The Muwahhid persecution scattered many of the Spanish Jews to Africa and to Provence and Languedoc. Those who took refuge in Africa, like Maimonides, retained the use of the Arabic language, but Arabic quickly became obsolete amongst those who had fled north. No doubt the refugees in Provence found it necessary to use the Provencal dialect for communication with their Christian neighbours, but that dialect had never yet been used for scientific or philosophical purposes; in Western Christendom Latin was invariably used for all educational and scholarly purposes, but the refugee Jews did not feel disposed to adopt a language which had no traditional associations for them and was altogether a foreign tongue never as yet employed for Jewish purposes. Under these circumstances the Jewish leaders deliberately copied the actual condition prevailing amongst their Jewish neighbours where the ancient Latin was in use as a learned language, whilst its derived dialects were the speech in everyday use, and so they revived the use of Hebrew as the medium of teaching and literature. Throughout Hebrew had retained its place as a liturgical language; there had been synagogue liturgies in Greek, but those belonged to a much earlier period. The revival of Hebrew produced a neo-Hebrew which does not preserve a line of historical continuity with the ancient Hebrew. For some time Hebrew had been a dead language in the East, and it had never spread as a living speech to the West. But this artificial revival, which has more than one parallel in history, was not so difficult a feat as it sounds at first. The vernacular speech of the Spanish Jew was Arabic, and philologically Arabic is very nearly a dialect if not of Arabic, yet at least of a proto-Arabic, which shows many close parallels with Hebrew. Of course at that time the true philological relations were not understood: influenced by theological prepossessions the Jew rather tended to regard Arabic as a derivative of Hebrew; yet the kinship was obvious, and in the early translations made from Arabic to Hebrew it is not uncommon to find that most of the words are translated in such a way that the same root-form is used as in the original. Secondly, it was not only the case that Hebrew “came easily” to those who knew Arabic, but there had been serious philological studies by Jehudh Chayyug, David Kimchi, and others which had emphasized this close kinship, and had indeed adapted all the rules of Arabic grammar to the use of Hebrew; it was therefore possible to compose and even to speak a tolerable Hebrew by the conscious rendering of the Arabic vocabulary into Hebrew. It is not suggested that the inaugurators of neo-Hebrew ignored the characteristics of the classical speech; in fact they did not do so, but they were in a position to use Hebrew as though a dialect differing from Arabic only in detail, and in this attitude they were more strictly correct than they supposed.