Research center works to save myriad Hebrew dialects shaped by millennia of wandering
Israel’s Academy of the Hebrew Language has been preserving a treasure trove of accents and pronunciations that are swiftly becoming lost by its own work to standardize language
Rossella Tercatin is The Times of Israel's archaeology and religions reporter.
On a radiant spring morning in Jerusalem, a group of visitors walked into the Cultural and Educational Center at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, nestled in the pastoral Givat Ram campus of the Hebrew University.
Inside, the group was welcomed by a colorful wall mural depicting a concise history of the language. The room darkened and a unique installation featuring a map of the Old World lit up with various centers of the Jewish Diaspora over the centuries. For each spot — Yemen, Poland, Italy, Morocco and more — a seemingly distant but powerful voice recited the opening verses of the book of Genesis.
The voices only spoke one language, Hebrew, but each reading carried a distinct accent and intonation, revealing the tongue as both a thread uniting Jews across two millennia of dispersion but also a reflection of the rich local flavors of the communities who used it in prayer or other aspects of spiritual life.
“For many centuries, nobody spoke Hebrew as their first language,” said Doron Yaakov, a researcher in charge of the Jewish Oral Traditions Collection at the Academy. “At the same time, Hebrew was preserved as the language of culture by Jews across the world, who learned, wrote, and, crucially, read Hebrew texts out loud. If this had not been the case, the language could not have been revived in modern times.”
Today, as modern Hebrew and globalization steamroll those local variations, it has fallen to the Academy — the very body in charge of Hebrew’s standardization — to document and preserve these traditions through its Jewish Oral Traditions Collection, a mission that is crucial to both saving vibrant pages of Jewish history from oblivion and opening new doors for researching and understanding Diaspora life.
Established in 1956 as the continuation of a Language Committee that had existed for almost five decades prior, the Academy is the pivotal institution for Hebrew in Israel and the world, developing new words, setting the standards for grammar, orthography, and punctuation, and preserving its history.
LISTEN – The Moroccan Tradition: The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Avraham Ben Harush.
The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Avraham Ben Harush. (Jewish Oral Traditions Collection/Academy of the Hebrew Language).
Pronounced differences
The earliest instances of Hebrew come from a handful of inscriptions found on stones at various sites throughout the Holy Land, thought to date back some 3,000 years, though academic consensus on the significance of the Late Bronze Age finds remains elusive. Scholarship on when it emerged as a distinct Semitic dialect is similarly incomplete and fraught with disagreement.
Nonetheless, the language of the Bible is thought to have been the dominant tongue throughout the Second Temple period (586 BCE-70 CE), if not earlier, and was still being spoken in parts of Israel until the 2nd century CE.
By the 5th century, the language had ceased as a form of everyday communication, but it remained in regular use as the language of prayer, Torah study and other aspects of Jewish spiritual life.
It would remain exclusive to the domain of the sacred for some 1,500 years, until the late 19th century, when early Zionist pioneers, led by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, set out to make modern Hebrew the language of the future Jewish state.
“On the eve of the Second World War, only a few people living in the land spoke Hebrew in their everyday life, but hundreds of communities knew how to read and pronounce it in their own unique ways,” Yaakov said.
Textual sources from as far back as 2,000 years ago show the emergence of regional variations of the language as communities branched off, Yaakov said.
“People in the Galilee spoke Hebrew differently than people in the Jerusalem area,” he said. “This is natural in a time when there was no modern media.”
“The Babylonian Talmud narrates that there were Jews in the Galilee who did not know how to pronounce khet and ayin and therefore were considered less suitable to serve as prayer leaders,” he added.
The Bible itself hints at these regional variations in the story of the shibboleth that appears in Judges chapter 12, which describes Gileadites sometime around the 10th century BCE using a regional pronunciation of the word for a grain (or possibly a flood) attempting to suss out Ephraimites fleeing their onslaught.
“When any fugitive from Ephraim said, ‘Let me cross,’ the Gileadites would ask him, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’; if he said ‘No,’ they would say to him, ‘Then say shibboleth’; but he would say ‘sibboleth,’ not being able to pronounce it correctly. Thereupon they would seize him and slay him by the fords of the Jordan.”
LISTEN – The Russian tradition: The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Yitzchok Zilber.
The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) are read by Yitzchok Zilber. (Jewish Oral Traditions Collection/Academy of the Hebrew Language)
According to Yaakov, some of these millennia-old variations were preserved by specific communities as they were scattered throughout the Diaspora and remained extant until very recently.
“If we take the Hebrew tradition common among Sephardic communities in Iraq and North Africa, it is based on the Hebrew spoken in the land of Israel in the Second Temple period,” said Yaakov. “The Yemenite Hebrew enunciation mirrors the language spoken in Babylon.”
Other variations likely came later due to local influences impacting their pronunciation of Hebrew.
But like much else, there’s no universal rule, and some communities preserved Hebrew pronunciations despite their local spoken language.
LISTEN – The Yemenite tradition: The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Shlomo Kara.
The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) are read by Shlomo Kara. (Jewish Oral Traditions Collection/Academy of the Hebrew Language)
“There is no P sound in Arabic-speaking countries, yet, Jews maintained the difference between the letters Peh and Pheh as they read Hebrew aloud,” Yaakov said.
He noted that scholars believe the one group thought to have preserved the purest form of Hebrew as it sounded 2,000 years ago is not considered Jewish. Samaritans, who say they are descendants of Jews who avoided exile, use a form of Hebrew preserved as a liturgical language when reading their version of the Torah.
“They are the only non-Jewish community that maintained a Hebrew tradition,” said Yaakov. “They preserve a Hebrew pronunciation that existed in Israel in the Second Temple Period.”
LISTEN – The Samaritan tradition: The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Avraham Tzedakah.
The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) are read by Avraham Tzedakah. (Jewish Oral Traditions Collection/Academy of the Hebrew Language) In the image: Samaritan worshipers celebrate Sukkot on top of Mount Gerizim in the West Bank in 2019. (Nasser Ishtayeh/Flash90)
Today, there are around 900 Samaritans in the region, mostly living in Holon and Nablus in the West Bank, next to Mt. Gerizim, which they consider a holy site. They believe their high priest to be a descendant of Aaron, the brother of Moses, and trace their roots back 127 generations in the land.
Swallowed up
The Jewish Oral Traditions Collection grew out of an understanding soon after the State of Israel was established that the oral traditions of Jewish communities returning from throughout the Diaspora would quickly be “swallowed up” by modern standardized Hebrew, Yaakov said.
Among the visionary scholars who set out to preserve the various variations was Prof. Shlomo Morag from the Hebrew University, who spent 40 years recording Hebrew speakers from around the world.
“In the 1950s, he began to visit absorption centers, new immigrants’ barracks, and synagogues with a big recording machine,” Yaakov said. “He identified experts from different communities that he could document.”
LISTEN – Syrian tradition: The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Moshe Tawil.
The first verses of Shirat Ha’azinu (Deuteronomy 22:1-3) read by Moshe Tawil. (Jewish Oral Traditions Collection/Academy of the Hebrew Language).
Working into the 1990s, Morag and his assistants recorded some 250 people from 30 countries and dozens of cities for the Jewish Oral Traditions Research Center at the Hebrew University.
In 2017, the collection’s 2,500 hours of tape were brought under the umbrella of the Academy, which recently completed digitizing the files and making them accessible to the general public online.
“These recordings are the only comprehensive testimonies of those Hebrew renditions,” said Yaakov. “Research shows that even if some descendants of those who came from those communities partially preserved the accent, for example, in their religious rituals, they still have lost many of its nuances.”
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