Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community 1443878057, 9781443878050

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part One: Linguistics and Language
Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language
Dialect Concentration and Dissipation
Language Shift and Speakers’ Attitudes in Seattle Ladino
The Ladino Database Project Results as Insight into the CurrentSituation of Judeo-Spanish in Turkey
?aketía
Part Two: History
Coping with Nineteenth-Century Transformation
French vs. Judeo-Spanish
A Pilgrimage to a Personality
Part Three: Culture
The Power in Transmission
Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and MultilingualismExpressed in La Amerika in Early Twentieth-Century New York
‘Los sefardíes’ and ‘Oriental Jews’
Sones sefaradíes

Citation preview

Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community

Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community Edited by

Bryan Kirschen

Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community Edited by Bryan Kirschen This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Bryan Kirschen and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7805-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7805-0

To the leaders, members, supporters, and advisors of ucLADINO for believing in our vision and helping us to build muestra komunitika.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................................ xi PART ONE: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies.............................................................................................. 2 Bryan Kirschen, State University of New York, Binghamton Dialect Concentration and Dissipation: Challenges to Judeo-Spanish Revitalization Efforts................................................................................. 50 Rey Romero, University of Houston, Downtown Language Shift and Speakers’ Attitudes in Seattle Ladino ....................... 72 Molly FitzMorris, University of Washington, Seattle The Ladino Database Project Results as Insight into the Current Situation of Judeo-Spanish in Turkey........................................................ 94 Karen Gerson ùarhon, Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center ণaketía: Discovering the Other Judeo-Spanish Vernacular .................... 113 Alicia Sisso Raz, Voces de ণaketía PART TWO: HISTORY Coping with Nineteenth-Century Transformation: Ladino in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic ......................................... 134 Ceren Abi, University of California, Los Angeles French vs. Judeo-Spanish: An Overview of the Alliance Israélite Universelle’s Language Policy in the Ottoman Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century ........................................................................ 142 Ana ûiriü Pavloviü, Central European University, Budapest

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A Pilgrimage to a Personality: Doña Gracia Mendes .............................. 152 Rifka Cook, Northwestern University PART THREE: CULTURE The Power in Transmission: Haketia as a Vector for Women’s Communal Power .................................................................................... 170 Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations, Sorbonne Paris Cité Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and Multilingualism Expressed in La Amerika in Early Twentieth-Century New York .......... 191 Holly D. Vernon, University of Houston, Downtown ‘Los sefardíes’ and ‘Oriental Jews’: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Representations of Sephardic Jews in the Englishand Spanish-Language New York City Press .......................................... 222 Bethany Beyer, University of California, Los Angeles Sones sefaradíes: la diversitá echa letra i muzika Sephardic Sounds: Diversity Turned Lyric and Music ............................ 241 Liliana Tchukran de Benveniste, eSefarad

PREFACE

Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community brings together twelve scholars in Sephardic studies from across the globe. The collaboration of these authors is the result of three years of dialogue from the 2012-2014 UCLADINO Judeo-Spanish Symposia. UCLADINO is a student-run organization at the University of California, Los Angeles. The goal of this group is to educate others about—and in—the Judeo-Spanish language(s). UCLADINO engages students, scholars, and members of Sephardic communities in an exploration of the multiple facets of Judeo-Spanish through the examination of Sephardic culture and history. The symposia have allowed for a great deal of collaboration and have fostered a series of discussions across multiple disciplines. Leaders, scholars, and activists share research that has allowed for the advancement of knowledge of Judeo-Spanish languages and Sephardic culture. This collection is unique from other publications that catalogue a variety of Sephardic research in that most of the articles treat the JudeoSpanish languages as their primary focus. Due to a number of factors discussed throughout this volume, UNESCO considers Judeo-Spanish an endangered language. As with all endangered languages, there is a tremendous need to document communities of speakers of the language while such endeavors are still possible. Several of the authors in this volume examine historical periods that may only be understood thanks to primary sources in the Judeo-Spanish language. Other contributors rely on ethnographic observation and sociolinguistic interviews in order to construct an understanding of the current state of the language. Given the multidisciplinary scope of Judeo-Spanish studies, this volume will be of interest to a wide audience. Within the academic realm, universities with Jewish Studies Departments or Centers will be able to utilize this text as a resource to better understand Sephardic communities worldwide. The question of which cities and nations should be included under the categorization of the term Sephardic is complex. The volume refers to those communities with a Judeo-Spanish linguistic heritage as Sephardic; due to this, Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community does not address Mizrahi populations, since it is outside the scope of this study. This collection will add to the research on the Sephardim, which by comparison is far less readily available than works published on their

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Eastern European brethren, the Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim. Also, given that this volume contains articles on Judeo-Spanish communities in Turkey as well as Morocco, Near Eastern Studies Departments or Centers will be able to utilize this work to better understand the situation of the Sephardim in predominantly Muslim countries. Within Romance Language Departments, in particular Spanish and Portuguese Departments, this volume will prove relevant. While most of the Sephardim have lived outside of Spain and Portugal for more than 500 years, their language has its roots in Medieval Spanish and for many, their identity is still embedded to a degree in Iberian traditions and culture. The governments of Spain and Portugal have recently (2015) revised their policies for granting the Sephardim Spanish and Portuguese citizenship in an effort to right the wrongs from centuries past. While both nations continue to finalize the procedures for naturalization, they have clarified that proficiency in Judeo-Spanish will serve in part as proof of Sephardic origin. The implications of this policy, rooted in history and language, will foster additional interest inside and outside of academia for all those who are interested in learning about the Judeo-Spanish language and the journey of the Sephardim. As the editor of this volume, I would like to thank the authors for contributing their research, partaking in the editing process, and engaging in the resulting discussions. I speak for each contributor when I say that we hope that this volume encourages further dialogue and exploration in Sephardic studies and inspires others to learn Judeo-Spanish in order to facilitate their research in the future.

INTRODUCTION

This volume serves to explore particular aspects of the relationship between the Judeo-Spanish language and Sephardic culture from the fifteenth century until the present day. In employing the term ‘Sephardic,’ the articles refer to those Jews who trace their lineage to the Iberian Peninsula. For many Sephardim, their language, primarily of IberoRomance origin, continued to develop while they primarily inhabited Turkey, the Balkans, and North Africa. In those lands of migration, over time, they adopted elements from the languages of the areas in which they settled; the language that developed from that contact is known today as Judeo-Spanish or Ladino, among other names. The notion of JudeoSpanish as one language or as a number of varieties of language shared by the Sephardim is discussed on several occasions throughout this collection. The makeup of the Judeo-Spanish language can be better understood by following the path of the Sephardim throughout the centuries. In the same way, observing the characteristics of the language exposes how it has been shaped by the linguistic influences from the nations in which the Sephardim have resided. The volume’s articles explore not only how language shapes identity and culture, but also how historical events reveal the linguistic landscape across Sephardic communities. While nearly all articles focus on the Judeo-Spanish language, this volume is divided into three sections that represent the researchers’ main areas of research: linguistic, historical, and cultural. Part one explores varieties of Judeo-Spanish throughout the Sephardic world. The first article by Bryan Kirschen examines how Judeo-Spanish is both a Jewish language as well as a Romance language. This piece explores models that account for the development of Jewish vernaculars and calques, and surveys how ideological stance factors into the understanding of Judeo-Spanish as a hyphenated language. This section continues with Rey Romero’s article, which analyzes the concepts of dialect concentration and dissipation. Using online forums, textual sources, and personal interviews, Romero assesses how speakers of an endangered language are able to re-construct it in the twenty-first century. His research reveals the current state of Judeo-Spanish worldwide and how speakers and learners modify the language according to agency, appropriation, and audience.

