I don’t understand. You do realize that by the time of Christ, Hebrew was a liturgical language (most Jews spoke Aramaic, and depended on the Targumim, an Aramaic paraphrase and explanation of the Tanakh) when hearing it in the synagogue? And furthermore, that a substantial number of Jews were Hellenic Jews, who spoke Greek fluently or even as their primary or only language?
Indeed, Jewry at the time of Christ could be roughly divided into Pharisees, Sadducees, Hellenic Jews (who were Hellenized to various degrees), and the ascetic Essenes? And that at least three dialects of Aramaic were spoken by the Jews, which were different from Old Testament Aramaic which we find in Daniel and a few other places? (Judean Aramaic, Gallilean Aramaic, which our Lord would have used as his native tongue, and what became Syriac Aramaic, spoken by the Jewish merchants in Mesopotamia and India (there were Jews in Kerala since the second century BC, the Christian church was founded there by the Apostle Thomas, who was martyred by an enraged Hindu rajah around 54 AD, and within that church, there is an endogamous group descended entirely from Jews? Indeed the Kochin Jews in Kerala are probably why St. Thomas and his disciples Saints Addai and Mari set out there to begin with. And the Christians of Malankara, who were called Nasranis by the ruling Hindus, call themselves Mar Thoma (St. Thomas in Syriac) Christians? There are still a few Kochin Jews in Kerala today, but most emigrated to India, and the beautiful Paradesi Synagogue is basically a quorum, as they cannot form a minyan. The most prominent Kochin Jewish family were the Sassoons, of whom Vidal Sassoon, the famous hairstylist, is the most well known scion.
Likewise, among the Hellenic Jews, some of whom likely spoke Greek only, they existed as a discrete community, and still do, known as the Romaniotes, in very small numbers, in Greece (their Rabbis wear attire similiar to that of Greek Orthodox priests, and they use their own liturgy, which is distinct from the Sephardic, Ashkenazi, Yemeni, Ethiopic and Karaite rites (all of which are more common; they are quite endangered considering the Karaites outnumner them). They also use distinct mantles for their Torah scrolls.
The Ethiopian Jews, or Beta Israel (which means House of Israel in Ge’ez and Amharic) are another interesting case, insofar as Ethiopia was the only self-governing Jewish state at the time of Christ, but the Ethiopians mainly spoke Ge’ez, another Semitic language. The Solomonic dynasty of Ethiopia and most of the rest of their people became the fourth or fifth nation to convert to Christianity in the early fourth century, at around the same time as Georgia (the city state of Edessa was the first, followed by the Kingdom of Armenia in 306 AD, and the Roman Empire in phases, with St. Constantine and his co-emperor Licinius issuing the Edict of Milan legalizing it in 313 AD, although it was not really until the reign of Theodosius I in the 380s that Christianity truly became the state religion (for most of the fourth century, the Roman Emperors were Arian heretics, followers of Arius who insisted Christ our God was created, and not Himself God, thus denying the doctrine of the Trinity) starting with St. Constantine’s son Constantius, and St. Athanasius, the defender of the Apostolic faith at Nicaea, was exiled from Alexandria to Trier in Germany; things remained horrible into the 360s), and many Nicene Christians were severely persecuted. However, that aside, returning to Abyssinia, as Ethiopia was then often called, the Beta Israel still survive, and a few of them still live there, but after the Derg communists strangled Emperor St. Haile Selassie after he refused to renounce Christianity, they, like many communist regimes, began anti-Semitic propaganda and violence, and so most of the Beta Israel had to flee to the state of Israel, with some assistance from the CIA and Mossad, but thankfully, they survive, and their Old Testament text is interesting in that it preserves several books not in the Septuagint.
