Quest to Save Dying Language Passes Through Niles, Skokie, Glenview

A linguist, a tax preparer and a journalist scour the north suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of a 3,000-year-old language--the language of Jesus.

Aramaic was once the language of the entire Middle East, used for commerce and government, and possibly spoken by Jesus. Today, it is down to its last generation or two of speakers. Many of those speakers live in Chicago’s northern suburbs. That’s what drew Aramaic scholar Geoffrey Kahn here last May, writes Ariel Sabar in January’s Smithsonian Magazine.  Guided by Elias Bet-Shmuel, a Chicago tax preparer and local Assyrian, the three men visit Agnes Nissan Esho, a widow in Niles; St. Andrew’s Church in Glenview, and Skokie resident Nemo Toma (St. Andrews and Toma are captured in the photo gallery). “The Windy City is a heady place for one of the world’s foremost scholars of modern Aramaic, a man bent on documenting all of its dialects …

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