The only copies—one typescript, one microfilm—of this work are both here in the library at the Katz Center. The study is the first of its kind, predating Haim Blanc’s Communal Dialects in Baghdad (1964), and Ha-Aravit Ha-Yehudit shel Baghdad by Yaakov Mansour (1975-1983; a condensed version was published in English translation in 1991 as The Jewish Baghdadi Dialect). The latest - and quite possibly last  - in this list is Assaf Bar-Moshe's The Arabic Dialect of the Jews of Baghdad :Phonology, Morphology, and Texts (2019).

While this year marked the first time the Katz Center took up the study of Sephardi and Mizrachi Jewry, Schramm’s dissertation written under the aegis of Dropsie College, the Katz Center’s first incarnation, suggests a wonderful continuity. So too the very subject touches on the core of some of the liveliest discussions this year, about the nature and distinctiveness of the language. Is Judeo-Arabic a distinct language, thus reflecting the degree to which Jews of Arab lands held themselves apart from their neighbors, or is it a dialect, separated mostly by pronunciation and selected vocabulary?

Schramm’s dissertation is classically philological, covering the phonemics, morphology, and syntax of the vernacular spoken by Baghdadi Jews. His data comes from fieldwork: three months spent in Israel in 1952 interviewing immigrants from Iraq. The study itself would likely appeal only to linguists until the last chapter in which two short texts are recorded, transliterated, notated, and rendered into English. The stories they tell—one about an exhumed rabbi and the other, a purloined parrot—bring life to the language, revealing as much about relations between Baghdadi Jews and their Muslim neighbors as they do about its linguistic attributes.