The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.
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.
The Arab citizens of Israel are the country's largest ethnic minority. They are colloquially referred to in Arabic as either 48-Arabs or 48-Palestinians, denoting the fact that they have remained in Israeli territory since the Green Line was agreed upon between Israel and the Arab countries as part of the 1949 Armistice Agreements. According to several sources, the majority of Arabs in Israel now prefer to be identified as Palestinian citizens of Israel. International media outlets often use the term "Arab-Israeli" or "Israeli-Arab" to distinguish Israel's Arab citizens from the Palestinian Arabs residing in the Israeli-occupied territories. They are formerly, or are descended from, those Arabs who belonged to the British Mandate for Palestine through Palestinian Citizenship Order 1925. Speakers of both Arabic and Hebrew, they self-identify in a wide range of intersectional civic, national, and religious identities.
Jewish languages are the various languages and dialects that developed in Jewish communities in the diaspora. The original Jewish language is Hebrew, supplanted as the primary vernacular by Aramaic following the Babylonian exile. Jewish languages feature a syncretism of Hebrew and Judeo-Aramaic with the languages of the local non-Jewish population.
Judeo-Arabic dialects are ethnolects formerly spoken by Jews throughout the Arab world. Under the ISO 639 international standard for language codes, Judeo-Arabic is classified as a macrolanguage under the code jrb, encompassing four languages: Judeo-Moroccan Arabic (aju), Judeo-Yemeni Arabic (jye), Judeo-Egyptian Arabic (yhd), and Judeo-Tripolitanian Arabic (yud).
Mizrahi Jews, also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) or Mizrachi (מִזְרָחִי) and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach, are a grouping of Jewish communities that lived in the Muslim world.
Levantine Arabic, also called Shami, is an Arabic variety spoken in the Levant, namely in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel and southern Turkey. With over 54 million speakers, Levantine is, alongside Egyptian, one of the two prestige varieties of spoken Arabic comprehensible all over the Arab world.
Mizrahi Hebrew, or Eastern Hebrew, refers to any of the pronunciation systems for Biblical Hebrew used liturgically by Mizrahi Jews: Jews from Arab countries or east of them and with a background of Arabic, Persian or other languages of Asia. As such, Mizrahi Hebrew is actually a blanket term for many dialects.
Arab Jews is a term for Jews living in or originating from the Arab world. The term is politically contested, often by Zionists or by Jews with roots in the Arab world who prefer to be identified as Mizrahi Jews. Many left or were expelled from Arab countries in the decades following the founding of Israel in 1948, and took up residence in Israel, Western Europe, the United States and Latin America.
Judeo-Tat or Juhuri is a Judeo-Persian dialect of the Tat language historically spoken by the Mountain Jews, primarily in Azerbaijan, Dagestan, and today in Israel. It belongs to the southwestern group of the Iranian division of the Indo-European languages with heavy influence from the Hebrew language. In the era of Soviet historiography, the Mountain Jews were mistakenly considered to be related to the Muslim Tats of Azerbaijan. However, they do not share a common linguistic heritage, as the Mountain Jews kept their native language, while the Muslim Tats eventually adopted Persian. The words Juvuri and Juvuro translate as "Jewish" and "Jews".
The Israeli population is linguistically and culturally diverse. Hebrew is the country's official language, and almost the entire population speaks it either as a first language or proficiently as a second language. Its standard form, known as Modern Hebrew, is the main medium of life in Israel. Arabic is used mainly by Israel's Arab minority which comprises about one-fifth of the population. Arabic has a special status under Israeli law.
Baghdad Jewish Arabic or autonymhaki mal yihud or el-haki malna is the variety of Arabic spoken by the Jews of Baghdad and other towns of Lower Mesopotamia in Iraq. This dialect differs from the North Mesopotamian Arabic spoken by Jews in Upper Mesopotamian cities such as Mosul and Anah. Baghdadi and Northern Mesopotamian are subvarieties of Judeo-Iraqi Arabic.
