“Judeo-Arabic” and the Separationist Thesis

Abstract

This essay questions the axiomatic ontology of the “Judeo-Arabic language” as a cohesive unit separate from Arabic and its entanglement in the persistent ambivalence surrounding the conjoining of “the Jewish” and “the Arab.” In the wake of the partition of Palestine and the dislocation of Arab-Jews to Israel, classificatory categories, which can be traced to the nineteenth-century academic meeting ground of Semitic/Oriental and Hebraic/Judaic studies, came to be reinforced in the twentieth century within Zionist discourse. Largely shaped by foundational scholars of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, knowledge production about Arabic-speaking Jews was embedded in what the essay regards as “Judeo-Arabic Orientalism.” Entrenched in the politics of linguistic naming is a partitioning ethnonationalist imaginary of culture and belonging. The epistemic framework undergirding “Judeo-Arabic language” is emblematic of what the essay refers to as “the separationist thesis.” Revisiting a few key arguments, the essay traces the genealogy not of a language but rather of an idea of a language, highlighting the invention of a paradoxical formation—an Arabic that is at once non-Arabic.