Judaeo-Georgian

Judeo-Georgian
Gruzinic, Qivruli
ყივრული
Native to	Georgia, Israel, Russia, Belgium, Austria, United States
Native speakers	35,000 (2023) Estimates vary widely; see § Number of speakers
Language family	Kartvelian Karto-Zan Georgian Judeo-Georgian
Writing system	Georgian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	jge
Glottolog	jude1258

A chief synagogue in Tbilisi decorated with the Georgian and Israeli flags on the occasion of Georgia's Independence Day celebration. May, 2008.

Judeo-Georgian, known endonymically as Qivruli (Judeo-Georgian: ყივრული ენა) and also known as Gruzinic, is the traditional variety of Georgian spoken by the Georgian Jews, one of the oldest surviving Jewish communities in the world.

Judeo-Georgian is not identical either to standard Georgian or to any single regional dialect of Georgian. It has been described as a combination of phonetic and grammatical dialect forms with a distinctive stratum of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, and it differs from the speech of non-Jewish neighbours chiefly in prosody and intonation, grammar, and lexicon. These distinguishing features have been eroding under the influence of standard Georgian and as a result of the community's rising social and educational status.

Alongside religion, customs, and traditions, the language has been treated by scholars as one of the principal markers of Georgian Jewish identity. Following large-scale emigration in the 1970s and 1990s, the great majority of speakers now live in Israel, with smaller communities in Russia, the United States, Austria and Belgium; the variety is classified as endangered.

Names

The community's speech is commonly called Judeo-Georgian or "the Jewish variety of Georgian" in scholarship, and also appears as Gruzinic and as Kivruli or Qivruli. The name Qivruli has been associated in particular with the Hebrew-influenced trading vernacular developed by Jewish merchants. Reuven Enoch reports that speakers themselves have referred to their speech as cveneburuli, from Georgian cveneburi "ours, our own", a term that allows speakers to foreground either their Georgian or their Jewish belonging depending on context.

Jews in Georgia were historically designated by the Georgian terms uria or huria, which acquired pejorative force and were largely replaced in the 19th century by ebraeli; the community also refers to itself as israelebi.

Classification and status

Judaeo-Georgian is the only Kartvelian Jewish variety, and its status relative to Georgian is debated. With the exception of a substantial body of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords, it is reported to be largely mutually intelligible with Georgian, and Georgian Jews themselves have often described their speech simply as Georgian.

Lomtadze and Kvirikashvili describe the variety as having a "dual status". Twentieth-century Georgian scholarship treated it as a variety of Georgian and sought to place it within the Georgian linguistic space, variously as a dialect, a sub-dialect, an ethnolect or an ethno-sociolect. Since the turn of the 21st century it has additionally been analysed as a Jewish language, and compared with other Jewish varieties against the criteria used in that field. Lomtadze and Enoch's analysis draws on Sarah Bunin Benor's "distinctive linguistic repertoire" approach, under which the regional varieties of Judeo-Georgian are based on local dialects but diverge from them through Hebraisms and Aramaisms, displaced dialectalisms, and archaisms.

History

Georgian-speaking Jewry is one of the oldest surviving Jewish communities in the world, with an approximately 2,600-year presence in the region; the most widely held view in Georgia is that the first Jews arrived in the 6th century BCE after the Babylonian captivity. The Georgian chronicle Kartlis Tskhovreba lists Hebrew and Aramaic among the six languages spoken in ancient Georgia, alongside Georgian, Greek, Armenian and Khazar.

There is no direct documentation of the language the community spoke on arrival. Georgian sources report that St. Nino communicated with the Jews of Mtskheta in Hebrew, but by that period Hebrew had largely been displaced in everyday use by Aramaic as the regional lingua franca, and the question remains open. Hebrew subsequently retained a mainly liturgical and symbolic function, with the community's vernacular being Georgian.

The best-known monument of the variety is the Tavsili, an oral translation of the Torah transmitted by rabbis across generations and thought to have originated in the 11th–12th centuries. Its name is a Georgian cognate of Arabic tafsir, the term applied to Saadia Gaon's 10th-century Judeo-Arabic Torah translation, reflecting contact with Arabic-speaking Jews during the period of Arab rule in Georgia. Linguistic analysis shows it to combine Old Georgian, vernacular Judeo-Georgian and Hebrew, and — unusually for a translation of a Hebrew text — it retains numerous Hebrew loanwords, such as nederi "pledge" (נדר) and bexori "firstborn son" (בכור). A critical edition of the Genesis portion was published by Enoch in 2008, and a critical edition of the Judeo-Georgian Passover Haggadah followed in 2014.

