| Total population | |
|---|---|
| 1500 [1] -4,500 [2] [lower-alpha 1] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Nazareth, Jish | |
| Languages | |
| Religion | |
| Syriac Christianity (Maronite Church, Syriac Catholic Church, Syriac Orthodox Church) | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Maronites in Israel, Assyrians in Israel |
Arameans in Israel are a Christian minority residing in State of Israel. They claim to descend from the Arameans, an ancient Semitic-speaking people in the Middle East in the 1st millennium BC.
Some Syriac Christians in the Middle East espouse an Aramean ethnic identity, and a minority still speak various Neo-Aramaic languages, with the Eastern branch being widely spoken. Until 2014, self-identified Arameans in Israel were registered as ethnic Arabs or without an ethnic identity. Since September 2014, Aramean has become a valid identity on the Israeli population census, making Israel the first country in the world to officially recognize Arameans as a modern community. Christian families or clans who can speak Aramaic and/or have an Aramaic family tradition are eligible to register on the census as ethnic Arameans in Israel. [4]
As of 2017, 16 people had registered as Aramean in the Population Registry. [1] According to interviewees in a 2022 article in Middle Eastern Studies , 2,500 Israelis had registered as Arameans at the Israeli Ministry of Interior, whereas another 2,000 have applied for changing their national denomination from Arab to Aramean. These 4,500 people would constitute c. 1.5% of Israel's Christian population. [2]
In September 2014, Minister of the Interior Gideon Sa'ar instructed the PIBA to recognise Arameans as an ethnicity separate from Israeli Arabs. [4] [5] Under the Ministry of the Interior's guidance, people born into Christian families or clans who have either Aramaic or Maronite cultural heritage within their family are eligible to register as Arameans. About 200 Christian families were thought to be eligible prior to this decision. [6] According to an August 9, 2013 Israel Hayom article, at that time an estimated 10,500 persons were eligible to receive Aramean ethnic status according to the new regulation, including 10,000 Maronites (which included 2,000 former SLA members) and 500 Syriac Catholics. [7]
The first person to receive the "Aramean" ethnic status in Israel was 2 year old Yaakov Halul in Jish on October 20, 2014. [8]
In 2019, an Israeli court ruled that Aramean minorities could choose a Jewish or Arab education, rather than requiring children with Aramean identity to be automatically enrolled in Arabic-language schools. [9]
The recognition of the Aramean ethnicity caused mixed reactions among Israeli minorities, the Christian community, and among the general Arab Israeli population. Representatives of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem denounced the move. [10]
Mordechai Kedar advocates the recognition of the Aramean identity and calls on the government of Israel to promote the awareness regarding this issue on the basis of the international principle of ethnic self-determination as espoused by Wilson's 14 points. [11] One of the supporters of the recognition of the Aramean identity is Gabriel Naddaf, who is a priest to the Greek Orthodox Christians in Israel. He advocated on behalf of his Aramean followers and thanked the Interior Ministry's decision as a "historic move". [12]
In July 2016, an article in the Ha'aretz estimated the number of Israeli Christians eligible to register as Arameans in Israel to be 13,000. [13] In October 2019, the Israeli Christian Aramaic Organization estimated the number of Israeli citizens, who are eligible to obtain Aramean affiliation at 15,000. [9]
As of 2017, 16 people had registered as Aramean in the Population Registry. [1]
According to interviewees in a 2022 article in Middle Eastern Studies , 2,500 Israelis have registered as Arameans at the Israeli Ministry of Interior, whereas another 2,000 have applied for changing their national denomination from Arab to Aramean. These 4,500 people would constitute c. 1,5% of Israel's Christian population. [2]
Aramaic is a Northwest Semitic language that originated in the ancient region of Syria and quickly spread to Mesopotamia, the southern Levant, southeastern Anatolia, Eastern Arabia and the Sinai Peninsula, where it has been continually written and spoken in different varieties for over three thousand years.
Israelis are the citizens and nationals of the State of Israel. The country's populace is composed primarily of Jews and Arabs, who respectively account for 75 percent and 20 percent of the national figure; followed by other ethnic and religious minorities, who account for 5 percent.
Assyrians are an indigenous ethnic group native to Mesopotamia, a geographical region in West Asia. Modern Assyrians descend directly from Ancient Mesopotamians such as ancient Assyrians and Babylonians. Modern Assyrians may culturally self-identify as Syriacs, Chaldeans, or Arameans for religious, geographic, and tribal identification.
The Arameans, or Aramaeans, were an ancient Semitic-speaking people in the Near East that was first recorded in historical sources from the late 12th century BC. The Aramean homeland, sometimes known as the land of Aram, encompassed central regions of modern Syria.
Aram was a historical region mentioned in early cuneiforms and in the Bible, populated by Arameans. The area did not develop into a larger empire but consisted of a number of small states in present-day Syria and northern Israel. Some of the states are mentioned in the Old Testament, Damascus being the most outstanding one, which came to encompass most of Syria. Furthermore, Aram-Damascus is commonly referred to as simply Aram in the Old Testament.
The term Melkite, also written Melchite, refers to various Eastern Christian churches of the Byzantine Rite and their members originating in West Asia. The term comes from the common Central Semitic root m-l-k, meaning "royal", referring to the loyalty to the Byzantine emperor. The term acquired religious connotations as denominational designation for those Christians who accepted imperial religious policies, based on Christological resolutions of the Council of Chalcedon (451).