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The articles that follow focus on specific Sephardic communities in the United States, Turkey, and Morocco. Within the United States, while New York City and Los Angeles represent two of the largest Sephardic communities today, Molly FitzMorris suggests that it is in Seattle that one may find one of the most unified Sephardic communities in the nation, a community that is made up primarily of Rhodeslis and Turks, or their descendants. FitzMorris discusses Los Ladineros, a self-selected group of Judeo-Spanish speakers within the Sephardic Jewish community of Seattle. Her research describes structural changes in the language as well as the language attitudes of this group’s members. The next piece features the work of Karen Sarhon. Sarhon’s utilization of the Ladino Database Project, which consists of interviews with speakers of Judeo-Spanish from Istanbul and Izmir, allows her to review the state of the language in Turkey today. This database allows for the analysis of linguistic features unique to the two communities under consideration. The final article in this section explores Haketia, the Judeo-Spanish of Morocco. Alicia Sisso Raz introduces readers to this variety of language, another vernacular of the Sephardim. Her research considers linguistic peculiarities of Haketia and how they diverge from those of other varieties classified as Judeo-Spanish. Part two reviews how languages that entered the communities inhabited by the Sephardim were often determined by the historical events and the leading institutions of the period. Several articles in this volume address the role of the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the impact that this organization had on Sephardic communities. Its mission civilisatrice fostered new linguistic policies and ideologies among the Sephardim that would replace Judeo-Spanish with other languages, particularly French. Ceren Abi explores the role of Ottoman Turkish and French within Sephardic communities of the Ottoman Empire prior to the formation of the Turkish Republic. She reviews the function of Judeo-Spanish within the Empire and pays particular attention to its collapse as demonstrated by the Vatandaú Türkçe Konuú! (Citizen Speak Turkish!) campaign. The next article by Ana ûiriü Pavloviü examines the language policies established by the Alliance Israélite Universelle in three major centers of Sephardic life within the Ottoman Empire. By examining reports published in the Bulletin d’Alliance Israélite Universelle, ûiriü Pavloviü reviews which languages were offered to students throughout Salonika (Thessaloniki), Smyrna (Izmir), and Adrianople (Edirne) from 1882-1912. Her research accounts for the changes in the courses offered within each city due to shifts in power and politics during this period. The final contribution in this section reviews the life journey of Doña

Judeo-Spanish and the Making of a Community

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Gracia Mendes from Portugal to Turkey. Rifka Cook divides her article into two parts; the first provides autobiographical information on Doña Gracia, while the second explores a responsa, a term used to refer to an exchange of letters in which one party consults another on a matter of Jewish law. Cook provides evidence that the selected centuries-old text reveals insight into Doña Gracia’s life. Furthermore, she refers to the aljamiado texts of the responsa in order to better understand the spoken and written language of the time. The third and final part of this volume examines the use of language in helping to construct identity and culture. Turning once again to the Haketia language found in Morocco, Vanessa Paloma Elbaz reports on her ethnographic research in order to reveal relations of power within the dwindling Sephardic communities of Northern Morocco. She posits that, although men are regularly seen as figures of authority in public spheres— the synagogue, the Jewish Community ‘Junta,’ and the Rabbinical Courts—the power of women in the private sphere is actually the most important power in the community. While women are responsible for keeping a kosher household, preparing for Shabbat as well as other holidays, and assuring family purity, they are also the ones who pass down familial, cultural, and religious oral traditions in the Haketia language. The next two articles explore periodicals published in a U.S. metropolis with a large Sephardic presence, that of New York City. A number of scholars have written on the Judeo-Spanish-language press, given that its influence reached from Turkey and the Balkans to the United States and accounted for over 300 periodicals prior to World War II. The two pieces consider newspapers printed in New York City and how the Sephardim and their language were perceived in those publications. Holly Vernon examines the Judeo-Spanish newspaper La Amerika, published in New York during the early twentieth century, so as to understand attitudes of the Sephardim toward their language, as well as the attitudes of the Ashkenazim. Her extensive review of this periodical reveals the challenges that the Sephardim faced upon immigrating to the United States and sheds light on the resources that La Amerika provided its readers in order to facilitate citizenship and assimilation into the mainstream culture. While assessing the Judeo-Spanish press reveals a great deal about Sephardic life, less is known about how the Sephardim were perceived by the surrounding non-Jewish and Hispanic populations in New York City. In her analysis of English- and Spanish-language newspapers from 18851930, Bethany Beyer describes how a handful of major newspapers introduced their readers to the Sephardim, often using a plethora of terms and constantly marking the group as different, different from most Jews in

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the United States and different from most speakers of Spanish in the nation. The final article is unique in that it contributes not only to the body of literature on Judeo-Spanish studies, but also because it is in JudeoSpanish. Liliana Tchukran de Benveniste explores the variety of musical styles sung in Judeo-Spanish, from medieval to contemporary. Her research as an investigator, performer, and speaker of the language allows readers to not only gain insight into the diversity of Sephardic musical expression but also to appreciate the composition of the language itself. As the authors attempt to demonstrate throughout this volume, communities of Sephardim are located worldwide. It is our hope that this volume will introduce readers to the various facets of Judeo-Spanish through its exploration of the language, culture, and history of the Sephardim. At the same time, this collection can serve as a means to encourage students, scholars, and community members to contribute to this multidisciplinary field and the ongoing conversations within it. Contributors to this volume consist primarily of junior scholars and community activists from around the world. Conversation between these two groups is fundamental in order to understand how the history of the Sephardim has allowed for the development, maintenance, endangerment, and even revitalization of the Judeo-Spanish language. May future collaboration enable more people to engage in this work in order to represent a greater number of Sephardic communities and ways of life.

PART ONE: LINGUISTICS AND LANGUAGE

JUDEO-SPANISH AS A JEWISH LANGUAGE: LINGUISTIC REALITIES AND IDEOLOGIES BRYAN KIRSCHEN STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, BINGHAMTON

1. Introduction In this article, I explore Judeo-Spanish as both a Jewish language and a Romance language. I explain its historical and linguistic roots dating back to the Iberian Peninsula and its development in the Sephardic diaspora. I begin by discussing models of Jewish language typology, beginning with Wexler’s (1981) pioneering theoretical framework, continuing with that of Fishman (1985), and culminating in recent research by Benor (2010). I continue by highlighting differences within Judeo-Spanish dialectology, primarily between the two major varieties, Djudezmo and Haketia (Bunis 1992b). I use Djudezmo to refer to the spoken language of the descendants of the Iberian Jews who migrated to Turkey and the Balkans, and Haketia to refer to the spoken language of those Iberian Jewish descendants who settled in North Africa, primarily in northern cities of Morocco. Following this discussion, I analyze the syntactic calqued variety of the language known as Ladino (Sephiha 1985). Finally, I explore the ideological stance of Sephardic Jews as applied to Judeo-Spanish. While a clear linguistic analysis between Jewish languages and their non-Jewish cognates helps one to understand the hybrid nature of Jewish language typology, reporting upon extra-linguistic features is imperative for such investigation. I compare research from Callaway (2008), Kushner-Bishop (2004), Harris (1994), Bunis (1992b), and Rodrigue (1990) in order to assess extra-linguistic considerations that shape the Judeo-Spanish speakers’ ideologies of their mother tongue. Together, we may better understand the Jewish and Romance elements of this language.