Under Soviet rule (1921–1991) the study of Hebrew was banned and yeshivas were closed; after the Second World War some synagogue-affiliated families studied it covertly. Russian became dominant, and from the 1960s onward Georgian Jews were largely educated in Russian-language schools and often continued their studies in Russia, with the resulting Russicisms in their speech carrying prestige.

Distribution

Beginning in the late 19th century, there were substantial Jewish communities in Kutaisi, the economic and cultural centre of western Georgia, as well as in Tskhinvali, Tbilisi, Oni, Akhaltsikhe, Batumi, Poti, Sukhumi and many other towns, with smaller communities in almost every part of the country and a synagogue in nearly every densely populated town or village. Jews made up 1.1 percent of Georgia's population in 1939 and 1.3 percent in 1959; by the 2014 census their numbers were low enough to be folded into an "other ethnic groups" category.

Following emigration in the 1970s and again in the 1990s, Georgian Jewry is now represented principally in Israel, and also in New York, Moscow, Vienna and Antwerp. The communities remaining in Georgia are concentrated in Kutaisi, Tbilisi, Gori, Poti and Batumi.

Number of speakers

Published estimates diverge considerably and are not always directly comparable, since some count ethnic Georgian Jews and others count speakers. The Jewish Language Project gives 30,534 for 1900, 80,000 for 2019 and 35,000 for 2023. Ethnologue reported roughly 60,000 speakers for 2015–2018. Historical census figures record 6,407 Jews in Georgia declaring Georgian as their first language in the 1897 survey, rising to 33,673 in 1959; about 14,500 Jews were living in Georgia in 1993, roughly half of whom emigrated over the following years.

Linguistic features

Phonology and intonation

The intonation of Judeo-Georgian combines elements of standard Georgian with those of local dialects while differing from both, varying by situation and social setting. Because Jews lived throughout Georgia, their pronunciation was shaped by the intonation of surrounding Kartvelian languages and dialects. Distinctive intonation appears chiefly in informal speech and is most marked in interrogative sentences, less so in declaratives and least of all in imperatives; in many cases it was perceptible only to local non-Jews, so that residents of Kutaisi could distinguish Jewish from non-Jewish Kutaisi speech while non-Jews from other regions could not.

Grammar, archaisms and displaced dialectalism

Syntax is largely that of the regional dialect the speaker uses, with few exceptions. Distinctiveness instead arises from retained archaisms and from what Lomtadze and Enoch term displaced or migrated dialectalism, in which forms characteristic of one region appear in the speech of Jews in another, so that dispersed Jewish communities may resemble one another more than their immediate neighbours. An example is the term of endearment dagenacvle / degenacvle (literally roughly "may I be your substitute"), against the standard and dialectal Georgian genacvale. The form appeared in the speech of non-Jewish, especially Imeretian, characters in early 20th-century Georgian fiction, but from the 1940s onward is attested only in Jewish speech, and can therefore be regarded as an archaism.

Vocabulary

Lexical distinctiveness falls into two broad classes. The first consists of Georgian words used differently by Jews:

• Semantic differences: jamaati, "a crowd" in Georgian, denotes a minyan in Judeo-Georgian, and by extension a congregation at prayer.
• Frequency differences: items such as damadlianda "was blessed" occur more often in Jewish speech.
• Terms of specific relevance, particularly toponyms: uriatubani "Jewish neighbourhood", uriak'ari "Jews' gate", locvisk'ari "synagogue entrance".
• Folk etymologies linking place names to Hebrew, such as Zanavi (from זנב zanav "tail") and Lailashi (from לילה laila "night").

