In the region of Babylonia (modern southern Iraq), rabbinical schools flourished, producing the Targumim and Talmud, making the language a standard of religious Jewish scholarship.
Among the Mandaean community in the Khuzestan province of Iran and Iraq, another variety of Eastern Aramaic, known as Mandaic, became the liturgical language of Mandaeism.
Since the Muslim conquest of Persia of the seventh century, most of the population of the Middle East has undergone a gradual but steady language shift to Arabic.
However there are still between some 550,000 – 1,000,000 fluent Eastern Neo-Aramaic speakers among the indigenous Assyrians of northern Iraq, northeast Syria, southeastern Turkey and northwestern Iran, as well as small migrant communities in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Armenia, Georgia, southern Russia and Azerbaijan.
A further number may have a more sparse understanding of the language, due to pressures in their homelands to speak Arabic, Turkish, Persian or Kurdish, and as a result of the diaspora to the Western World.