2. What is a Jewish Language? In this section, I examine the myriad of Judeo-Spanish repertoires within the current framework of Comparative Jewish Linguistics (also referred to

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as Jewish Inter- or Intra-linguistics). Judeo-Spanish is one of a number of Jewish languages used contemporarily throughout the world and pertains to a much larger list if one takes into account those Jewish languages no longer in use. Sephardim who speak Judeo-Spanish are often exposed to the language in their formative years; the language represents a unique grammar within their language faculty. Chomsky notes that the language faculty can be thought of as a language acquisition device, “an innate component of the human mind that yields a particular language through interaction with presented experience, a device that converts experience into a system of knowledge attained.” 1 Considering such principles of language helps us to understand the linguistic structure of Judeo-Spanish and how its grammar fits into the larger theory of Universal Grammar. This initial state of the language faculty determines what is possible— grammatical—within a language and what is not. As we explore the nature of the Judeo-Spanish language, we will determine how innate properties of grammar interact with the societies in which the Sephardim have resided. After examining complementary as well as competing definitions on what Jewish languages are, I evaluate their typology, creation, and further considerations within the field. I describe unique features of JudeoSpanish and include the reasons for linguistic as well as ideological parameters to establish its norms. In order to answer a series of questions such as how Jewish languages emerge, how they are related, and who their users are, linguists of Comparative Jewish Linguistics have offered a variety of paradigms to respond to these as well as other inquiries. Throughout this article, I examine the issues that arise in such claims. Jewish languages are often compared to the languages spoken by their coterritorial non-Jewish neighbors. Wexler conjectures that “the base component of every Jewish language is derived from a coterritorial nonJewish cognate, yet never completely overlaps with it,” often keeping them from obtaining an independent status as a language. 2 Such a language is one that Ornan posits is spoken typically among Jews themselves, while expanding on the definition in that the language used from within the Jewish community is different from that outside of it.3 Stillman notes that Jewish languages, while often pertaining to unrelated linguistic families, are linked to one another in their “use of the Hebrew

 1

Noam Chomsky, Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986), 16. 2 Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981), 117. 3 Uzzi Ornan, "Hebrew is not a Jewish Language," in Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua Fishman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 22-26.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

script for writing them (although this is not an absolute sine qua non) and the inclusion, and indeed ready assimilation, of an element of Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary.”4 The distinct forms of writing and speaking among the Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors have been a common trend throughout history. Differences among Jewish repertoires range from those that incorporate a small number of Hebrew and Aramaic words into their lexicon to those that grammatically differ from their non-Jewish cognates.5 The substratal or adstratal degree of inclusion of Hebrew and Aramaic lexicon, as well as the sociolinguistic phenomena with which they interact, is a vital component to understanding Jewish varieties of language. In regard to treating the Jewish repertoire as a language, researchers of Jewish languages and Jewish Comparative Linguistics have built upon one another’s work and have proposed additional frameworks that encompass a number of lesser-studied Jewish languages. The most comprehensive definition is that of Fishman, who defines a language as Jewish, that is phonogically, morpho-syntactically, lexico-semantically or orthographically different from that of non-Jewish sociocultural networks and that has some demonstrably unique function in the role-repertoire of a Jewish sociocultural network, which function is not normatively present in the role-repertoire of non-Jews and/ or is not normatively discharged via varieties identical with those utilized by non-Jews.6

In his description, Fishman encompasses the fundamental linguistic features of language while highlighting the significance of the sociological aspects of the users behind the language. Thus, it is not only the linguistic construct of the Jewish language that must be focused on, but also a complementary understanding of psychological and sociological factors intertwined within the community of speakers. Researchers continue to revise existing terminology in an effort to expand the database of Jewish languages and how they precisely fit into such frameworks. New hypotheses may be tested by examining research from both well-documented and understudied Jewish languages. Jewish

 4

Norman Stillman, The language and culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco: An Ethnolinguistic Study, no. 11 (University of Manchester, 1998), 3. 5 Sarah Bunin Benor, "Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty-First Century" in Religion Compass 2, no. 6 (2008). 6 Joshua Fishman, "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view,” in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985), 4.

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Comparative Linguistics, which Wexler originally refers to as Jewish Interlinguistics, has a unique research agenda that has evolved into a field of its own.7 Research in this field compares those languages with similar typological features, which are “derived from a coterritorial non-Jewish language, and each is open to similar types of enrichment—sometimes even similar resources.”8 Wexler adds that speakers of Jewish languages are those who have a common ethno-religious identity and are linked to a series of language shifts dating back to Old Hebrew. In recent decades, several issues have lingered over typological frameworks within the field. One of these concerns deals with the assumption that a Jewish language must be spoken by Jews for it to be identified as Jewish. This preconceived notion has led scholars to conclude that Modern Hebrew cannot be classified as a Jewish language. 9 This claim deduces that Modern Hebrew is not a Jewish language from a sociolinguistic perspective, given that Jews and non-Jews alike also speak it natively. Since Modern Hebrew has achieved official nation-state recognition by Israel and is spoken by millions of Muslims and Christians in the land, the claim suggests that it is not possible for the language to be a Jewish one. This is a topic that continues to result in debate among scholars. Judeo-Spanish, of course, also served non-Jews as the language of international trade, while gaining a great deal of attention throughout the Balkans.10 While there is inevitably a ‘Jewish’ component to the conceived notion of a Jewish language, documenting precisely where these features lie remains at the forefront of the field. Similarly, although Jews typically used a variant of the Hebrew alphabet as the preferred orthography of their language, this cannot be a defining factor in determining what a Jewish language is. Judeo-Spanish, for example, was written for centuries in the Rashi and Solitreo alphabets, along with certain printed sources in Meruba-block characters. However, the reforms implemented by Ataturk in 1928 made it that all those residing in Turkey switch to the Latin alphabet, which included a switch from the Arabic alphabet used in Ottoman Turkish to a Latinized alphabet used for Modern Turkish. Judeo-

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Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981). 8 Ibid., 137. 9 Uzzi Ornan, "Hebrew is not a Jewish Language," in Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua Fishman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985). 10 Tracy Harris, "The sociolinguistic situation of Judeo-Spanish in the 20th century in the United States and Israel," in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 4 (2) (2006), 120.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

