Aramaic

Aramaic is a group of Semitic languages which has been continuously used in the Middle East from the second millennium BCE until today. The Aramaic alphabet is the basis for the Modern Hebrew alphabet. The Aramaic language was adopted in ancient Judah as a primary language during the time when Judah was a part of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (538-333 BCE). Jewish works that survive from this period include the biblical works Ezra and Nehemiah and the Elephantine Papyri. Aramaic continued to be used widely by Jewish communities throughout the Near East after the rise of Alexander the Great until the rise of Islam. The literary legacy of this nearly thousand-year span of history includes 1 Enoch, Daniel, the Targumim (translations of the Bible into Aramaic), and the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. Jewish communities in northwestern Iraq employed a form of Neo-Aramaic in their communities until 1948 when the modern State of Israel was founded. Many people from these communities relocated to Israel where some continue to speak Aramaic.

Various dialects of Aramaic (Old Aramaic, Imperial Aramaic, Qumran Aramaic, Targumic Aramaic, Syriac, Babylonian Aramaic) are taught by faculty members in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies (Jonathan Kaplan, Na’ama Pat-El) and Religious Studies (Brent Landau and Jonathan Schofer).