© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI: 10.1163/22134638-12340004 Journal of Jewish Languages 1 (2013) 135–167 brill.com/jjl Voices Yet to Be Heard: On Listening to the Last Speakers of Jewish Malayalam Ophira Gamliel The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel Abstract Jewish history in Kerala, the southernmost state in modern India, goes back to as early as the tenth century CE. In the mid-twentieth century, Kerala Jews migrated en masse to Israel, leaving behind but a handful of their community members and remnants of eight communities, synagogues, and cemeteries. The paper presents a preliminary attempt to describe and analyze the language—so far left undocumented and unexplored—still spoken by Kerala Jews in Israel, based on a language documentation project carried out in 2008 and 2009. In light of the data collected and studied so far, it is clear that the language in question fits nicely into the Jewish languages spectrum, while at the same time it fits perfectly into the linguistic mosaic of castolects in Kerala. Though the linguistic database described here reflects a language in its last stages, it affords salvaging the remnants of a once rich oral heritage and opens new channels for the study of the history, society, and culture of Kerala Jews. Keywords Jewish Malayalam; language documentation; folklore; Malayalam dialects; India; Kerela In the fall of 2007, a group of Israelis of Kerala origin in their fifties and sixties and I, an Indologist and philologist from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, initiated a Malayalam workshop in Israel. They migrated from Kerala in 1954 before being formally educated in standard Malayalam. I had just returned from Kerala after a long stay and sought Malayalam speakers to practice spo- ken, nonstandard Malayalam. This informal workshop had the objective of a friendly knowledge exchange—the Malayalam script in exchange for the spoken language. It soon became clear that the Malayalam they spoke was somewhat different from the language I studied in Kerala, as I had difficul- ties understanding them. Within a few months, I realized that their speech is Jewish Malayalam, a Jewish language on the verge of extinction. One may argue whether Jewish Malayalam is a distinct language at all. On the one hand, seen from the point of view of Malayalam scholars, it is merely