Spanish speakers similarly gave up their established norms of writing.11 In defining a Jewish language by its orthography, one would have to claim that Judeo-Spanish would subsequently lose the ‘Judeo’ character in its shift to the Latin alphabet; of course this is not the case. Works written in Jewish characters in languages like Judeo-Persian or Judeo-Arabic are often classified as Jewish literature, even if themes of the text are not related to Judaism.12 Nevertheless, the orthography of these texts is only decipherable to a (mostly) Jewish audience. The conundrum, therefore, lies in the purpose for implementing a Jewish font for written sources by the Jews. The most widely spoken contemporary Jewish language is still an emerging one, that of Jewish-English.13 Gold and Benor have carried out extensive research on Jewish English.14 Jewish-English, as the language is termed, does not have a history of documentation in Hebrew characters; however, it still pertains to the vast number of Jewish (or Judeo-) languages in existence today. These issues, along with others, have provided scholars with new ways of analyzing individual Jewish languages and approaching comparative studies between them. I have described Jewish speech varieties as languages. However, as linguists often find themselves discussing, the distinction between a language and a dialect is a controversial, political, and ideological matter. Max Weinreich is known for his statement that a “language is a dialect with an army and navy,” which serves to demonstrate the paradox as to how languages have become independently recognized from one another throughout history due to underlying politics at hand. 15 Gold insists on using the terms ‘lect’ and ‘variety’ to describe what are typically referred to as Jewish languages.16 He asserts that using these terms allows the field to move forward and not put forth (often subjective) judgments on which

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Olga Borovaia, "The serialized novel as rewriting: The case of Ladino belles lettres," in Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 1 (2003). 12 Sarah Bunin Benor, "Do American Jews Speak a Jewish Language"?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness," in Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009). 13 See note 6. 14 David Gold, "Jewish intralinguistics as a field of study," in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 30 (1981); Sarah Bunin Benor, "Do American Jews Speak a Jewish Language"?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness," in Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009). 15 Bernard Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 141. 16 David Gold, "Jewish intralinguistics as a field of study," in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 30 (1981).

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speech varieties should be classified as dialects or languages, for which a comprehensive paradigm has not been created. He does, however, accept the hierarchal terminology of ‘language,’ which could be used to refer to Judeo-Spanish or Yiddish and the respective lects that pertain to each of them. Such an issue, prevalent across the world, is a linguistic and ideological one in both categorization and nomenclature. American English, British English, and Australian English are all classified as English; Egyptian Arabic and Moroccan Arabic are both considered Arabic; yet Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, due to politics within the former Yugoslavia, are considered separate languages by their speakers. Linguistically, however, there is no distinct point at which a language becomes independent from another, or simply a dialect of it, regardless of how many contrasting features they reveal. Identifying at what point Yiddish becomes a different language from German, Judeo-Spanish from Spanish, or Judeo-Arabic from Arabic, remains unanswered. This leads Gold to assert that a lect is “a Jewish lect to the extent that it furnishes its Jewish users with the means of expressing all that a person as a Jew needs to express by language.”17 With this notion, one may explore how Jews go about using their language and the degree of Jewishness it suggests, given variation from the non-Jewish variety. Benor’s work agrees with that of Gold, while considering Jewish languages as lects, etholects, and in describing a new theoretical construct, the Jewish Linguistic Repertoire. Benor emphasizes the importance in classifying what are typically referred to as Jewish languages as Jewish regiolects or Jewish lects. 18 This revised terminology accounts for variation within a community, as opposed to ignoring varieties that fall anywhere outside of a fabricated standard of a Jewish ‘language’ or ‘dialect.’ The Jewish Linguistic Repertoire (JLR) focuses on the selective use of distinctive features that Jews use as resources in their speech or writing. Benor notes that such a concept takes the set system of a language and “renders the controversy about language vs. dialect irrelevant, and allows for the use of more or less distinct language by any Jew or nonJew.” 19 These features, on the one hand, can include infrequent lexical incorporation from Hebrew, Aramaic or other languages and, on the other, represent the utmost unintelligible language in comparison to the nonJewish cognate language. This shift in categorization focuses on the community and appreciates the elements that Jews use to interact within as

 17

Ibid., 33. Sarah Bunin Benor, "Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twenty-First Century" in Religion Compass 2, no. 6 (2008). 19 Ibid., 1068. 18

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

well as outside of their speech communities. The revised construct shifts the question from “Does Jewish community X speak a Jewish language? to: How and to what extent does excerpt of speech or writing X make use of a distinctively Jewish linguistic repertoire?”20 This adjustment to the fundamental and underlying question behind Comparative Jewish Linguistics allows scholars to connect past and present speech communities and assess their development diachronically. While the JLR offers a distinct approach to the study of Jewish speech varieties, particularly for that of Jewish-English, there are certain issues for which we must account. Of the documented Jewish languages, Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish are the most carefully researched. They also represent an anomaly compared to other Jewish languages and a hiccup to the JLR. Both Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish are what Benor refers to as post-coterritorial languages. 21 This type of language is brought about when generations of speakers use their language outside their original territory in new regions of different languages, or when a speech community continues to use their language even when their co-regionalists shift to another one. Post-co-territorial languages constitute an exception and not the norm in Jewish history. This is understood in that Yiddish and JudeoSpanish, both pertaining to this category, developed profoundly outside the lands of their base-language, while most other Jewish vernaculars remain in close geographic proximity to them. Thus, the JLR construct applies somewhat differently to these post-co-territorial vernaculars, which I address through the lens of Judeo-Spanish spoken vernaculars. The latest advance of Jewish language classification is an updated account of the Jewish Linguistic Repertoire to that of the Ethnolinguistic Repertoire, in order to account not only for Jewish language varieties, but others as well. 22 Similarly, this approach relies on a set of linguistic resources that speakers have at their disposal in order to index a given part of their (ethnic) identity. In this construct, variability and distinction are established by “any elements of language used in other groups (whether or not the speakers are aware of them), including system level morphosyntactic, phonological, and prosodic features, as well as sporadic lexical and discourse features.” 23 This description of the revised theoretical



20 Sarah Bunin Benor, "Do American Jews Speak a Jewish Language"?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness," in Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2 (2009), 235. 21 See note 5. 22 Sarah Bunin Benor, "Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity," in Journal of Sociolinguistics 14, no. 2 (2010). 23 Ibid., 160.