The second class consists of Hebrew and Aramaic borrowings. Many retain their original meaning, such as xupa "wedding canopy" (חופה), pesaxi "Passover" (פסח), and xaxami "rabbi", from Hebrew ḥaxam "wise man" (חכם). Others are transformed:

• Phonetically, as with maca "matzah" (מצה).
• Morphologically, by attaching Georgian markers to Hebrew stems. Hebrew loans commonly take the Georgian nominative marker -i, as in k'alebi "dog" (from כלב kelev) and xatani "bridegroom" (חתן). Already-plural Hebrew forms may take a redundant Georgian plural suffix, giving coanimebi "priests" (from kohanim) and agorotebi (from agorot), from which a new singular agoroti is sometimes back-formed.
• Semantically: zaq'eni means "bad", against Hebrew zaqen "old"; the bimah is called teva rather than by the term used in most other Jewish communities. Hebrew sefer "book" additionally covers "document", "ticket" and "passport".

Because such Hebraisms were used frequently in mixed neighbourhoods, some were understood by non-Jewish residents, whereas narrower religious terminology remained restricted to Jewish use.

Names

Personal names and surnames form a further identity marker. Jews in Georgia frequently bore a widely used Georgian given name alongside a Hebrew name reserved for ritual use and known within the family. Where both Jews and non-Jews used biblical names, Jews tended to prefer Hebrew forms such as Itskhak and Shemuel for purposes of self-identification, while non-Jews preferred Greek-derived forms such as Isaac and Moses.

Merchants' cryptolanguage

Petty trade was the principal occupation of Georgian Jews, and merchants developed a coded trading vernacular that was widely used in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It combined Hebrew lexical roots with Georgian grammatical morphology, leaving conversations unintelligible to non-Jewish customers. Pourtskhvanidze and Tskhvediani argue that this variety is best analysed pragmatically rather than as code-switching, since Georgian Jews were generally not fluent in Hebrew, and that competence depended less on knowledge of Hebrew than on membership in the merchant group and the Jewish residential quarter; they classify it as an ethno-sociolect used in a specific interactional setting.

The jargon left durable traces in general Georgian urban slang, where its Hebrew-derived items are no longer perceived as foreign. Examples include goimi "yokel" (from גוי goy), ksiva "letter" (from כתיבה ktiva "writing"), naša "girl", maq'uti "money", and ṭobe "good, profitable" (from טוב tov).

Sociolinguistic variation

Use of Judeo-Georgian was stratified by class and setting. Upper- and middle-class speakers used standard Georgian in formal communication; everyday speech was based on the regional dialect but carried the distinctive features described above; and religious or tradition-related discourse employed a Georgian–Hebrew mixture in which Hebrew words took Georgian grammatical markers. Lomtadze and Enoch found that upper-class Jews largely avoided the variety, middle-class Jews used it in particular situations, and for lower-class Jews it was the sole means of communication. The frequency of Hebraisms correlates with a speaker's religiosity.

Educated Jews who integrated into wider Georgian society worked to reduce their accent and avoid distinctive forms. Some substituted Georgian Christian vocabulary for Jewish religious concepts — using aghdgoma "Easter" for Passover, or jvrisc'era "church wedding" for the huppah — a practice reflecting the pressure on Jews in Soviet public employment to observe religious practice covertly.

Status

Judeo-Georgian is classified as endangered. Like many Jewish languages, it is in decline in Israel, where Georgian Jews have shifted towards Modern Hebrew. The distinctive features described above were still prevalent until the 1990s; the small communities remaining in Georgia are losing them under the influence of standard Georgian, which threatens transmission to the next generation. The variety has not been comprehensively described: the first substantial scholarly treatments appeared only around the turn of the 21st century, and authoritative studies of its continued use in expatriate communities outside Israel have not been conducted.

See also

• Georgian Jews
• Jewish languages
• Judeo-Tat
• History of the Jews in Georgia

Further reading

• Enoch, Reuven (2008). Tavsili: The Traditional Oral Translation of the Bible in Judeo-Georgian (Genesis). Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
• Enoch, Reuven (2014). The Passover Haggadah in Judeo-Georgian: A Critical Edition (in Hebrew). Jerusalem: Magnes Press.
• Moskovich, Wolf; Ben-Oren, Gershon (1982). "The Hebrew-Aramaic and Georgian Components in the Spoken Language of Georgian Jews". Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress of Jewish Studies, Division D. Jerusalem: World Union of Jewish Studies. pp. 19–24.

External links

• LanguageServer's Judaeo-Georgian page Archived 2008-10-05 at the Wayback Machine