The Kingdom of Aram-Damascus was an Aramean polity that existed from the late-12th century BCE until 732 BCE, and was centred around the city of Damascus in the Southern Levant. Alongside various tribal lands, it was bounded in its later years by the polities of Assyria to the north, Ammon to the south, and Israel to the west.
The Lebanese people are the people inhabiting or originating from Lebanon. The term may also include those who had inhabited Mount Lebanon and the Anti-Lebanon Mountains prior to the creation of the modern Lebanese state. The major religious groups among the Lebanese people within Lebanon are Shia Muslims (27%), Sunni Muslims (27%), Maronite Christians (21%), Greek Orthodox Christians (8%), Melkite Christians (5%), Druze (5%), Protestant Christians (1%). The largest contingent of Lebanese, however, comprise a diaspora in North America, South America, Europe, Australia and Africa, which is predominantly Maronite Christian.
Syrians are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, who have Arabic, especially its Levantine dialect, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend of both indigenous elements and the foreign cultures that have come to rule the land and its people over the course of thousands of years. By the seventh century, most of the inhabitants of the Levant spoke Aramaic. In the aftermath of the Muslim conquest of the Levant in 634, Arabic became the dominant language, but a minority of Syrians retained Aramaic, which is still spoken in its Syriac and Western dialects.
Arabs represent the major ethnicity in Syria, in addition to the presence of several, much smaller ethnic groups.
The Christians of Iraq are considered to be one of the oldest continuous Christian communities in the world.
Terms for Syriac Christians are endonymic (native) and exonymic (foreign) terms, that are used as designations for Syriac Christians, as adherents of Syriac Christianity. In its widest scope, Syriac Christianity encompass all Christian denominations that follow East Syriac Rite or West Syriac Rite, and thus use Classical Syriac as their main liturgical language. Traditional divisions among Syriac Christians along denominational lines are reflected in the use of various theological and ecclesiological designations, both historical and modern. Specific terms such as: Jacobites, Saint Thomas Syrian Christians, Maronites, Melkites, Nasranis, and Nestorians have been used in reference to distinctive groups and branches of Eastern Christianity, including those of Syriac liturgical and linguistic traditions. Some of those terms are polysemic, and their uses have been a subject of terminological disputes between different communities, and also among scholars.
Assyrian nationalism is a movement of the Assyrian people that advocates for independence or autonomy within the regions they inhabit in northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey.
The Western Aramaic languages represent a specific subgroup of Aramaic once spoken widely throughout the ancient Levant, predominantly in the south, and Sinai, including ancient Damascus, Nabatea, Judea, across the Palestine Region, Transjordan, Samaria as well as Lebanon in the north. The group was divided into several regional variants, spoken mainly by the Nabataeans, Mizrahi Jews, Melkites of Jewish descent, Samaritans and Maronites. All of the Western Aramaic languages are considered extinct today, except Western Neo-Aramaic, which is still spoken by the Arameans (Syriacs) in the towns of Maaloula and Jubb'adin in Syria.
Christianity is the third largest religion in Israel, after Judaism and Islam. At the end of 2022, Christians made up 1.9% of the Israeli population, numbering approximately 185,000. 75.8% of the Christians in Israel are Arab Christians. Christians make up 6.9% of the Arab-Israelis.
Ethnic groups in the Middle East, in the 'transcontinental' region which is commonly a geopolitical term designating the intercontinental region comprising West Asia without the South Caucasus, and also comprising Egypt in North Africa. The region has historically been a crossroad of different cultures and languages. Since the 1960s, the changes in political and economic factors have significantly altered the ethnic composition of groups in the region. While some ethnic groups have been present in the region for millennia, others have arrived fairly recently through immigration. The largest socioethnic groups in the region are Arabs, Turks, Persians, Kurds, and Azerbaijanis but there are dozens of other ethnic groups that have hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions of members.
Maronites are a Syriac Christian ethnoreligious group native to the Eastern Mediterranean and Levant region of West Asia, whose members traditionally belong to the Maronite Church, with the largest concentration long residing near Mount Lebanon in modern Lebanon. The Maronite Church is an Eastern Catholic sui iuris particular church in full communion with the pope and the rest of the Catholic Church.
The Assyrian conquest of Aram concerns the series of conquests of largely Aramean, Phoenician, Sutean and Neo-Hittite states in the Levant by the Neo-Assyrian Empire. This region was known as Eber-Nari and Aram during the Middle Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
Maronites in Israel are an ethnoreligious minority who belong to the Maronite Catholic Church, which has historically been tied with Lebanon. They derive their name from the Syriac Saint Maron, whose followers moved to Mount Lebanon from northern Syria, establishing the Maronite Church, most of whose members currently reside in Lebanon. The Maronites in Israel encompass the long-existing Maronite community in Jish, Haifa, and Nazareth areas, as well as the families of former South Lebanon Army members, 7,000 of whom fled South Lebanon in April–May 2000 to Israel. Of these approximately 7,000 migrants, just 2,700 have remained in Israel: over the years, most of them have decided to either return home to Lebanon or to move to Europe or the United States.
The Catholic Church in the Middle East is under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. The Catholic Church is said to have traditionally originated in the Middle East in the 1st century AD, and was one of the major religions of the region from the 4th-century Byzantine reforms until the centuries following the Arab Islamic conquests of the 7th century AD. Ever since, its proportion has decreased until today's diaspora tendency, mainly due to persecution by Islamic majority societies. In most Islamic countries, the Catholic Church is severely restricted or outlawed. Significant exceptions include Israel and Lebanon.