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construct complements as well as extends Fishman’s definition of a Jewish language.24 Wexler accounts for four types of situations that allow for the creation of a Jewish language:25 A. Languages that are different from their non-Jewish cognates because of linguistic developments of the associated Jewish community. Some of these languages are connected through a chain of language shift going back to Old Hebrew and implement a substratum of Hebrew and Aramaic. [Example: Yiddish]. B. Languages that are different than their non-Jewish cognates because of linguistic developments of the cognate language. The variety of the Jews, therefore, becomes Jewish by default. Some of these varieties are considered ‘fossilized’ or ‘archaic’ in that they do not develop in the same way that the non-Jewish cognate does. [Example: Judeo-Spanish ‘Djudezmo’]. C. Languages that are unspoken, yet are representative of culture and religion. Written varieties of this sort are typically calqued versions of liturgical texts where the Hebrew/ Aramaic component is translated wordfor-word into the colloquial language of the Jewish community. This variety may exist alongside the spoken vernacular, however, varying greatly in linguistic construct. [Example: Ladino, the written translation variety of Judeo-Spanish]. D. Languages that vary minimally from the non-Jewish cognate yet incorporate an occasional set of Hebrew/ Aramaic elements in their speech. Such newly emerging or obsolescent languages tend to be preceded by the prefix ‘Jewish,’ rather than ‘Judeo.’ [Example: JewishEnglish].26 The factors that lead to the development of a Jewish language include segregation, religion, migration, and/ or a desire for a separate linguistic profile. 27 Types A and B represent this concept in that the former (A) relies on changes established from within the Jewish community while the non-Jewish co-regionalists bring about such change in the latter (B). The spoken vernaculars of Judeo-Spanish that developed outside of the Iberian

 24

See note 6. See note 2. 26 Paul Wexler, "Ascertaining the position of Judeo-Spanish within Ibero-Romance [1977], " Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages (Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006a). 27 Paul Wexler, "Jewish linguistics: 1981-1991-2001 [1993]," in Jewish and NonJewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006b). 25

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

Peninsula did not experience the same linguistic innovations that occurred from within it, as Jewish communities were virtually isolated from linguistic developments in the Peninsula.28 The enrichment of Hebrew and Aramaic elements, which arise from religious practice and the nexus with their speech communities’ established traditions, is common to all Jewish languages. The history of Jewish settlement and linguistic shift has been a topic of inquiry dating back to the Jewish exile into Babylon in 597 BCE. 29 The history of migration among the Jews has put them in close quarters with speakers of cognate and non-cognate language varieties, adding adstratal or superstratal elements to their Jewish repertoires. As Jews often desire to have a distinct linguistic profile from their co-regionalists, this contributes to unique innovations within and across Jewish languages. At the core of Jewish languages is lexical incorporation from Hebrew and/ or Aramaic. Wexler notes three roles for which these languages serve: “they are potentially the oldest component in a Jewish language, they are the only component common to all Jewish languages, and they are capable of systematically assuming two forms for each borrowed element.” 30 Hebrew, the original language of the Jewish people would serve as a substratal element for the initial diasporic languages that the Jews adopted: Aramaic, Iranian, and Greek. For those Jewish languages not in direct contact with either Hebrew or its successor as of the sixth century, Aramaic (or Judeo-Aramaic at that), these two languages are considered to contribute secondary substratal or adstratal elements. The integration of Hebrew and Aramaic, commonly referred to as The Holy Language or Lashon haKodesh (LK), is what Rabin states as the “substructure that enabled the Jews in their wanderings to change spoken languages, and in some cases even written languages, without changing their culture.” 31 Although Hebrew was not utilized as a primary means of communication or socialization for over two millennia, the language had remained an integral component of the Jewish religion. 32 For this reason, Hebrew



28 The case of Haketia, the Moroccan Judeo-Spanish vernacular, however, remained in closer contact to the developments within Spain due to geographic proximity. 29 Bernard Spolsky, The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 35. 30 Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981), 119. 31 Chaim Rabin, "What Constitutes a Jewish Language?" in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30, ed. Joshua Fishman (1981), 24. 32 Bernard Spolsky, "Jewish multilingualism in the first century: An essay in

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remained in the spheres of Jewish life and, thus, throughout their (Jewish) languages to varying degrees. Elements of Hebrew and Aramaic are often fully integrated into their respective Jewish languages.33 These elements undergo linguistic (phonological, morphological, etc.) changes in their new constructs. This assertion makes the fusion of features within Jewish languages clear, as opposed to believing that lexical items are merely borrowed resources and not fully integrated into the Jewish language. Elements of Hebrew and Aramaic incorporated into Judeo-Spanish, for example, have shown a variety of semantic processes. Certain lexical items retain the same meaning in both languages; some may (partially) differ, while other Jewish languages may semantically extend the definition of a particular word or phrase. These lexical refinements, of course, occur alongside all other linguistic juxtapositions.

3. Djudezmo and Haketia: The Judeo-Spanish Spoken Vernaculars Speakers of Judeo-Spanish refer to their language by a number of names, among those: Djudezmo, Djudyo, Djidyo, Haketia, Spaniolit, Muestro Espanyol, Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, or simply Spanish or (E)spanyol. Each term has an ideological stance associated with it; however, for the purposes of this article, I use Djudezmo to refer to the spoken language of the descendants of the Iberian Jews who migrated to the Ottoman Empire, and Haketia to refer to the spoken language of those Iberian Jews who settled in North Africa, primarily in northern cities of Morocco. JudeoSpanish, a term created by scholars within the last century, encapsulates all forms of diasporic Ibero-Romance Jewish speech. Often, Djudezmo is referred to as Eastern Judeo-Spanish and Haketia as Western JudeoSpanish. Djudezmo may be further divided into two varieties: Southeastern, encompassing Turkey, Greece, and Eastern Bulgaria, and Northwestern, representing the former Yugoslavia, Rumania, Western Bulgaria, and Austria.34 Many speakers and language-orientated institutions

 historical sociolinguistics," in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985). 33 David Bunis, "A Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Judezmo and Yiddish," in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30 (1981). 34 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b).

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

refer to the language of the Sephardim as Ladino,35 however, this term will be used to describe a particular written variety of Judeo-Spanish (see section 4). Throughout the centuries of the post-Iberian Diaspora, Sephardim have referred to their language by all of these names, as documented in Judeo-Spanish periodicals and other textual and oral sources. The history of the Judeo-Spanish language and its dialectology may be divided into three periods, as suggested by Bürki, Schmid, and Schwegler. 36 They suggest grouping the linguistic development of the Sephardim into Sefarad I, II and III, where Sefarad represents not only the changes in the language, but also the relocation of the Sephardim in their diasporas. I categorize these Sefarads according to this paradigm in the following figure. PERIOD Sefarad I Sefarad II

APPROXIMATE DURATION Medieval Judeo-Hispanic culture in the Iberian Peninsula Life in Sephardic communities formed outside of the Iberian Peninsula after the expulsions at the end of the fifteenth century

Sefarad III

Establishments in the United States, Latin America, Western Europe, and Israel

Figure 1.1 Sefarads, adapted from Bürki, Schmid and Schwegler (2006:9)

Sefarad I theoretically spans over a millennium in which the Jews resided in the Iberian Peninsula, yet particularly refers to the way the Jews used their language in the years leading up to la Reconquista. Sefarad II represents roughly four centuries in the Jews’ diaspora into the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Lastly, Sefarad III represents the shortest temporality beginning in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Bürki, Schmid, and Schwegler associate this diaspora with the migration patterns of the Sephardim after the rise of nation-states within the Ottoman Empire and the tragic events of World War II, where many Sephardic cities, like Ashkenazic, were annihilated. Focusing on Djudezmo, Bunis similarly establishes a paradigm for the development of the Judeo-Spanish language according to three periods:

 35

While I use Ladino to refer to the written calqued variety, I keep the term when quoting a speaker who may use Ladino to refer to the spoken variety, as is quite common outside of academic circles. 36 Yvette Bürki, Beatrice Schmid, and Armin Schwegler, "Una lengua en la diáspora: el judeoespañol de Oriente," in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (RILI), IV (2006).

