Two Israeli television channels are trying to see to it that Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus and his contemporaries in that region of the Roman Empire, will once again become a living language and not just be an almost extinct curiosity for scholars of Semitic languages to study.
“Suroyo TV” and “Suryoyo TV” offer an endless supply of material for online discussion by fans so they can decide which is best.
Among nouns that have the same meaning, there are variations of the term “Syriac” in Aramaic. The aficionados live in the Haifa zone, in Upper Galilee.
There are probably others, but living in Syria, in the mountains south of Damascus, and in the small city of Maalula.
It seems, however, that it is quite difficult for the latter to connect to the two Israeli channels.
These two channels are nevertheless still valuable: they prove that Aramaic is still living and breathing as a language, according to the inhabitants of Jish, one of the villages in the area.
Aramaic is a Semitic language that is very close to Hebrew, and was once spread over the Fertile Crescent, the wide strip of Middle Eastern land that had its center between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, but whose cultural and linguistic borders stretch all the way to the Mediterranean.
Over the centuries, the use of Aramaic gradually dried up and was replaced by the Arab language of conquerors who came up from the south; and today it is the language of choice for Christians in the Middle East, particularly when in terms of liturgical use. It is even studied by experts on the Talmud.
Aramaic was actually—and a bit hastily—given up for dead until scholars became aware that a number of Aramaic dialects were spoken by communities in Syria, Iraq, Turkey, and Iran. And those are not the only examples; to a lesser extent, they are also spoken in Lebanon, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Israel.
In the western world, the Aramaic diaspora is very much alive and evident in the United States and Sweden; and as often occurs, these “exiles” actually seem more active and interested in revitalizing the language.
It is believed that close to 400 thousand people throughout the world understand and speak different nuances of the Aramaic language.
In Israel, the battle to turn Aramaic back into a living language has been carried forward by two brothers, Amir and Shady Khallul. They use Eliezer Ben Yehuda, the father of modern Hebrew, as their model. If Jewish people are in a position to revive Hebrew and turn it into a modern language, why shouldn’t we do the same thing with Aramaic?
The question has been asked, and an affirmative answer has been given. Last year, the Israeli Education Minister gave Jish permission to teach Aramaic in the first two years of elementary school; it was necessary to build a program from the ground up.
Dictionaries of the language were discovered in France, and a lot of educational materials, in Sweden. Most of the books have been printed in Lebanon. Modern Aramaic is written using an old alphabet (Biblical script uses Hebraic letters), which is something like a mixture of Hebrew and Arabic; it has 22 characters and is written right to left.
There are two main dialects, an eastern and a western one (as is the case with Armenian), and a single written model, “Estrangela,” which is used in prayers and religious texts.
Israeli speakers of Aramaic who use the western dialect have an additional challenge. They have to teach their children how to speak the language and then encourage them to use it in everyday life with friends, family, and at school; they also have to teach them how to write using both the western and Estrangela alphabets.
Jish was once the site of Gush Halav, a village from the time of Jerusalem’s Second Temple; it was noted for the fertility of its soil and the high quality of its olives. More than half of its current 3,000 inhabitants are Maronite Christians, whom Israeli soldiers displaced from neighboring Bir’am in 1948; they were not allowed to return to their village of origin, which became the Bar’am Kibbutz.
35 percent are Muslims, while10 percent are Greek Orthodox christians. It is these Maronites who are trying to keep the culture, language, and historical legacy alive.
Jish has a very lively community life and contacts with other Maronites who live in Israel, Nazareth, Acri, and Haifa. Among these, are almost 2,000 soldiers from the former Southern Lebanese army who found refuge in Israel after the Israeli army withdrew from Lebanon in 2000. At the time, the initiative to teach Aramaic was enthusiastically welcomed; classes for both children and adults were launched.
Even the school’s headmaster, a Muslim, actively and staunchly supports the project, so much so that his son is even enrolled in one of the courses, in order to establish solidarity with neighboring regions.
Maronites in Jish are a different kettle of fish, however: for them, Aramaic is essential to their existence as a people, in the same way that the Hebrew and Arab languages are for those groups.
“We don’t identify ourselves as Aramaic, unlike some other nationalities,” Khallul declared.
“For us, the State of Israel is very precious. I am very proud of the military service I carried out as Captain of the paratrooper brigade, and it’s not just a few Aramaics who enlist in the Israeli army. We feel a deep sense of belonging in this place and all of the traditions it has welcomed.”
And, in effect, the contact between Maronites goes back a long time. Various Maronite currents were reported at the end of the 1930’s with the advent of the Zionist movement.
During the 1939 Arab revolt, the Maronites supplied Jews who had been laid siege to in Safed, food off the back of donkey; they also helped some Holocuast survivors secretly enter Bir’am through the border, when the English closed off Palestine.
David Ben Gurion, also worked to create a Maronite Christian state in southern Lebanon, which was financed by his Jewish agency.