Blanc found that both Christian and Jewish Baghdadis spoke a qeltu dialect, but the Christian dialect resembled northern Iraqi dialect, showing that the Christians had moved to Baghdad from the north when the city's population began to recover. The Jewish dialect was not related to any other Arabic dialect, so Blanc concluded that the Jews were the only people who continued to live in Baghdad after its destruction by the Mongols.
By the way, I believe the title of Blanc's fascinating book is "Communal Dialects in Baghdad," not "of Baghdad."

If I recall correctly, the Christian Baghdadi dialect makes its r's uvular, whereas the Jewish one doesn't.

If I recall correctly, the Christian Baghdadi dialect makes its r's uvular, whereas the Jewish one doesn't.
Actually, it's the other way around. In Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic, r > ġ, i.e. M(uslim)C(hristian) bir, but J biġ "well", MC arbaʿ, but J aġbaʿ "four" etc.
I believe I've already mentione hered Jacob Mansour's The Jewish Baghdadi Dialect which is a more detailed description of Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic with a lot of texts recorded by native informants.
And one should also mention the rich literature written in Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic which includes not only translations of portions of the Bible, targum and various aggadic materials, but also original compositions, mostly legends and alike. For the past few months I've been working on a fully-vocalized translation (šarḥ)of targum to Song of Songs, mostly trying to figure out the relation between the language of the šarḥ (which has a lot of strange features, mostly grammaticalizations of earlier hypo- and hypercorrections like the negative marker ליס < Classical Arabic ليس) and the actual spoken language as recorded by Blanc and Mansour. Fascinating stuff.

I remember reading (in Blau?) that Judeo-Arabic literature was legible throughout a larger area in part because the vowelless script disguised dialect features. Of course, English clearly demonstrates that it also works to write the vowels in a way that no one has pronounced them for centuries.

MMcM,

that certainly applies to what Hary calls "Classical Judeo-Arabic". But starting with the 15th century, the dialect differences really started to show, especially in the off-center areas like North Africa. There might have been purely linguistic reasons for that, but most agree that it was also motivated by a change in the social structure (the rise of the ghetto). Translations and original compositions written in the Maghribi Judeo-Arabic, whether vocalized or not, would have been largely unintelligible to speakers of Judeo-Arabic in Egypt and Iraq and vice versa. To what extent precisely, that's difficult to tell, because even though most of those who wrote in Judeo-Arabic no longer tried to emulate Classical Arabic, a large number of them still tried to emulate Classical Judeo-Arabic which in turn emulated Classical Arabic. So in any late (post 15th century) Judeo-Arabic, you are bound to find a mixture of pure colloquial, grammaticalized hypo- and hypercorrections, fusha and what was perceived as standard Judeo-Arabic. And in a high number of cases, some of these categories overlap. No wonder Hary chose to describe it as multiglossia...

Over the past year Eli Timan (a speaker of Iraqi Judeo-Arabic who lives in London) and I have been engaged in a project based at SOAS and funded by the British Academy to document personal history narratives in Iraqi Judeo-Arabic with members of the diaspora community in London, Canada and Israel. Eli has collected hours of wonderful text material and has been transcribing and translating it into English. We plan to work with David Nathan of the Endangered Languages Archive to publish some samples on the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages project website (http://www.hrelp.org). We may also develop a small multimedia product presenting the recordings, transcriptions and photographs that Eli has taken.

You know, "qeltu" sounds kinda like "ghetto"...

A uvular r? That needs to be mentioned in Wikipedia! Trill or fricative?

(David, I wrote back to you about French and German uvulars in The Sound of Home, just before it was closed).

Concerning the uvulars, do you have Skype? We both seem to be underestimating the variation within German, and only acoustic evidence can help at this point.

In lard rôti, I agree that most speakers use a sound here that is mostly or entirely fricative -- and at least partially devoiced. That's because it's word-final. The same speakers (those that I've heard) use a one-contact trill intervocalically.