ICJudaism: A Teacher’s Guide to Judaism
Hosted by ICTeachers Formerly: Mike’s Rough Guide to Judaism
Disclaimer:
The contents of these pages represent the author’s personal views, experience and
understanding.
There are bound to be some things here that some Jews would disagree
with.
Languages
Judaism is something of a polyglot religion. Throughout much of our history, Jews
have been "strangers in strange lands" -
Jews have always learned to speak the languages of the countries they lived in. They have also spoken their own languages. The language of prayer has always been Hebrew. The language of conversation has varied from community to community, the 2 best known Jewish vernacular languages are Yiddish and Ladino.
Hebrew is one of the world's older languages. It is the language in which the Torah was originally written and in which it is still read in synagogues and houses of study. It was the language spoken by the biblical Hebrews. In orthodox communities the entire synagogue service is conducted in Hebrew. In progressive communities some of the service will be conducted in vernacular languages.
A few prayers are written in Aramaic rather than Hebrew. Aramaic was the dominant language spoken in the Near East from about the 4th Century BCE to the 6th Century CE. The two languages are quite closely related.
Ivrit
Ivrit is a modernised variant of Hebrew which is spoken in Israel, although there are still Charedic groups who find this distressing, since they take the view that Hebrew should remain a language purely for prayer until after the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah).
Pronunciation of Hebrew varies between communities. Outside Israel there are slight differences between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi communities (e.g. Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to say Shabbos and tallus when Sephardis would say Shabbat and tallit).
Written Hebrew uses an alphabet (usually called the aleph-
The Hebrew alphabet has only consonants, which makes it impossible for someone unfamiliar with the language to pronounce words from a written text. About 1200 years ago a system of dots and other marks was invented to act as vowels. These marks, which are placed under, above or next to the letters, are technically known as diacritic marks. In Hebrew they are called nikkudim but they are often simply referred to as points. A text which has the nikkudim is known as a pointed text.
Like other Semitic languages (eg Arabic), Hebrew is written from right to left. To those used to English, Hebrew books seem to open at the “wrong” end!
Click here to see a sample of pointed Hebrew text.
There is also a cursive form of written Hebrew whose letters are very different in shape from their square capital equivalents.
Plurals
(An attempt to clarify possible confusion with Hebrew terms used on this site)
Hebrew is a gendered language. Masculine words most commonly end with a consonant
and are usually pluralised by adding the suffix -
Numbers
Hebrew has no numerals. Instead, letters have numerical values eg. The first 9 letters
of the aleph-
Modern Hebrew uses Arabic numerals.
Hundreds of years ago, Jewish mystics developed a theory that used the values of
letters to assign values to words and to assign meanings to them eg, to link the
meanings of words with equal values. This system is called Gematria. (There’s lots
about it on the net -
Although the Hebrew letters are so different in appearance to the Latin alphabet
which is used for English, they share the same origins. The first two Hebrew letters
are ALEPH and BET (indeed we call the collection of letters the Aleph-
There are quite a number of Hebrew loan words in English including amen, hallelujah, bedlam, cherub, jubilee, messiah, Satan, hosannah and sabbath. Many common names are also Hebrew in origin, eg. Adam, Benjamin, Eve, Jack, John, Michael, Rachel, Rebecca, Sarah to mention just a few.
