My main mentor in Israel was a Tunisian man by the name of Ben Tziyon Cohen. He was from the island of Jerba, whose Jewish community was among the most ancient in the world. All of the Jews of Jerba were Cohanim. That is to say, they traced their ancestry back to Aaron, the brother of Moses. They were all of the priestly class.
Ben Tziyon opened my eyes to the truth of the fake Kabbalah, and that the Zohar (the main book of the Kabbalah) is a forgery – and largely in opposition to traditional Judaism. He and I also worked out, as much as humanly possible, how Hebrew was pronounced about 2,000 years ago, during the time of the Mishnah. It remained largely unchanged, at least in the Middle East, until modern times. He authored two books on the matter: The Language of Truth and the concise version: The Truth of True Speech.
Here, I’ll set about translating key passages from the latter book. It’s arranged by letters and vowels, and I’ll start with the soft Gimel (ג):
The Gimel is among the BGD-KFT (בּגד כּפת) letters, that have a double pronunciation. We are compelled to accept that the pronunciation of the soft Gimel is not the same as the hard Gimel. It’s exactly the same as the Kaf and Pe (כּפּ), for example have a different pronunciation in their soft form than in their hard form. This is the tradition of the Sephardim and the Mizrahi communities unanimously to distinguish between the soft Gimel and the hard Gimel. They pronounce the soft form similar to how the soft Khaf (כ) is said., and close to how the French pronounce the letter R. Also, the Ashkenazim, about 400 years ago, used to pronounce it the same as the Sephardim do, except that they latter forgot about this entirely. The Sephardim maintained this tradition until our current day – except that here, in the Land of Israel, it’s unfortunately being forgotten among them because of the influence of the Ashkenazim and the general education system, which is based primarily upon the Ashkenazic tradition.
In our book, The Language of Truth, we cited about 7 pieces of evidence supporting the Sephardic pronunciation. We cited Rav Yosef Ometz (Ashkenazi) and his grandson, author of Nohegh KaTzon Yosef. We cited the books of the Geonim (rabbinical authorities from about 700AD-1050AD) and from Rishonim (rabbinical authorities from about 1000AD- 1500AD) who wrote in Arabic. We cited Scripture, we cited the Rashbatz (14-15th century Spain and Algeria), Rav Sa’adya Gaon (10th century Egypt), from the Talmud, from the commentary of Rashi (11th century Provence)…
This is the first of several parts, which I’ll publish by letter. Then I’ll gather them all together into one post that people can link to for reference. To make this post more interesting, I’ll include the geneology of my mentor in his own words:
