The movement between Hebrew and Arabic is not new to the twentieth century, as it stood for many generations at the center of Jewish literature. Over centuries, movement between Hebrew and Arabic expressed literary tendencies, and perceptions of identity, and sometimes also theological influences: one starting point to examining these relations within Judaism is the extensive literary project of Rabbi Sa’adia Gaon in the tenth century, and the poetic enterprise of Dunash Ben Labrat. One earlier point of cotact is the Jews who lived in the Arab peninsula before Islam, and some of them, like the Jewish-Arab poet A-Samawal Ibn Adiya, were central poets of the Jahiliya age. The movement from Hebrew into Arabic and vice versa underwent great changes over the centuries, yet continuously remained central to all Jewish communities in the Arab world, through secular and religious works in Judeo-Arabic and translations between languages: from the philosophical works of Rabbi Judah Halevi and Maimonides, through translators as Rabbi Judah Alharizi and the Ibn Tibbon family, to the last centuries. In the twentieth century, with the rise of the Jewish and the Arab national movements, both cultures saw a steady rise of the wish to “purify” the national culture and language in order to reflect a homogenous nation, be it Arab or Jewish. Some of the writers continued to write in literary Arabic in Israel; some gradually moved from Arabic to Hebrew;  and some stopped writing or publishing altogether. Thus many writers from the Jewish communities of the Arab world – first generation immigrants, and even more later generations – developed an ambivalent outlook towards their Arab-Jewish cultural heritage, beginning with the colonial encounter and intensifying while in Israel. In this course we seek to map out the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the writing of authors from the Jewish communities in the Arab world up to the twentieth century, who wrote either in Hebrew (rabbinical or Israeli) or in Arabic (Judeo-Arabic or literary Arabic), and to examine it also in relation to Palestinian writers writing in Hebrew in the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century.