Judeo-Arabic as an Endangered Language: Memoir by Samantha Ellis

This passage comes from Samantha Ellis’s memoir, Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture (published in the United States as Always Carry Salt). The book discusses how Ellis’s family shifted from Judeo-Iraqi Arabic to English after migrating to the United Kingdom and her efforts to learn some of her childhood language. This excerpt focuses on one of the factors in the endangerment of Judeo-Arabic, the “revernacularization” of Hebrew, or the making of the Jewish language of prayer and texts into a vernacular as it had been in antiquity. This passage uses several metaphors to portray various languages, and elsewhere in the book, Ellis describes Judeo-Arabic as “the intimate, vulnerable language of safety, of closeness, trust and belonging.”