History

Like many other peoples of the Hellenistic world, Jews were well acquainted with the Greek language and used it as a lingua franca, a language of culture and a means of everyday communication throughout the Mediterranean. Ancient Judeo-Greek is reflected in epigraphic sources, Bible translations, such as the Septuagint (LXX) and Aquila, and literary works, such as Josephus Flavius, Eupolemus, etc. Ancient Judeo-Greek of biblical translations was by far the most influential form of the ethnolect, since the canonized LXX exercised a profound effect on the nascent religiolect of Greek Christianity.

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​Jews continued to use Greek throughout late antiquity and the early Byzantine period. However, it is unclear to what degree the knowledge of the Greek alphabet was preserved. Most language relics that survived from this historical stage, admittedly scarce, are written in Hebrew script and originate from the Cairo Genizah. They appear typically as glosses to the authoritative Hebrew texts (Scripture and Mishna). Occasional admixture of Judeo-Greek can be found inside the texts of a more quotidian nature (private documents, instructions for the Passover meal).

 

The first centuries of Ottoman rule were, on the contrary, rich in extensive and coherent texts. There were biblical translations covering entire books, and short lyrical and para-liturgical poems. Some of these texts have been transmitted orally or in writing up to the Second World War. Pride of place in this period belongs to the Constantinople Pentateuch (1547), the largest Judeo-Greek text in Hebrew script.

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With the arrival of Italian- and Spanish-speaking Jews to the Ottoman Empire in the late fifteenth century, Judeo-Greek began to influence the languages of immigrant communities. The exchange of lexical material occurred in both directions.

 

Since the creation of the independent Greek state in 1830, organized teaching of the Greek language to Jewish schoolchildren became increasingly common, and it soon resulted in the spread of Greek literacy and switching to the Greek alphabet as the main system of writing Judeo-Greek.

 

Although the Holocaust decimated the Romaniote communities, a few speakers of Judeo-Greek varieties remained alive. The survivors intermarried with the descendants of Sephardic communities, Jews from other countries and local Greeks. Many Judeo-Spanish speakers in Greek territories abandoned their language in favor of Greek, occasionally incorporating Jewish features. The area where Judeo-Greek is now spoken is limited almost exclusively to Greece.  

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Linguistic features and current status​

As a rule, different varieties of Judeo-Greek were mutually intelligible with linguistic varieties spoken by the surrounding population.

 

Judeo-Greek in its current form deviates from Standard Modern Greek only minimally: it includes the vocabulary of religious observances and traditional forms of communal life, often originating from Judeo-Spanish, Judeo-English or Israeli Hebrew rather than from earlier forms of Judeo-Greek.