Judeo-Moroccan Arabic is the variety or the varieties of the Moroccan vernacular Arabic spoken by Jews living or formerly living in Morocco. Historically, the majority of Moroccan Jews spoke Moroccan vernacular Arabic, or Darija, as their first language, even in Amazigh areas, which was facilitated by their literacy in Hebrew script. The Darija spoken by Moroccan Jews, which they referred to as al-‘arabiya diyalna as opposed to ‘arabiya diyal l-məslimīn, typically had distinct features, such as š>s and ž>z "lisping," some lexical borrowings from Hebrew, and in some regions Hispanic features from the migration of Sephardi Jews following the Alhambra Decree. The Jewish dialects of Darija spoken in different parts of Morocco had more in common with the local Moroccan Arabic dialects than they did with each other.
Israeli Jews or Jewish Israelis comprise Israel's largest ethnic and religious community. The core of their demographic consists of those with a Jewish identity and their descendants, including ethnic Jews and religious Jews alike. Approximately 99% of the global Israeli Jewish population resides in Israel; yerida is uncommon and is offset exponentially by aliyah, but those who do emigrate from the country typically relocate to the Western world. As such, the Israeli diaspora is closely tied to the broader Jewish diaspora.
Varieties of Arabic are the linguistic systems that Arabic speakers speak natively. Arabic is a Semitic language within the Afroasiatic family that originated in the Arabian Peninsula. There are considerable variations from region to region, with degrees of mutual intelligibility that are often related to geographical distance and some that are mutually unintelligible. Many aspects of the variability attested to in these modern variants can be found in the ancient Arabic dialects in the peninsula. Likewise, many of the features that characterize the various modern variants can be attributed to the original settler dialects as well as local native languages and dialects. Some organizations, such as SIL International, consider these approximately 30 different varieties to be separate languages, while others, such as the Library of Congress, consider them all to be dialects of Arabic.
Israeli Druze or Druze Israelis are an ethnoreligious minority among the Arab citizens of Israel.
Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, informally known as the Nation-State Bill or the Nationality Bill, is an Israeli Basic Law that specifies the country's significance to the Jewish people. It was passed by the Knesset—with 62 in favour, 55 against, and two abstentions—on 19 July 2018 and is largely symbolic and declarative in nature. The law outlines a number of roles and responsibilities by which Israel is bound in order to fulfill the purpose of serving as the Jews' nation-state. However, it was met with sharp backlash internationally and has been characterized as racist and undemocratic by some critics. After it was passed, several groups in the Jewish diaspora expressed concern that it was actively violating Israel's self-defined legal status as a "Jewish and democratic state" in exchange for adopting an exclusively Jewish identity. The European Union stated that the Nation-State Bill had complicated the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, while the Arab League, the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Muslim World League condemned it as a manifestation of apartheid.
Palestinian Arabic is a dialect continuum of mutually intelligible varieties of Levantine Arabic spoken by most Palestinians in Palestine, Israel and in the Palestinian diaspora.
Gabriel Naddaf is an Israeli Greek Orthodox priest. He serves as a judge in Israel's religious court system and as a spokesman for the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem. He is one of the founders of the Forum for recruiting Christians in the Israel Defense Forces.
Modern Palestinian Judeo-Arabic is a variety of Palestinian Arabic spoken by Jews in Israel. As Jews from Morocco established a community in the Galilee and around Jerusalem, their dialect of Maghrebi Judeo-Arabic mixed with Palestinian Arabic. It peaked at 10,000 speakers and thrived alongside Yiddish until the 20th century. But today it is nearly extinct with only 5 speakers remaining in the Galilee. It would begin to decline due to the revival of Hebrew as Hebrew became the dominant language of the Yishuv, or pre-Israel Jewish population of Palestine. Modern Judeo-Palestinian Arabic contains influence from Judeo-Moroccan Arabic, Judeo-Lebanese Arabic, and Judeo-Syrian Arabic.
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