“May I treasure up the words in my heart!”: Syriac culture in Modern Aramaic oral tradition

Modern Aramaic philology is a research field that has attracted the attention of few scholars and vernacular literature preserved in manuscripts appears indeed to be a rather marginal phenomenon in comparison with both oral tradition and Classical Syriac writing (copying of the classical heritage and composition of new original texts). In the last few decades and especially in the last few years, a surprising number of grammatical descriptions of modern Aramaic varieties have appeared. All of them include the transcription and translation of oral texts, some of which are particularly valuable from a literary point of view. Both written and oral texts reveal an extraordinary tenacity of classical stories and motifs. A couple of xamples will be given here: the story of the Maccabean martyrs and their mother Shmuni and of Joseph and Mary. In both cases oral transmission has preserved ancient lore in the collective memory of the community, although in rather creative and somehow distorted ways, as is typical of the oral/aural medium.