The Black Hebrews, whose official title is The Original African Israelite Nation of Jerusalem, are English-speaking black immigrants who believe that they are descended from the ancient Israelites. Led by Chicagoan Ben-Ami Ben Israel , they began to arrive en masse in Israel in 1969. Today over 2000 Black Hebrews call Israel home. For more information, see the section on Dimona , the community where most of them dwell. The Hebrew language contains 22 characters, written from right to left. Vowels are generally left unwritten, but may appear underneath regular characters as smaller markings. The contemporary Hebrew language was created from biblical Hebrew by Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who compiled the first modern dictionary in the 1920s. In a surprisingly short period, the revived biblical dialect matured into a full-fledged language, spanning from colloquial speech to poetry. While a Semitic language in structure, modern Hebrew contains elements of European lan- guages; many words for which no equivalent biblical concept exists have been lifted almost as is. Modern spoken Hebrew contains a large number of Hebraicized versions of English words that may be understandable to careful English-speaking listeners. Most Israelis speak English, and signs are usually written in English as well as Hebrew and Arabic, the official languages of Israel. Today's Arabic is actually two distinct languages, and many, many dialects. Classical Arabic , was the language of pre-Islamic Arabs and the Qur'an. Its complex rules of grammar were not fully developed until the Umayyad period , when the Islamic Empire rapidly expanded to include people of non-Arab origin . Today, the intricate complexity of the Classical, rigorously taught in schools and used for Qur'anic recitation, is every student's horror. A simplified version is used for writ- ing, public speeches, and even cartoons on television. This less rigid form of clas- sical Arabic has been packaged and sold to Westerners as "Modern Standard Arabic." Newspapers and television broadcasts throughout the Arab world are in Modern Standard. As its name suggests, the language is a modern invention-Clas- . The other species of the language is the Colloquial , the speech of daily life. Dialects are so diverse that an Iraqi and a Palestinian meeting for the first time would sound like a Monty Python sketch. Educated Arabs can always fall back on the Classical, however stilted it may sound in conversation. The appendix of this book contains a list of useful Hebrew and Arabic words and phrases. Each religious community in Israel operates its own religious courts, funded by the Ministry of Religion, and controls its own holy sites. Freedom of religion is safeguarded by the state under the 1948 Declaration of Establishment. JUDAISM Neither theologians nor historians can pinpoint a date for the founding of Judaism. The Israelite religion has been evolving, however, for perhaps the past four millen- nia.