there anything that justifies treating items of folklore as belonging to an independent category, deserving of its own research methodologies? The answer to that question, according to the article 'Folklore as a Special Form of Creation' by Roman Jakobson andPetr Bogatyrev (1980 [1929])-regarded by many as the founding manifesto of modern folkloristics-is, of course, yes. Folklore is indeed a special, unique, form of human creativity, and it cannot be categorised as any other form of artistic creativity. Its nature is particularly dissimilar from written literature, since in folkloristic creativity an inherent component is what Jakobson andBogatyrev (1980 [1929], 7) term the "preventive censure of the community." "An item of folklore per se begins its existence only after it has been adopted by a given community, and only in those of its aspects which the community has accepted" (Jakobson andBogatyrev 1980 [1929], 4-5) . Society is the preserving medium of the folkloric work of art, and the survival of a given work depends on its further transmission: "in folklore only those forms are retained which hold a functional value for the given community" (Jakobson andBogatyrev 1980 [1929], 6).
According to Jakobson and Bogatyrev the relationship between a potential item of folklore, one which exists as knowledge common to many members of a community, and any actual, concrete, individual performance, is parallel to that between the two Saussurean concepts of langue and parole: In folklore the relationship between the work of art on the one hand, and its objectivization-i.e., the so-called variants of this work as performed by different individualson the other, is completely analogous to the relationship between langue and parole. Like langue, the folkloric work is extra-personal and leads only a potential existence; it is only a complex of particular norms and impulses, a canvas of actual tradition, to which the performers impart life through the embellishments of their individual creativity, just as the producers of parole do with respect to langue. (Jakobson andBogatyrev 1980 [1929], 9) The difference between oral and written literature is particularly salient when comparing the potential survival and longevity of the two: as opposed to folklore, a written literary work "retains its potential existence" (Jakobson andBogatyrev 1980 [1929], 6). It can be revived and become influential once again after long periods, even centuries, of complete disregard and neglect by society. Its survival, or at least its potential survival, is not dependent upon intergenerational transmission or acceptance.
In the field of folklore the possibility of reactivating poetic facts is significantly smaller. If the bearers of a given poetic tradition should die out, this tradition can no longer be resuscitated, while in literature phenomena which are a hundred or even several hundred years old may revive and become productive once again! (Jakobson andBogatyrev 1980 [1929], 7) Despite the methodological separation between oral and written literature which the authors draw, an interesting form of relation between the two is possible, a reciprocal relation between folklore and written literature-the 'recycling' of folklore. Despite their categorical differentiation, their separate functions in culture, and their different paths of development, artistic literary works and folkloristic works may influence one another and may constitute the raw material of one another. The authors address this type of relation in discussing Pushkin's poem 'The Hussar', commenting that it is "a characteristic example of the way in which art forms change their functions in passing from folklore to literature and, vice versa, from literature to folklore" (Jakobson andBogatyrev (1980 [1929]: 13-14). Pushkin based his poem on a popular folktale, but reworked it into a highly sophisticated and ironic poem, whose folksiness serves as an artistic device. The poem later reverted back to the realm of folklore, becoming part of a popular piece of Russian folk theatre. 22 The close association between the inception of the theoretical framework of folkloristics and that of linguistics is notable throughout the article, both of whose authors are indeed famous for their contributions to linguistics: using key concepts of theoretical linguistics, the authors claim that the adaptation of an 22 For a similar case of the relationship between NENA oral and written literature, the book Toqpo šel Yosef (Farḥi 1867) and the story of Joseph and his brothers, see Aloni (2014a, 27-30;2014b, 339). item of folklore by a society, and subsequent changes that the item of folklore undergoes, are parallel to processes of grammaticalisation and other innovative transformations in language. An incidental variation of a linguistic generalised principle-a lapsus or an element of personal style-cannot be considered a part of a language's grammar, unless it is gradually accepted into the general system. A parole incident, a personal performance, will remain defined as such unless it is integrated into the langue. This can happen only if the coincidental change matches the internal rules of development of the language. 23

