Julia isn't a normal jit either. most jits make speculative guesses based on observed patterns and then has to deoptimize occasionally. Julia only compiles based on type information, so in many ways it is closer to running an ahead of time compiler at runtime. because of this, Julia is often called just ahead of time compiled.

It's not quite interpreted. Python is compiled to bytecode when first loaded (that's what all those .pyc files are) and there is no separate compile step as with Java.