 So, before this video I made a video giving some background about the ancient history of the Middle East, but to briefly recap, Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Aramaic. Good. Okay. So last we left off, the land of Israel had just been conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and there was a really large community of Jewish people who had been exiled from Israel and were living all across the empire, particularly in the city of Babylon. Depending on what you are and aren't willing to believe as a valid source of history, we may or may not know all that much about the Jewish people before this point, which is why I'm starting the video here. The Neo-Babylonian Empire, like the Neo-Assyrian Empire before it, mostly spoke Aramaic, so although the Babylonian Jews continued to use their ancestral language of Hebrew for liturgical purposes and to record theological texts like the Hebrew Bible, they gradually started speaking Aramaic in everyday life, and this marks the beginning of a long trend of Jewish people picking up the language of the land they're living in while still holding on to ancient Hebrew. This is also the first time the Jews really needed to define themselves as a people. Before they all lived in the same place and spoke the same language, but now they lived all over the place, mixed in with plenty of non-Jews, and usually spoke the same language as everyone else. So this was a defining moment for the Jewish people, the moment when they first had to firmly establish who is and isn't a Jew. Because so many people spoke Aramaic as their native language at this pivotal moment of Jewish history, Aramaic would go on to become a sort of Jewish ancestral language alongside Hebrew. Anyway, in 539 BC the Persians under Sears the Great conquered Babylon and since a lot of their new empire incorporated former Babylonian territory that used Aramaic, they decided to pick up Aramaic as an official language. Sears allowed the Jewish people to return to Israel and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, earning him an honored place in Judaism and making him the only non-Jew to be called Messiah. So the Jews went back to their homeland, but when they got there they didn't suddenly start speaking Hebrew again. They actually continued to use Aramaic in everyday life while using Hebrew for religious and scholarly purposes, just as they had in Babylon. In 332 BC, Alexander the Great conquered the entire Persian Empire and spread the Greek philosophical ideas of Socrates, Plato, and especially Aristotle over the entire region. Alexander's empire fractured into a number of small kingdoms after his death which became known as the Hellenistic Kingdoms, one of which the Celestial Empire would stay in control of Israel. But the ideas that Alexander the Great spread would stay in all of these places and had a lasting effect on all of the people he conquered, including the Jews. Many Jews, especially those who had migrated to the Ptolemaic Kingdom, another Hellenistic kingdom that controlled Egypt and parts of Anatolia, sought to combine traditional Jewish theology with Greek philosophical ideas, a movement known as Hellenistic Judaism. Linguistically, the Hellenistic Jews spoke a dialect of Greek known as Koine Greek, which was a lingua franca of most of the Hellenistic kingdoms, and the most famous for translating the Hebrew Bible into this dialect of Greek in a translation known as the Septuagint. Because they wrote down so much, we can actually tell that the version of Koine Greek that the Hellenistic Jews spoke was a little bit different from the version that everyone else spoke. Not too much, just some minor differences in syntax that would have made Greek easier for someone whose native language was a Semitic language. And sometimes it wasn't even there at all, sometimes they did use perfect standard Koine Greek grammar, particularly if they were writing for a non-Jewish audience. It seems kind of small and unimportant, but the Jewish people adopting the language of the people they're living with and then modifying it in small ways to be more like Hebrew and Aramaic is going to be another big running theme of this video. Israel eventually rebelled against the Celestial Empire and formed its own kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty called the Hasmonean Kingdom, but only about 50 years after its independence it began to be plagued by civil war and during the civil war the Romans invaded and took over in 63 BC. About 80 years after that was when Christianity was founded, but that is not what this video is about, so I'm not getting into it. As one might expect by now the Jews eventually revolted against the Romans. Three times actually. The first time was between 63 and 73 AD and although the Temple on Jerusalem was destroyed and although the Romans ransacked and burned the entire city of Jerusalem and although a lot of Jews were exiled or sold into slavery, a lot of Jews still stayed in Israel. The second time they revolted was the Kitos war from 115 to 117, but it was fought mostly in the Jewish diaspora across the Roman Empire, particularly in Libya. It was only after the Bar Kokba revolt from 132 to 136 that the last of the Jews in Israel were either killed, exiled or sold into slavery. Following the Bar Kokba revolt, Jews are usually divided into two groups based on where they migrated afterwards, the Ashkenazi Jews and the Sephardi Jews. Linguistically, pretty similar things happened to both of these communities. There had probably been a few Jews who had migrated to some new place centuries ago, possibly as long ago as the original Babylonian exile, and when those first immigrants got there they learned and started speaking the language of the people they had just moved in with. But then, as more and more Jews started moving in, particularly after the Bar Kokba revolt, the Jews in the region formed their own comparatively insular community. And since a lot of the Jews who were moving in spoke Hebrew and Aramaic, the dialects these people spoke wound up being fundamentally the same as everyone else in the region, but with a lot of loanwords from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious ideas. As time went on, because the Jewish communities tended to