Native to Israel, Iran ISO 639-2 jpr | Writing system Hebrew ISO 639-3 jpr | |
Native speakers 60,000 in Israel (1995) Language family Indo-European
Indo-Iranian
Iranian
Western
Southwestern
Persian
Dzhidi | ||
Judeo-Persian, or Jidi (/ˈdʒiːdiː/; also spelled Dzhidi or Djudi), refers to both a group of Jewish dialects spoken by the Jews living in Iran and Judeo-Persian texts (written in Hebrew alphabet). As a collective term, Dzhidi refers to a number of Judeo-Iranian languages spoken by Jewish communities throughout the formerly extensive Persian Empire. On a more limited scale, Dzhidi refers to the Judeo-Persian dialect spoken by the Jewish communities of the area around Tehran and Mashhad.
Contents
Persian words in Hebrew and Aramaic
The earliest evidence of the entrance of Persian words into the language of the Israelites is found in the Bible. The post-exilic portions, Hebrew as well as Aramaic, contain besides many Persian proper names and titles, a number of nouns (as "dat" or "daad" in current Persian = "law"; "genez" or "Ganj" in current Persian = "treasure"; "pardes" or "Pardis" or "ferdos" in current Persian= "park, which is the main root of English word "Paradise") which came into permanent use at the time of the Achaemenid Empire.
More than five hundred years after the end of that dynasty the Jews of the Babylonian diaspora again came under the dominion of the Persians; and among such Jews the Persian language held a position similar to that held by the Greek language among the Jews of the West. Persian became to a great extent the language of everyday life among the Jews of Babylonia; and a hundred years after the conquest of that country by the Sassanids an amora of Pumbedita, Rab Joseph (d. 323), declared that the Babylonian Jews had no right to speak Aramaic, and should instead use either Hebrew or Persian. Aramaic, however, remained the language of the Jews in Israel as well as of those in Babylonia, although in the latter country a large number of Persian words found their way into the language of daily intercourse and into that of the schools, a fact which is attested by the numerous Persian derivatives in the Babylonian Talmud. But in the Aramaic Targum there are very few Persian words, because after the middle of the third century the Targumim on the Pentateuch and the Prophets were accepted as authoritative and received a fixed textual form in the Babylonian schools. In this way they were protected from the introduction of Persian elements.
Literature
There is an extensive Judeo-Persian poetic religious literature, closely modelled on classical Persian poetry. The most famous poet was Meulana Shahin Shirazi (14th century C.E.), who composed epic paraphrases of parts of the Bible, such as the Musa-nama (history of Moses); later poets composed lyric poetry of a Sufi cast. Much of this literature was collected around the beginning of the twentieth century by a Persian rabbi who had moved to Israel.