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Old, Middle and Modern, similar to those Sefarads suggested above. 37 However, his analysis represents the linguistic paradigms associated within the respective geographical setting of the Sephardim and not the actual migration itself. The Old Period, similar to Sefarad I, spans from the beginning of Jewish settlement until 1492, the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain.38 Scholars continue to debate whether or not a Judeo-Spanish variety existed during this period; this is due to the lack of primary sources alluding to the language of the Jews prior to their expulsion. Minervini expresses this challenge in noting, “la lingüística histórica tiene el límite intrínseco de estar basada sobre fuentes escritas, que inevitablemente borran—o al menos ocultan—rasgos importantes de la lengua hablada, sobre todo aquella de los estratos sociales más bajos.”39 Bunis explains the linguistic particularities of the Jewish variety of language while within the Peninsula, using the few medieval texts that have survived, most from the fifteenth century. However, similar to Minervini, he notes, “since writing, and especially creative and formal writing, always differs somewhat from speech, these written documents can only give us an imperfect idea of how the average medieval Sephardi spoke.”40 Both Bunis and Minervini offer lists of lexicon to exemplify the influence of Hebrew and Aramaic in (non-calque based) writings, while noting minimal substrata from Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Greek. Examples tend to be limited in the literature of those describing these substrata, often noting meldar ‘to read’ and Ayifto ‘Egypt’ from Judeo-Greek and alhad ‘Sunday’ and alkunya ‘surname’ from Judeo-Arabic. Wexler acknowledges that Judeo-Spanish during Sefarad I, as well as in the immediate years following the expulsion, predominantly mirrors Castilian, while undoubtedly having elements of other Romance languages present. For this reason, he notes, “it may be more correct to describe the speech of 15th century Iberian Jews as (Judeo-?) Aragonese, (Judeo-?) Valencian etc., rather than as simply ‘Judeo-Spanish.’”41 Given that the term Judeo-Spanish often encapsulates all forms of Ibero-Romance language, there are still many questions to be asked about unique varieties

 37

See note 34. This could also span until 1497, the year in which the Jews of Portugal were forced to convert or exiled. 39 Laura Minervini, "El desarrollo histórico del judeoespañol," in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (2006), 15. 40 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b), 42. 41 Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981), 114 38

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

of Jewish speech prior to the expulsions of the Sephardim. Nevertheless, although Judeo-Spanish is heavily based on Castilian Spanish, other peninsular languages have influenced its formation as well. Aside from occasional lexical variation among Sephardim, Minervini notes that in examining their syntax, phonology, and morphology, it is not possible to ascertain substantial differences between the Jews and Christians during this period.42 Similarly, Sephiha attests that prior to the expulsion, the Jews of Spain spoke varieties of Spanish similar to those of their Christian and Muslim neighbors. 43 Therefore, differences between the Spanish of the Jews and that of their co-regionalists does not preclude a distinct Judeo-Spanish, as evidenced in later periods. These views are prominent among scholars who take the stance that the variety of language within the Peninsula was not uniquely Jewish in nature. The strongest argument for a distinct Jewish repertoire during Sefarad I comes from an analysis across the Judeo-Spanish varieties of Djudezmo and Haketia. This argument notes that, while these varieties developed after Sefarad I, the similarities between them indicate a common linguistic source for both groups of speakers. Schwarzwald asserts that the similarities between Djudezmo and Haketia are not coincidental. 44 She notes the retention of prepalatal fricatives in both vernaculars as evidence of a common linguistic origin. This, however, would not indicate a unique Jewish component in speech during Sefarad I given that co-regional nonJewish speakers also used these phones. Instead, their retention can be attributed to their isolation from the Peninsula during the evolution of Castilian. A more convincing argument for common roots from Sefarad I is the innovative lexical forms pertaining to both Djudezmo and Haketia, primarily of Hebrew origin. These include: balabay(a) ‘householder, boss’, axenarse ‘to beautify oneself’, dezmazalado ‘unlucky’. Shared lexicon from other language stock include: trokamyento ‘change’, prometa ‘promise’, araskina ‘itch’, and prestura ‘speed.’ 45 While these forms provide evidence for a Judeo-Spanish repertoire within the Peninsula, the evidence does not necessarily account for a separate variety altogether. The question whether Judeo-Spanish existed in the Peninsula prior to the expulsion compares to how the variety of language spoken by

 42

See note 39. Haim Vidal Sephiha, "'Christianisms' in Judeo-Spanish Calque and Vernacular," in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Langauges, ed. Joshua Fishman (1985). 44 Ora Schwarzwald, "Language Choice and Language Varieties Before and After the Expulsion," in From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture, ed. Yedida Stillman, and Norman Stillman Zucker (1999). 45 Ibid., 406. 43

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Sephardim outside the Peninsula is a Jewish variety. The Ethnolinguistic Repertoire is one approach that may account for this issue.46 In comparing Jewish vernaculars, Benor notes, “while speakers of Yiddish and Ladino spoke completely different language from their Slavic and Balkan neighbors, speakers of Judeo- Greek, Judeo- Arabic, Judeo- Persian, and dozens more languages spoke the local language with varying degrees of distinctiveness.”47 Although Benor does not apply the repertoire approach directly to Judeo-Spanish nor its distinct periodization, her theory reminds us of what is at the core of Jewish language typology. Her statement reviews Djudezmo in Sefarad II, which was undoubtedly out of contact with the language developments occurring within the Peninsula during the initial centuries following the expulsion. However, Benor notes that speakers of Greek and Arabic spoke Jewish varieties of the language in their respective territories, and aptly places these Jewish varieties within the model of the Ethnolinguistic Repertoire. Therefore, the language spoken by the Sephardim in the Peninsula before the turn of the century following their expulsions should, and could, appropriately fit into this model as well. This type of language would be classified under Wexler’s type D typology, which alludes to nascent languages, or those that are exceedingly similar to that of the co-territorial non-Jews, despite substratal influences from Hebrew, Aramaic, or possibly another language.48 At this point, we must distinguish between the linguistic developments of Eastern (Djudezmo) and Western (Haketia) Judeo-Spanish during Sefarad II. As Djudezmo and Haketia are both post-expulsion developments, their linguistic origins can be traced to Sefarad I, and explored in the years following this period. The development of Djudezmo is represented during Sefarad II, encompassing the years 1493 until 1810. Bunis categorizes this period in two distinct periods: Early Middle (1493- 1728) and Late Middle (1729-1810).49 Minervini attributes the development of Judeo-Spanish outside of the Peninsula to koineization.50 Referring to the situation concerning JudeoSpanish, she describes this term as the formation of a variety of language “que es consecuencia de las nuevas condiciones históricas, sociales y

 46

Sarah Bunin Benor, "Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity," in Journal of Sociolinguistics 14, no. 2 (2010). 47 Ibid., 13. In this case, Benor uses ‘Ladino’ in terms of the spoken vernacular, and not the calqued variety. 48 See note 2. 49 See note 40. 50 Laura Minervini, "El desarrollo histórico del judeoespañol," in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (2006).