isolate themselves from non-Jews a fair amount, their dialect slowly drifted from the dialect of the rest of the region, as both evolved in different directions over the centuries. The first place this happened was the Iberian Peninsula, modern day Spain and Portugal. The Jews who moved here became known as the Sephardi Jews, and to this day a lot of Jews descended from Jewish migrants from the area still speak a language sometimes called Judeo-Spanish, sometimes called Judezmo and sometimes called Ladino. The language is really similar to modern day Spanish, but you can also see how similar it is to other Romance languages with the Iberian Peninsula, like Portuguese, Catalan, and Aragonese. The vast majority of Sephardi Jews were exiled from Spain during the Inquisition, so most of them are more recently from the lands they fled to, including Muslim areas in Southern Europe, where the language picked up a fair amount of vocabulary from Arabic, Turkish, Greek, and various Slavic languages. The other group, the Ashkenazi Jews, developed a language that, next to Hebrew, is probably the most well known as a Jewish language, Yiddish. This language is descended from Middle High German, but it also has a fair amount of influence from old Italian, old French, and old Slavic languages, probably because a lot of Jewish immigrants to Germany around this time went through France, Italy, and Southern Europe to get there and had to learn those languages in between. From Germany, a lot of Ashkenazi Jews migrated into Eastern Europe, so Yiddish became widespread among the Jews in these areas too. Now those two languages are the most famous of the modern Jewish languages, but there are other groups of Jews who migrated to other places, the biggest of which would be the Mizrahi Jews, a bit of a catch-all term for Jews who have historically lived in the Middle East and North Africa. These Jews also often spoke their own dialect, different from their neighbors, but it was usually just barely its own dialect, not different enough for anyone to ever really call it its own language, like Judeo-Spanish or Yiddish. Usually these are dialects of Arabic, like Judeo-Iraqi Arabic or Judeo-Yemeni Arabic. Many of these Jewish languages are currently dwindling into extinction. The hardest group hit by the Holocaust was the Ashkenazi Jews. Of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, 5 million spoke Yiddish, reducing the world population of Yiddish speakers from 12 million to about 7 million. Alright, so I'm really worried that I won't be able to deal with topics involving a lot of violence in the recent past with the reverence they deserve, so how about we move on to the next period of Jewish history? How was I supposed to know that Israel wouldn't make the Gaza Strip right after I started working on these videos? Okay guys, I know a lot of us have really strong opinions about the Israel-Palestine I know I'm struggling to not just turn this whole video into one big rant on the topic, but even though this might not be the best time to ask this, I would really appreciate it if we could try to put our disagreements aside just for a minute and appreciate the fact that something really, really interesting has happened here linguistically. That thing being, Hebrew is a thing again. I mean, yeah, Hebrew had been preserved by Jews this whole time and used in religious writings, but no one had ever actually spoken it in everyday life since the Babylonian exile. During the Zionist movement, as millions of Jews started migrating to Ottoman Palestine during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the language that wound up becoming the language franca of all of these new people all over the world was Hebrew. And this wasn't just because Hebrew was the only language they all had in common, so of course they started using it to communicate. They could have just as easily used Arabic, the language that the people already lived there, or Yiddish, the most widespread modern Jewish language, or Pella would have been just as easy to bring back Aramaic. But no, they brought back Hebrew, and they did it mostly because a lot of them believed that Hebrew was the best language for the Jewish people to speak when they returned to Israel. As Hebrew became the dominant language of the region, millions of people started growing up with it as children, creating a whole new generation of native Hebrew speakers. So Hebrew went from having zero native speakers for one and a half thousand years to having about five million native speakers today. That is freaking unheard of! To give you some perspective, the number of times people have taken a completely dead language with no native speakers and created a community of people of any size made up mostly of native speakers of that language is exactly one. This is the only time anything like this has happened ever, anywhere. And yeah, modern Hebrew is really, really different from ancient Hebrew. In fact, grammatically, it might actually be more similar to Yiddish, but you know what? It still counts. A lot of people today want to do similar things, like getting everyone to speak Esperanto, or Lojban, or revive Proto into European. And although those languages becoming widespread in modern times is pretty seriously unlikely, at least in the near future, the example of Hebrew shows us that if enough people really want to make it happen, it can be done. Language usually changes into balls according to its own rules and laws, almost as if it's changing completely on its own. But Hebrew reminds us that language is still a thing people do, and if enough of us want to, we can do it however we want. Catch me later for more linguistics videos. Oh, and one more thing, just a quick message that an unlikely hood a few people understand and no one will care about. To people who are, like me, enthusiasts of a particular TV show, about a particular group of six colorful equines, and will be attending a certain large gathering that will be held on Baltimore this weekend, you may wish to know that I will not be attending, but fancy pants will. I'm forging brand new lans. I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm birthing life from sand. And I would see us lord thank you. I caught myself a throne. I got a pretty hat and now I'm