Some groups, like Muslims, share a sacred book, written in a sacred tongue. Some groups, like Roma, share an understanding of common ancestry and historical migration. And some groups, like Chinese outside of China, maintain diasporic ties to their ancestral homelands. All of these characteristics have implications for language ideology and language use, and all of them apply to the Jews. Since their dispersion from ancient Palestine, where they spoke Hebrew and then Aramaic, Jews have lived throughout North Africa, Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, speaking varieties of the local languages. Their linguistic distinctiveness has stemmed from their ongoing study, recitation, and creation of sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts, the continued influence—and sometimes maintenance—of ancestral languages like Yiddish and Judeo-Greek, and diasporic ties to their ancient homeland and, eventually, its new(-old) language, Modern Hebrew.

In Languages of the Jews, Bernard Spolsky tells this story in impressive detail, using the approaches of sociology of language and sociolinguistic ecology. Following Hymes’ (Reference Hymes1974) notion that analysis should start with a community rather than with a language, Spolsky's book is organized by geographic location and era. After an introduction about Hebrew in contemporary Israel, we start the historical journey with the biblical narrative of the Children of Israel, the land of Canaan, the Kingdom of Judah, and Hellenistic and Roman Palestine. We learn about the Babylonian exile and other nearby diasporic communities. Then we travel to the Arabian peninsula and Africa, Muslim lands, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Eastern Europe. In the modern era, we visit Britain and its colonies, Scandinavia, and the New World, and then we return to the Middle East and to Zion. For each Jewish community, we learn which languages were spoken, written, and taught, as well as the impact of language policy, both communally and externally imposed.

To find this information, Spolsky, a world-renowned authority on language policy, consulted a dizzying array of sources, from archaeology to archives, from censuses to periodicals, from store signs to library records. At times, he brings in examples from contemporary sociology of language to gain an understanding of the past. For example, he mentions Papua New Guinea and the Navajo Nation in explaining Hebrew-Aramaic bilingualism and the relationship between spoken and written language in the sixth century BCE.

Spolsky's descriptions have implications for the sociology of language. We learn about the importance of historical developments—migrations, persecutions, and upward socioeconomic mobility (or lack thereof)—in influencing patterns of language use. He posits that ‘Jewish languages are distinguished by the situation of their speakers as a minority, usually a persecuted one in forced isolation from or subordination to the speakers of the majority Gentile variety’ (p. 265). This understanding allows us to analyze historical Jewish language use in comparison to that of contemporary minority groups, such as African Americans in the United States and Turks in Germany.

In addition, we hear repeatedly about the role of language ideology, especially in the continued maintenance of Hebrew as a sacred language and eventually its revival starting in the late nineteenth century.

This emphasis on language ideology influencing language use aligns with research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology (e.g. Silverstein Reference Silverstein, Clyne, Hanks and Hofbauer1979; Woolard & Schieffelin Reference Woolard and Schieffelin1994; Schieffelin, Woolard, & Kroskrity Reference Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity1998), including studies of language revitalization efforts in Native American communities (Kroskrity & Field Reference Kroskrity and Field2009) and other colonial and postcolonial contexts (Makihara & Schieffelin Reference Makihara and Schieffelin2007).

Spolsky's book also has implications for the study of language and religion, a field that has seen theoretical and synthesizing work in recent years (e.g. Omoniyi & Fishman Reference Omoniyi and Fishman2006). Religious observance often involves the diglossic use of distinct languages or language varieties (Ferguson Reference Ferguson1959), a phenomenon demonstrated by Jewish communities throughout history in their use of Hebrew, Aramaic, and other languages alongside their spoken vernaculars (Fishman Reference Fishman and Fishman1985a). Spolsky's descriptions of Jewish multilingualism align with Fishman's description of religious languages/varieties as ‘more stable’ than others and as tending to influence their secular counterparts (Fishman Reference Fishman2006:15). Jews not only maintained Hebrew as a sacred language but allowed many Hebrew loanwords to influence their spoken vernaculars (Bunis Reference Bunis2005).