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

culturales determinadas.”51 For example, Wexler notes the common belief that features from Portuguese found in Judeo-Spanish are attributed to koineization during Sefarad II. 52 However, he hypothesizes that these components may have been integrated into Judeo-Spanish during the years between 1492-1497 in which many Sephardim migrated to Portugal before leaving there as well. Nevertheless, daily contact among Sephardic communities, which may have exhibited slight differences in their Jewish repertoires depending if they were from Aragón, Castilla, León, Cataluña or other regions, would level their language as they began to incorporate adstratal and superstratal components into their language. The Jews of various regions from within the Peninsula settled into post-expulsion areas with one another, often establishing synagogues based on their former cities, although not all were represented. Quintana-Rodríguez notes that the initial process of koineization occurred within Sephardic communities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 53 She posits that two koines developed independently; one in Istanbul and the other in Salonika. These two major centers of Sephardic life influenced other Judeo-Spanish speaking communities with which they were in contact. Following the years of the expulsion from Spain, Penny explores the linguistic development of Castilian within the Peninsula as well as JudeoSpanish outside of it.54 Significant changes took place in both varieties, which makes comparison of such features a more promising undertaking during the period of Sefarad II. Judeo-Spanish retained certain phonological features that Romance varieties shared prior to the expulsion. Castilian replaced the voiceless prepalatal fricative [‫]ݕ‬, its voiced counterpart [‫]ݤ‬, and the voiced prepalatal affricate [d‫]ݤ‬55 with the voiceless velar fricative [x]. Djudezmo, however, retained these pre-expulsion Sefarad I phones. Similarly, Haketia retained [‫ ]ݕ‬and [‫]ݤ‬, while [d‫]ݤ‬ converged with [‫ ]ݤ‬in words of Ibero-Romance origin.56 Kushner-Bishop

 51

Ibid., 18. See note 26. 53 Aldina Quintana-Rodríguez. Geografía lingüística del judeoespañol. Estudio sincrónico y diacrónico Vol. Sephardic 3. (Berne: Peter Lang, 2006). 54 Ralph Penny, History of the Spanish Language, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and Variation and change in Spanish, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 55 Thought to be an allophone of /‫ݤ‬/ in Old Spanish, occurring in initial position as well as after a nasal. 56 An example of Haketia [‫ ]ݕ‬is disho. Examples of Haketia [‫ ]ݤ‬include: hiƵo (son), Ƶudió (Jew), reliƣión (religion) and ƣeneral (general). In contemporary orthographic norms the grapheme ƣ (as opposed to Ƶ ) is used before an [e] or an [i]. 52

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notes that these phones first simplified toward the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth into [‫]ݕ‬, which eventually velarized to [x] and remained at that until the present day. 57 These developments occurred not only within the Peninsula, but all other countries founded by the Spanish after the expulsion, primarily due to close contact between them. Ottoman Sephardic quarters, of course, had minimal contact with the Iberian Peninsula after the Sephardim were expelled. Kushner-Bishop finds that the Sephardim zealously consider these prepalatal phones as a key marker of their language and a symbol of its preservation for more than five centuries. 58 While for some, this retention serves as an identity marker; others perceive the fact that these phonemes did not morph into others as representative of the fossilized nature of the language. Integral to understanding the development of the Judeo-Spanish language during Sefarad II is familiarity with the lifestyle in which the Sephardim lived in their diaspora. Stein notes that “under the Ottoman leadership, the Sephardim were able to blossom culturally, socially, and economically: not only as a discrete community but in symbiosis with the multi-lingual and multi-sectarian peoples alongside whom they lived.”59 This atmosphere was conducive to the expansion of the Judeo-Spanish language within the Ottoman Empire, where administrative regions were organized as millets. The establishment of the millet was defined in terms of ethnicity and religion, not by territory itself. Callaway notes the nature of this organizational structure in that, there was a Muslim millet, to which Muslims of all different ethnolinguistic affinities belonged, an Orthodox millet, comprised of Greek and Slavic Orthodox Christian communities, an Armenian millet, comprised of Armenian Orthodox Christians, and a Jewish millet, comprised of Sephardim, Ashkenazim, Italian Jews, and other Rabbinical Jewish denominations.60

Judeo-Spanish speaking communities resided in intimate spaces that would not be of an equal nature after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. This

 57

Jill Kushner-Bishop, "More than a language, a travel agency: Ideology and performance in the Israeli Judeo-Spanish revitalization movement." Dissertation (University of California, Los Angeles, 2004). 58 Ibid. 59 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Introduction ‘Ladino in Print,’" in Jewish History 16, no. 3 (2002), 226. 60 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 3.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

space allowed for the Judeo-Spanish language to evolve in a unique way from that of Peninsular Spanish, all while staying the mother tongue of generations of Sephardim until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. The two major cities of Sephardic migration were those of Constantinople, (later, Istanbul), and Salonika (later, Thessaloniki). These two cities represented dominant Sephardic societies, with Constantinople as the capital of the Ottoman Empire and Salonika, referred to as the little Jerusalem of the Balkans, as a major port city. 61 Other main centers of Sephardic life included the cities of Izmir and Edirne. Outside of the Iberian Peninsula, Djudezmo developed in slightly different ways and essentially created two main varieties: Northwestern and Southeastern, although there are certainly linguistic subtleties among each community within these groupings as well. Djudezmo represented a variety of lects, each with adstratal or superstratal phonological and lexical elements from their co-territorial languages. Djudezmo, however, was certainly not standardized across all communities within the Ottoman Empire. 62 Lexical and phonological variation and innovation fluctuated from millet to millet, some of which can be evidenced throughout the Judeo-Spanish press starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Early Middle Period (1493-1728) is classified by new linguistic developments, many of which can be associated with the koineization of Judeo-Spanish in the Balkans. Turkish and Greek elements began to enter the local speech varieties of the Sephardim, as well as those of other local languages. An adstrata of Italian elements is also attributed to this period given trade relations with Venice and other port cities. This period represents the formative years of Judeo-Spanish outside of the Peninsula. The Late Middle Period (1729-1810) characterizes the onset of a plethora of rabbinical literature produced in the spoken vernacular. The purpose of such a literary style, as opposed to Hebrew or Ladino texts, was to target the majority of the Sephardim, all of whom were familiar with the colloquial language. The first major literary piece accounted for is that of Constantinople’s Abraham ben Isaac Asa in 1729, a translation of Oti’ot de Rabbi Akiva (Letters of Rabbi Akiva). Subsequent works from Isaac Asa included works related to philosophical, historical and religious texts. Another work, deemed as the highest of caliber in Judeo-Spanish literature, is that of Me’am Lo’ez, a comprehensive collection of biblical commentary. Isaac ben Makhir Khuli (1685-1732) initiated this project,

 61

Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the JudeoSpanish Community, 14th-20th centuries, (University of California Press, 2000). 62 Rey Romero, Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the JudeoSpanish dialect spoken in Istanbul (Libra Kitap, 2012).

