Islamic traits and motifs in Jewish and Christian North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic languages and literatures

Abstract

The North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic dialects, historically spoken by Christian and Jewish minorities in the vast territory that includes southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq and northwestern Iran, belong to a region of linguistic convergence which includes varieties of Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish, spoken by the Muslim majority of the population, and in which prestigious literary—then national—Islamic languages (Arabic, Persian, Turkish) have exerted considerable influence. The results of these contacts have received much attention from scholars, and in some cases Islamic features have been isolated in the lexicon of Modern Aramaic varieties. An apparently paradoxical integration of terms with strong Islamic connotations into the religious language of Christians and Jews has also been observed. From a cultural and literary point of view, the minorities share with the Islamic majority much of the material culture, folklore, literary genres and, in some cases, stories and motifs, the ultimate origin of which may also have been Christian or Jewish.