ABSTRACT
Medieval Judaeo-Arabic (MJA) covers the period between the seventh and the fifteenth centuries. MJA is a scriptolect, a heteroglossic multi-level variety or a continuum. The seventh century Arabo-Islamic conquests—an undisputed fact—introduced the ‘Mediterranean society’ and its literary systems into a new historical phase, in which the Arabic culture, and the Arabic language and literature, acquired a central position. Linguistically, the influence of the Arabic language on Medieval Hebrew can be seen in its lexicon, morphology and syntax. The doctrine of the Beauty of Hebrew was formulated in the Middle Ages as result of and a reaction against the Islamic doctrine of the superiority of the Arabic language. The languages that are attested to in the literary production of medieval Arabic-speaking Jews are Arabic, Aramaic and Hebrew. Medieval Hebrew was not a living variety either, but a written variety. Hebrew/Arabic diglossia is a literary diglossia, i.e. two languages which compete for one function: the language of the written word.
