Until the 1950s, Jews played a significant role in shaping social life in Baghdad. A thriving Jewish community had lived there for centuries. The people spoke Arabic and considered themselves a significant part of Iraq. However, at the beginning of the twentieth century, antisemitism took hold, culminating in June 1941 in the Farhud, a pogrom against the Jewish population. Within two days about 9,000 Jewish households were ransacked, and more than 180 Jews were killed. Assaf Bar-Moshe says that after the Farhud, Jews in Iraq never felt safe again. After the State of Israel was founded, hundreds of thousands fled there. 

Assaf Bar-Moshe is an Israeli linguist whose parents originally came from Baghdad. He works at the Institute of Semitic Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, where he studies and documents the languages of the former Jewish communities of Mesopotamia and the Levant. Bar-Moshe says that for centuries the Jews there had cultivated many Judeo-Arabic dialects, but in Israel most of these dialects were lost within a single generation through the assimilation process. Many speakers of these dialects today are over eighty years old, or even ninety.

The Language of Childhood

Bar-Moshe is trying to meet as many of these people as possible. He records conversations, analyzes vocabulary and grammar, and conducts comparative studies. Following many years of research, in 2019 he published a volume on the grammar of the Baghdad dialect. He is now dedicating his work to the numerous smaller dialects. He explains, “In many small towns in Mesopotamia and Turkey, there were often communities with only a few hundred speakers. Today, in Israel, if you are lucky, it might be possible to find two or three people who speak a particular dialect. I try to speak with them and help them remember the language of their childhood. Then I record it.”

With his work Bar-Moshe aims to contribute to preserving the dialects for posterity. In addition, the dialects can also provide crucial insights into the linguistic development of Arabic. Bar-Moshe notes that as a rule the Jewish dialects are very conservative. He explains, “To a certain extent the Jewish dialects contain grammatical forms that have been lost in the Arabic spoken by the majority society in Mesopotamia. The Jewish dialects can help us gain a better understanding of the early forms of Arabic.”

In another step, analyzing the dialects could be the key to answering open questions about the cultural history of the region. Bar-Moshe points out that we know relatively little about the early history of the Jewish communities there. The scholars are now trying to reconstruct history based on linguistic shifts. Bar-Moshe says that in a way they are working like archaeologists, except that they work with linguistic relics instead of material culture.

Judeo-Arabic Dialects

A comparison of the Judeo-Arabic dialects of Baghdad and Aleppo that Bar-Moshe conducted along with Semitic studies scholar Werner Arnold from the University of Heidelberg has already yielded some interesting findings. Bar-Moshe points out that the dialect of Aleppo is a Levantine dialect and thus from a different dialect family than the Mesopotamian dialect of Baghdad. “Interestingly, the Aleppo dialect contains a number of forms that are remarkably similar to forms in the Baghdad dialect.”

According to Bar-Moshe, these similarities can only be attributed to an exchange between the two language communities. He says that he and Arnold believe that the similarities are related to the Mongol conquest of Baghdad in 1258. They think that larger groups of Jews from Baghdad fled to Aleppo at that time.

Bar-Moshe has a very personal connection to his work. His parents were among the last Jews to leave Iraq. He explains, “Most of the Iraqi Jews, about 120,000, emigrated to Israel in 1951 as part of a coordinated effort by the State of Israel. However, about 7,000, including my parents, remained in Iraq. They did not leave until the 1970s, when Saddam Hussein took power in Iraq.”

When Bar-Moshe was growing up, he and his family spoke the Judeo-Arabic dialect of Baghdad Jews. He says, “Since my parents came to Israel so late, they spoke the Baghdad dialect quite naturally, unlike most of the Baghdad Jews who had emigrated earlier. That made me one of the probably youngest living speakers of this rare language.”

It took a long time before Bar-Moshe began to study his parents’ language linguistically. He says the idea had never occurred to him. Even after he began to study linguistics, he initially devoted himself to learning and studying Mandarin.

In 2011 Bar-Moshe submitted a study of Chinese syntax as his master’s thesis at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of the professors then bluntly asked him how much longer he intended to waste his time, pointing out that there are billions of Mandarin speakers, but only a vanishingly small number of people with a mastery of Judeo-Arabic. 

That was enough to spark Bar-Moshe’s interest, and he never looked back. He says, “It is such an important task to contribute to ensuring that this linguistic diversity isn’t lost. These are the last years when it is still possible to meet living speakers of the old dialects.”

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This article originally appeared in German in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität Berlin on November 29 , 2025.