Jews are a religious group, but they are also a worldwide people with diasporic ties, and they are a series of ethnic minority groups in countries around the world. As we are reminded by Spolsky's emphasis on merchants’ logs, communal records, periodicals, and belles lettres, this book fits not only into the sociology of language and religion but also language and ethnicity and diaspora. Research in all of these fields tends to focus on a particular group or locale synchronically. Spolsky's book broadens our perspective by offering dozens of synchronic portraits of outposts of a worldwide people in various times and places, as well as some synthesizing diachronic analysis.

Languages of the Jews is the most comprehensive treatment of the sociology of Jewish languages to date. It complements the editorial and theoretical work of Joshua Fishman in the 1980s (Reference Fishman1981, Reference Fishman and Fishman1985a, Reference Fishman1985b, Reference Fishman1987) by presenting historical information on language practices and ideologies in many Jewish communities. In conjunction with more structurally oriented theoretical and typological works on Jewish languages (e.g. Weinreich Reference Weinreich and Weinreich1954, Reference Weinreich, Glasser, Noble and Fishman1973/2008; Wexler Reference Wexler1981; Alvarez-Péreyre & Jean Baumgarten Reference Alvarez-Péreyre and Baumgarten2003; Benor Reference Benor2008; Hary Reference Hary2009), scholars can use Spolsky's book to continue the work of comparative sociolinguistic analysis of Jewish communities.

Such analysis appears sporadically throughout Spolsky's book, but at times I take issue with his conclusions. For example, in discussing Jewish language practices of the ancient and medieval worlds, he writes that there was ‘surprisingly little variation in pattern’ (p. 190). I agree that there are similarities among Jewish communities of that era, but Spolsky neglects to analyze what I see as crucial differences. For example, speakers of two Jewish languages—Yiddish (a Germanic language with many Semitic, Slavic, and other influences) and Judezmo (Ottoman Judeo-Spanish)—were exceptional in that they maintained them for centuries surrounded by completely different languages (Slavic and Balkan, respectively). As I argue elsewhere (Benor Reference Benor2008), it is important to analyze Yiddish and Judezmo differently from other Jewish languages, not only when exploring their origins or why/how they were maintained for so long, but also when investigating their decline in the modern era. Spolsky explains that emancipation and enlightenment led Jews to ‘acquire the co-territorial dominant languages of their countries of residence’ (p. 190). I would argue that this process of language assimilation looks different for Yiddish speakers acquiring Polish and for Judezmo speakers acquiring Turkish than it does for Judeo-Venetian speakers acquiring Italian or for Judeo-Greek speakers acquiring Greek. The former instances involve learning a new language, while the latter involve learning which distinctive features to avoid and how to modify accents and intonational patterns to sound less Jewish.

While some treatments of Jewish languages omit discussion of contemporary communities or dismiss them as simply speaking the local languages, Spolsky devotes ample time to Jews in contemporary Europe, Latin America, and the former British Empire. He mentions Jewish Lithuanian, Jewish Dutch, and other contemporary varieties but, strangely, concludes that the ‘existence of a Jewish variety of English [is] controversial’ (p. 225), due to the variation I describe according to religiosity, social networks, and other factors (Benor Reference Benor2011). Similarly, he minimizes the maintenance of Yiddish by contemporary Hasidim in New York based on Fader's (Reference Fader2009) analysis of gender variation in Yiddish-English bilingualism (p. 225). Surely variation existed in the language of other premodern and modern Jewish communities, especially according to gender, but Spolsky does not question the existence of Judeo-Aramaic, Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Malayalam, and so on as distinctly Jewish language varieties.

These concerns notwithstanding, I believe this book makes a valuable contribution to scholarship on language and religion, language and ethnicity, and language and diaspora. Jews—past and present—offer a unique case study for sociologists of language, as Spolsky's comprehensive narrative so ably demonstrates.