The Inherent Injustice of Analysis
Analysis of a verbal item of folklore, or of any item of folklore, almost always consists of analysis of a recorded, transcribed, written, concrete performance of that item, a performance that is but one of many possible performances of it. Analysis detaches the item of folklore from its broader original context. Any particular performance of an item of folklore emerges organically from the context in which it is performed-complex contexts many of whose constituent factors are normally disregarded and discarded in documentation and analysis. An actual performance is 23 Naturally, almost a century after its publication, Jakobson and Bogatyrev's article has been followed by numerous important discussions and theoretical formulations regarding folkloristics and its object of study, which are beyond the scope of the present book. See, for instance, specially crafted by the performer (and by the environment-audience reactions, for instance), consciously and unconsciously, to match particular aspects of the situation: the event, the day, the place, and so on. A given analysis must disregard a substantial portion of these aspects of the particular situation. It is this necessary disregarding, partially intentional and partially arising from ignorance, that creates an injustice towards the item of folklore being analysed, the inherent injustice in any analysis. 24 It is brought about by the distinction between a concrete performance of an item of folklore and its abstract, potential, 'dematerialised', existence, common to many members of the community-a distinction which is so fundamental to the study of folklore.

The Study of Folklore as the Rejection of Folklore
Ironically, the inception of the study of folklore is linked to the rejection of folklore itself. The rise of folkloristics as a discipline occurred simultaneously with, and was driven by, the major forces and processes of change of Western modernity. One component of the cultural changes brought about by modernity was a rejection of the 'traditional'. Folklore, tagged as traditional, was

Note on Transcriptions and Translations
The transcription system used throughout this book for the NENA texts is the one used by Prof. Geoffrey Khan in his NENA grammars (see, for instance, Khan 1999;2004;2008a;2009). In addition to the standard Semitic consonant and vowel signs, intonation signs are employed: a superscript vertical line (aˈ) indicates an intonation unit boundary; a grave accent (à) indicates the main nuclear stress in an intonation unit; and acute accents (á) indicate non-nuclear word stresses in an intonation unit. Usually, vowels in stressed syllables are long and vowels in unstressed syllables are short; long vowels in unstressed syllables are marked with a macron (ā) and short vowels in stressed syllables are marked with a breve (ă). 28 Hyphens are used in the following cases: between the g-~k-, 29 b-~p-, 30 and qam-prefixes and their qaṭel verb base; before cliticised copulas -ile~-le -ila~-la -ilu~-lu; after the cliticised prepositions l-, b-, bəd-, ta-, etc.; after the conjunction u-'and'; after the cliticised relative particle dəd-; before or after other cliticised elements: be-'household of', la-'no, not' English translations are as literal as possible; tenses are kept as in the NENA text, at the expense of standard English style. 32 An example of a particularly difficult word to translate is the word həǹna. The literal meaning of həǹna is 'this' or 'this thing'. Pragmatically it has several functions: a substitute for a word that the speaker is unable to remember (sometimes the speaker will add the forgotten word immediately thereafter); an 28 This is also true for vowels whom the speaker chose to pronounce particularly long or short in their connected speech for various reasons (i.e., non-phonemically). 29 Also with a prosthetic vowel: gə-. 30 The hyphen is kept when the verbal prefixes g-~k-and b-~p-are assimilated to the subsequent consonant, e.g., q-qàbəl, p-pàyəš. 31 In some cases it is difficult to decide whether a phrase is a loan from Modern Hebrew or whether it is a loan from an older layer made prior to immigration to Israel. 32 For a study of Jewish Zakho NENA narrative syntax, see Cohen (2012, 237-357). anaphoric pronoun referring back to an object or a concept mentioned earlier; an abbreviation replacing an idea that all participants know it refers to; and as a euphemistic substitute for words that the speaker wishes to avoid saying. The word həǹna is translated as italicised 'this' throughout the English translations.

Outline of the Book
The three chapters of this book explore three genres 33 of the rich oral heritage of the Jews of Zakho: proverbs, enriched biblical narratives, and folktales. The three genres chosen for this book, or rather the analysed units of each of these genres, progress so to speak from the smallest unit, that of the proverb, to the larger unit of the motifeme, and then to the largest unit of a complete folktale. 34 The first chapter deals with an important member of the family of gnomic genres: the proverb. The chapter provides contextualisation within the framework of paremiology, the study of proverbs. It suggests that what is lacking in the existing documentation and analysis of Jewish NENA proverbs (and indeed, in those of other languages as well) is a key factor in the understanding of the phenomenon of the proverb: the performative 33 For the centrality of genre as a category in the study of folklore, see Ben-Amos (1969;1976a;1976b);Seitel (1999). The book ends with some Closing Remarks. 35 The recording of the narrative recounted by Samra Zaken is available for listening at https://nena.ames.cam.ac.uk/dialects/78/. 36 The recording of the folktale told by Ḥabuba Messusani is available for listening at https://nena.ames.cam.ac.uk/dialects/78/.