Living Aramaic לשון ארמית חיה

The Jews of Kurdistan called themselves Hozaye or Anshe Targum, "the people of the Targum." Their language is North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic, and the dialects divided down to the level of the village: "almost every village and town had its own."

Lishana Deni (לשנא דני, "our language")—Zakho, Amedi, western Iraqi Kurdistan; closest of all to the neighbouring Christian Neo-Aramaic varieties, which is itself the point: the language here is shared with the neighbours, not a Jewish marker. Lishan Didan (לשן דידן, "ours")—Urmia and Iranian Azerbaijan, Salmas, Naghadeh; the substrate is not Kurdish but Turkish-Azeri. Lishanid Noshan—around Erbil. Hulaula—Sanandaj, Bijar, Saqqez and Kerend in Iranian Kurdistan; of the Jewish varieties it has the most living speakers.

One lexical correction: Nash Didan and Lishan Didan are the same community and the same dialect, named once after the people and once after the language. Many popular sources make two peoples of them. There is one.

The language is well described, and that is the work of a few people: Yona Sabar (Los Angeles)—the Zakho dialect and A Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dictionary of 2002; Geoffrey Khan (Cambridge)—grammars of the Jewish varieties and the North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic database; Hezy Mutzafi.

Beyond linguistics there is something rarer still: the oral heritage of Zakho—midrashim, epic songs, ballads, part of it shared with Muslim Kurdish tradition. It is exceptional precisely because the Jews of Zakho were, as the scholarship says plainly, among the least literate in the diaspora: reading and writing were for few, and transmission went by voice. What other communities wrote down, here they sang—and so the surviving corpus gives what written collections do not.

One tradition must be named as tradition. "The Jews of Kurdistan are the Ten Lost Tribes" is asserted often, in reference works too, on the strength of Aramaic speech and 2 Kings 17 on the deportation to "the cities of the Medes." Aramaic speech proves late-antique Mesopotamian continuity, not descent from the exiles of the eighth century BCE. It is a beautiful and old conjecture, but not evidence.