Insaniyat: Journal of Islam and Humanities
Volume 1 Number 1, Nov 2016

Judeo-Arabic: Cultural Symbiosis of the Jews in the Islamicate Context

Leonard Chrysostomos Epafras (Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS), Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia)



Article Info

Publish Date
26 Nov 2016

Abstract

The present article studies the Jewish-Muslim intimacy through the Jewish language as a cultural space in the period of the medieval Islam. The Judeo-Arabic, as the technical terms of the Jewish language in this period and in the subsequent eras, was one of the many venues through which people negotiated the Jewish identity in the non-Jewish environments. This negotiation was the outcome of intensive meeting between the Arabs’ culture and the Jewish-specific heritages since pre-Islamic era to the period of the medieval Islam in dialectical and contested way. The Arabic language in the Hebrew script was an example of this process. In this article, the author traces back the earlier encounter between the Jews and the Arabs in the proto-Judeo-Arabic, al-yahūdīyyah, which includs the Muslim narrative of both the Prophet Muḥammad and the Jews. Next, this paper studies a later period of the Judeo-Arabic development as a Jewish specific language. The author argues that the Judeo-Arabic demonstrates a cultural symbiosis and a frontier of interaction between the Jews and the  Muslims  marked  by  the  way  Muslims  and  Jews  accommodated  and  contested  to  each  other.DOI: 10.15408/insaniyat.v1i1.4401

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Journal Info

Abbrev

insaniyat

Publisher

Subject

Arts Humanities Languange, Linguistic, Communication & Media Library & Information Science Social Sciences

Description

Insaniyat: Journal of Islam and Humanities is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the Faculty of Adab and Humanities, Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University (UIN) of Jakarta. It aims to publish research findings that relates to the studies of language, literature, social, ...