This talk begins with the wider world of Jewish languages and then turns to Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic as a fascinating case study. Spoken by the Jews of Baghdad, this dialect offers a unique window into the history, culture, and everyday life of one of the Middle East's oldest Jewish communities. 

Through stories and sayings, the talk shows how a language can preserve memory, identity, and traces of the past long after a community has been dispersed. It explores what made Judeo-Baghdadi distinctive, how it differed from the Arabic spoken by other communities in Baghdad, and what it can reveal about the history of Iraqi Jews.

Assaf Bar-Moshe is a linguist and dialectologist who received his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research focuses on the documentation and analysis of Mesopotamian Judeo-Arabic dialects, with particular emphasis on comparative approaches to Jewish Arabic varieties in the region.

He is currently based at Freie Universität Berlin, where he works on documenting endangered Judeo-Arabic. In addition to his academic work, Assaf teaches at the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages, where he contributes to the preservation and transmission of underrepresented Jewish language traditions.