The article presents a sociolinguistic profile of “Mock Jewish,” or the stylized varieties of Judeo-Arabic deployed for humorous purposes in early twentieth-century Tunisian public culture. We assembled a corpus of texts from both print and audio-visual media, including newspaper columns, television and radio performances, folktales, and plays, in which “Jewish” (yahūdī) or “Israelite” (isrāʾīlī) voices are stylized with exaggerated forms of linguistic difference. The purpose of the analysis is not to evaluate the inauthenticity of Mock Jewish vis-à-vis Judeo-Arabic proper, but to understand how performers deploy these markedly “Jewish” stylistic tactics to create diverse social meanings and assess the effects of these performances on language and society. We argue that Mock Jewish forms part of the broader “ideologies of linguistic differentiation” that construct Jewish speech as separate and distinct from non-Jewish varieties. However, the performances of Mock Jewish are not limited to sectarian polemic, but engage diverse targets, derive from different motivations, and provoke divergent responses from audiences.

这篇文章展示了“模拟犹太人”的社会语言学概况，即二十世纪早期突尼斯公共文化中出于幽默目的部署的犹太-阿拉伯语的程式化变体。我们收集了来自印刷和视听媒体的文本语料库，包括报纸专栏、电视和广播表演、民间故事和戏剧，其中“犹太人”（yahūdī）或“以色列人”（isrāʾīlī）的声音以夸张的形式风格化的语言差异。分析的目的不是评估模拟犹太人相对于Judeo-Arabic 正确，但要了解表演者如何运用这些明显的“犹太”风格策略来创造不同的社会意义并评估这些表演对语言和社会的影响。我们认为模拟犹太人构成了更广泛的“语言分化意识形态”的一部分，这些意识形态将犹太人的言论构建为与非犹太人不同的语言。然而，《模拟犹太人》的表演并不局限于宗派论战，而是针对不同的对象，衍生出不同的动机，引发观众的不同反应。