In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives

[Harold Schiffman]

April 22, 2008
Malula Journal
In Syrian Villages, the Language of Jesus Lives
By ROBERT F. WORTH

MALULA, Syria — Elias Khoury can still remember the days when old
people in this cliffside village spoke only Aramaic, the language of
Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital, Damascus, only by
a long and bumpy bus ride over the mountains, was almost entirely
Christian, a vestige of an older and more diverse Middle East that
existed before the arrival of Islam. Now Mr. Khoury, 65, gray-haired
and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the
language he spoke with his own mother. "It's disappearing," he said in
Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed in the mud-and-straw house
where he grew up. "A lot of the Aramaic vocabulary I don't use any
more, and I've lost it."

Malula, along with two smaller neighboring villages where Aramaic is
also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic
island. In the Convent of St. Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above
town, young girls recite the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and
booklets about the language are on sale at a gift shop in the town
center. But the island has grown smaller over the years, and some
local people say they fear it will not last. Once a large population
stretching across Syria, Turkey and Iraq, Aramaic-speaking Christians
have slowly melted away, some fleeing westward, some converting to
Islam. In recent decades the process has accelerated, with large
numbers of Iraqi Christians escaping the violence and chaos of their
country.

Yona Sabar, a professor of Semitic languages at the University of
California, Los Angeles, said that today, Malula and its neighboring
villages, Jabadeen and Bakhaa, represent "the last Mohicans" of
Western Aramaic, which was the language Jesus presumably spoke in
Palestine two millennia ago. With its ancient houses clinging
picturesquely to a dramatic cleft in the mountains, Malula was once
remote from Damascus, the Syrian capital, and local people spent their
lives here. But now there are few jobs, and young people tend to move
to the city for work, Mr. Khoury said.

Even if they return, they are less likely to speak Aramaic. Buses to
Damascus used to leave once or twice a day; now they leave every 15
minutes, and with better roads the journey takes about an hour.
Constant exchange with the big city, not to mention television and the
Internet, has eroded Malula's linguistic separateness.  "The young
generations have lost interest" in Aramaic, Mr. Khoury said sadly. His
granddaughter, a bright-eyed 17-year-old in blue jeans named Katya,
offered a few samples of the language: "Awafih" for hello, "alloy a
pelach a feethah" for God be with you. She learned Aramaic mostly at a
new language school in Malula, established two years ago to keep the
language alive. She knows some songs, too, and has started learning to
write the language — something even her grandfather never did.

Mr. Khoury smiles at the words, but recalls how in his own childhood
60 years ago, schoolteachers slapped students who reverted to Aramaic
in class, enforcing the government's "Arabization" policy. "Now it's
reversed," he says. Families speak Arabic at home and are more likely
to learn Aramaic at the language center, where some foreigners also
study. In the town's central intersection, a group of young people
outside a market seemed to confirm Mr. Khoury's gloomy view. "I speak
some Aramaic, but I can barely understand it," said Fathi Mualem, 20.

John Francis, 20, said, "My father wrote a book about it, but I barely
speak any." (Western-sounding names are common among Christians in
Syria and Lebanon.)  Malula — Aramaic for "entrance" — derives its
name from a legend that evokes the town's separate religious heritage.
St. Takla, a beautiful young woman who had studied with St. Paul, is
said to have fled from her home in what is now Turkey after her pagan
parents persecuted her for her newfound Christian faith. Arriving in
Malula, she found her path blocked by a mountain. She prayed, and the
rocks divided in two, a stream flowing out from under her feet.

Today, tourists walk up and down the narrow canyon where the saint is
said to have fled, with rose-colored rocks rising 100 feet above a
well-trod footpath. Nearby, two dozen nuns live at the Convent of St.
Takla, presiding over a small orphanage. ("We teach the children the
Lord's Prayer in Aramaic," said one black-clad nun, "but everything
else is in Arabic.") There is a shrine in the mountainside where St.
Takla is said to have lived, with a tree growing horizontally out of
it.

But even the town's Christian identity is fading. Muslims have begun
replacing the emigrating Christians, and now Malula — once entirely
Christian — is almost half Muslim, residents say. Malula's linguistic
heritage stirred some interest after the release of Mel Gibson's 2004
film "The Passion of the Christ," with its mix of Aramaic, Latin and
Hebrew dialogue. Virtually everyone in town seems to have seen the
film, but few said they understood it. That was not their fault: it
included different dialects of Aramaic, and the actors' pronunciation
made it hard to understand anything, said Mr. Sabar, the Semitic
languages professor.

Aramaic has also changed over the centuries, taking on features of
Syrian Arabic, Mr. Sabar said. But most residents of Malula believe
that their town's ancestral language is still the same one Jesus
spoke, and will speak again when he returns. "Our parents and
grandparents always spoke to us in this language," said Suhail Milani,
a 50-year-old bus driver with a wizened face. "I hope it will not
disappear."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/world/middleeast/22aramaic.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=middleeast&pagewanted=print

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