La Composante Hebraïque du Judeo-Arabe Algerien: Communautes de Tlemcen et Aïntemouchent (review)

Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 217 Reviews also kindly, solicitous of his students' good, and remarkably unconcerned about the earthly success of his own enterprises. Shalom Goldman's more tightly focused account of Hebrew study at Dartmouth contains the tantalizing bit of information that, after regular teaching lapsed in the early nineteenth century, Dartmouth did not set up a professorship of Hebrew again until the 1980s, but then it found a home in the Department of Asian Studies. Thomas Siegel's study of Stephen Sewall, the first holder of a Hebrew chair at an American college, presents a lucid account of the shifting curriculum in the eighteenth century. Sewall, who held the chair at Harvard from 1764 to 1785, began teaching when an older Puritan model of unified learning under God still prevailed. But by the time he departed his post, Harvard with most other colonial colleges had adopted an Enlightenment model that increasingly featured study in discrete subjects for their own utilitarian sake. Hebrew and the Bible in America is a useful book for the wide range of information it contains on its varied subjects. If the diffuse focus of the volume prevents it from establishing ground-breaking interpretative paradigms, it nevertheless should be welcomed even by scholars concerned more about America's general religious history than about Jewish history itself. Of greatest significance, it shows that "the Bible in America" is not a simple or monochromatic subject, but rather one deserving the most serious scrutiny from those who believe in any of the biblical faiths, or in none. Mark A. Noll Wheaton College Wheaton, IL 60187 LA COMPOSANTE HEBRAIQUE DU JUDEO-ARABE ALGERIEN: COMMUNAUTES DE TLEMCEN ET AINTEMOUCHENT . By Moshe Bar-Asher. Pp. 184. Jerusalem: Editions Magnes, 1992. Cloth, $13.00. An ethnolect is an independent linguistic entity with its own history and development that refers to a language or a variety and is used by a distinct language community. Judeo-Arabic is an ethnolect which has been spoken and written in various forms by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world; its literature is concerned for the most part with Jewish topics and is Hebrew Studies 37 (1996) 218 Reviews written by Jewish authors for Jewish readers. Judeo-Arabic is characterized by several important features: it contains elements of standard Arabic, dialectal components, pseudo-corrections, and standardization of such features; it uses Hebrew rather than Arabic characters; it has different traditions of orthography, and it contains elements of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and grammar. This mixing of linguistic elements places JudeoArabic in an interesting position for the examination of sociolinguistic features such as multiglossia (B. Hary, Multiglossia in Judeo-Arabic [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992], pp. 3-6), language continuum,code-switching, registers and style, and languages or dialects in contact, as Judeo-Arabic is the meeting point of standard Arabic, Arabic dialects, Hebrew and Aramaic. Judeo-Arabic went through a dramatic historical change around the fifteenth century, when the Jewish world severed its contact with the Muslim world and its Arabic language and culture. This was especially true in North Africa and less so in Yemen, where strong contact was maintained for some time. At this time, because of the change in the contact between the cultures, not only did the structure of Literary Written Judeo-Arabic change in that it incorporated more dialectal elements, but more and more works appeared in Hebrew. Splitting Judeo-Arabic into only two periods with the fifteenth century as the dividing line is too limiting. In order to refine and more accurately describe Judeo-Arabic, its history can actually be divided into five periods: Pre-Islamic Judeo-Arabic, Early Judeo-Arabic (eighth/ninth to tenth centuries), Classical Judeo-Arabic (tenth to fifteenth centuries), Later Judeo-Arabic (fifteenth to nineteenth centuries), and Modem Judeo-Arabic (twentieth century). The present volume is a study of Modem Judeo-Arabic used in two Jewish communities in northwest Algeria: A"in-Temouchent (45 miles south-west of Oran) and Tlemcen (85 miles south-west of Oran). More specifically, it investigates the Hebrew elements found in the ethnolect of these two communities. The Hebrew component of Judeo-Arabic has long been recognized in the literature as an important...