On Friday mornings in a class on the heritage of Babylonian Jewry, Oded Amit has taught a small group of Israelis to speak Jewish Iraqi, the language of his ancestors. Amit, 70, was born and raised in Baghdad, and Jewish Iraqi was the language in which his mother raised him.

“It’s a beautiful language, rich, full of wisdom and wit, but it is disappearing,” Amit told Al-Monitor. “What I’m doing is an attempt, perhaps desperate, to save something of it — to keep it alive a little longer. The younger generation doesn’t speak it anymore. They heard their aunt or grandma speaking it, but for them it’s not a mother tongue, it’s a curiosity.”

For hundreds of years, this dialect of Babylonian Jews flourished in their communities throughout Iraq. When most of them left in the early 1950s, Iraq lost the speakers of this unique language. The dialect is now spoken primarily in Israel and London, the two main centers of Babylonian Jewry. These days, there is no Jewish life per se in Baghdad. Only 12 Jews remain, so the community, more than 2,600 years old, is near its end. This is what motivated Amit, a retired engineer and a multitalented artist, to start his new career of teaching late in life.

Amit's course requires some basic knowledge, so all of those who register are sons and daughters of immigrants from Iraq. It consists of eight 90-minute sessions. After 12 hours, its graduates are able to chat fluently with grandma or can better understand what she is mumbling. Before Amit began teaching, he spent long hours extracting the rules of grammar from his mother’s language.