page_title: Mizrahi Jews
section_title: Aramaic
hierarchical_section_title: Mizrahi Jews / Language / Aramaic
caption_attribution_description: Photograph of three Kurdish jewish family members from the the small town of Rowndiz in the Kurdish mountains in northern Iraq, taken by a traveling missionary in 1905. The town was described by A.M.Hamilton [The narrative of an Engineer in Iraq,1930's] "High on the steep and narrow slope and perched thus between two great precipices is the town of upper Rowndiz, [lower Rowndiz was burned by the Russians in 1915-16]. Rowndiz looks out on mountains on all sides. Jagged and irregular peaks, nearly all of them over eight thousand feet in height, snow-capped for six months of the year". Some of the Kurdish Jews settled in the new and prosperous town of Qamishli in Syrian Mesopotamia post WW1, facing the ancient town of Nusibis [Nusaibin] on the Turkish side of the border. Qamishli possessed a train station on the Berlin-Baghdad Railway, an aerodrome, and a Synagogue. Today, some 75.000 to 100.000 so called Kurdish Jews live in Israel.
context_page_description: Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim, also referred to as Mizrachi, Edot HaMizrach, or Oriental Jews, are the descendants of the local Jewish communities that had existed in the Middle East and North Africa from biblical times into the modern era. Originally, the term Mizrahi was the Hebrew translation of Eastern European Jews' German name Ostjuden, as seen in the Mizrahi Movement, Bank Mizrahi and in HaPoel HaMizrahi. In the 1950s the Jews who came from the communities listed above were simply called and known as Jews and in order to distinguish them in the Jewish sub-ethnicities, Israeli officials, who themselves were mostly Eastern European Jews, transferred the name to them, though most of these immigrants arrived from lands located further westward than Central Europe. Mizrahi is subsequently the surname most often changed by Israelis, and many scholars claim that the transferring of the name "Mizrahim" was a form of Orientalism towards the Oriental Jews, similar to the ways in which Westjuden had labeled Ostjuden as "second class" and excluded them from possible positions of power.
context_section_description: Aramaic is a Semitic language subfamily. Specific varieties of Aramaic are identified as "Jewish languages" since they are the languages of major Jewish texts such as the Talmud and Zohar, and many ritual recitations such as the Kaddish. Traditionally, Aramaic has been a language of Talmudic debate in yeshivot, as many rabbinic texts are written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic. The current Hebrew alphabet, known as "Assyrian lettering" or "the square script", was in fact borrowed from Aramaic.
  In Kurdistan, the language of the Mizrahim is a variant of Aramaic. As spoken by the Kurdish Jews, Judeo-Aramaic languages are Neo-Aramaic languages descended from Jewish Babylonian Aramaic. They are related to the Christian Aramaic dialects spoken by Assyrian people.
caption: Kurdish Jews in Rawanduz, northern Iraq, 1905.
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