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and the entire series of commentary was completed by his successors in the nineteenth century.63 In these texts and others, new characteristics of Judeo-Spanish were documented. Consonant cluster –rd- was often metathesized into –dr, as in vedra(d) ‘true’, vedre ‘green’, godro ‘fat,’ and guadrar ‘to save.’ Also, as Peninsular Spanish went through a process whereas initial fÆhÆ‫ܓ‬ occurred, some Sephardic cities also began to replace initial –f, common in Old Spanish (and traced to Latin), with a zero-marking/ null grapheme (‫)ܓ‬, such as in fazerÆ azer ‘to do/ to make’ and farinaÆ arina ‘flour.’ This phonological development, however, did not take place in cities like Salonika, Bitola, or Bucharest, where the initial –f is maintained.64 Morphosyntactic changes occurred in the preterit forms of the first person singular and plural, such as avlí 65 ‘I spoke’ and avlimos ‘we spoke.’ The suffixes –i and –imos are common throughout all three sets of verbs (-ar, -er and –ir).66 Phonologically, while the Djudezmo varieties of Istanbul and Izmir produce vowels similar to Castilian, other Sephardic cities demonstrate varying degrees of vowel shift. Djudezmo speakers from Rhodes, Sarajevo, and Bucharest, for example, raise atonic front vowel eÆ i and back vowel oÆ u.67 Therefore, djente ‘people’ would be phonetically realized as [‫ޖ‬d‫ݤ‬en.ti] and k(y)ero ‘I want’ would yield [‫ޖ‬k(j)e.‫ݐ‬u].68 Since most of the linguistic evidence from this time comes from textual documentation, I shall note that in Rashi and Solitreo writings, [e] and [i] were both represented by the letter yod (. / I) in medial or final position, or aleph yod (.% / ia)69 in initial position. Of a similar nature, both [o] and [u] were represented by the letter vav (* / o) in medial or final position, or aleph vav (*% / oa) in initial position. Speakers, of

 63

David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b). 64 Marius Sala, Estudios sobre el judeo-español de Bucarest. (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1970),138. 65 I add stress marks here although there are no such markers in Rashi or Soliteo transcriptions. Contemporary proposed standards of Judeo-Spanish in Latin characters also avoid placing accent marks. 66 Exceptions to this apply- i.e., vide ‘I saw,’ dishe ‘I said.’ The forms vidi and dishi, however, are not uncommon—due to either vowel raising in some cities or hyper-correction in others. 67 David Bunis, A guide to reading and writing Judezmo. (Adelantre!, The Judezmo Society, 1975). 68 This is similar to front and back vowel raising in Portuguese. 69 The first (left-most) letter/s are presented in Rashi characters followed by Solitreo letter(s) after the slash.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

course, pronounced their particular variety and, in cases of textual ambiguity, would refer to context. Sephardim from Monastir often realize aÆe in syllable-final position; examples include kaze ‘house,’ and favles, ‘you speakIND.’70 In Sarajevo, we also see the case of vowel lowering from atonic eÆ a as in meldar ‘to read’ realized as [mal‫ޖ‬ða‫]ݐ‬.71 During this period, an increasing number of lexical elements from other languages began to be incorporated into the Djudezmo vernacular with Hispanic verbal suffixes; examples include badkar from Hebrew ‘to check’ and karistrear from Turkish ‘to mix’. Similarly, periphrastic phrases were used as in azer teshuvá from Hebrew ‘to repent’ and azer dikat from Turkish ‘to pay attention.’ These examples demonstrate some of the linguistic innovations taking place during this period. The Modern Period of Djudezmo, Sefarad III, may also be divided into early (1811- World War I) and late (World War I- present) periods. This divide is in accordance with the evolution of linguistic features of the language rather than migration patterns alone and, therefore, Sefarad III commences earlier than as in Bürki, Schmid, and Schwegler’s model. 72 Bunis attributes the start of the Modern Period to the increased number of texts published in the vernacular not only in the Constantinople and Salonika, but throughout many cities where Sephardim resided, including Vienna, Belgrade, Sofia, Sarajevo, Bucharest, and Jerusalem.73 This period commences at the start of the nineteenth century due to linguistic changes in morphology, phonology, and lexicon, which speakers retain to this day. The Modern Period of Judeo-Spanish begins around the year 1811 due to the modern vernacular portrayed in the works of Belgrade’s Israel ben Hayyim. His publications, many of which he printed in Vienna, include: a High Holiday prayer book featuring vernacular commentary and instruction (1811), a reedited edition of the aforementioned Isaac Asa’s eighteenth century Bible, as well as a series of manuals for children related to language and mathematics. 74 Subsequent writers pertaining to this period, in addition to Hayyim, utilize a one-to-one grapheme to phoneme system in their writing, thus beginning to standardize Judeo-Spanish Rashi

 70

Max Luria. A Study of the Monastir Dialect of Judeo-Spanish on Oral Materials Collected in Monastir, Yugoslavia. (Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1930). 71 Eliezer Papo, "Serbo-Croatian Influences on Spoken Judeo-Spanish," in European Journal of Jewish Studies, 1 (2), (2008). 72 See note 36. 73 See note 34. 74 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b), 409.

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(and Solitreo) orthography. Texts from this period also feature adstrata from Slavic languages, evident in some of the Northwestern Sephardic varieties of language. Examples of such phonological elements include [a.pu‫ޖ‬dza‫‘ ]ݐ‬alight’, [ka‫ݐޖ‬o.tsa] ‘carriage’ and [t‫ݕ‬u‫ޖ‬p‫ݐ‬i] ‘bridge.’ 75 These words would be pronounced differently in their Southeastern forms: [a.po‫ޖ‬za‫]ݐ‬, [ka‫ݐޖ‬o.sa], and [kju‫ޖ‬p‫ݐ‬i]. Of major importance within this period is the start of the printing press within Turkey and the Balkans. The Djudezmo printing press produced over 300 periodicals throughout the Mediterranean diaspora.76 Many of the writers and editors of these newspapers were educated within Westernized schools such as the French Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860) and the Italian Società Dante Alighieri (1888). The French and Italian languages influenced some writers so much that their publications exhibited a “tendency to avoid words of Hebrew and Turkish origin, increasingly considered to be old-fashioned and of low prestige.”77 During this period, the Djudezmo printing press flourished in the Ottoman Empire and serves as a resource in understanding the linguistic development and patterns throughout a number of Sephardic communities worldwide. Unlike French and Italian, Hebrew and Aramaic enter Judeo-Spanish in two distinct ways, representing two sets of corpora. The first pertains to the Classical Corpus, which concentrated on liturgical texts, commentaries, and prayers. This corpus is primarily apparent in written sources. The second set of lexicon pertains to the Integrated Corpus. This corpus represents lexicon from Hebrew and Aramaic that Judeo-Spanish speakers incorporated into their spoken vernaculars. Aside from common Biblical quotations and terminology, which stem from the Classical Corpus, a great deal of the lexicon was crafted in the diaspora representing new linguistic innovations such as semantic extensions or detractions and periphrastic verbal constructions. Morag explains that while the Classical Corpus was “text-bound,” the Integrated Corpus, “fully pertained to a system of living language,” applicable to most Jewish languages.78 The Integrated Corpus, therefore, represents lexicon that covers all aspects and emotions of individual and communal life. This set of lexicon pertains to the community. That is to say, any speaker of Judeo-Spanish would be able to

 75

Ibid., 410. Tracy Harris, Death of a language: The history of Judeo-Spanish. (University of Delaware Press, 1994). 77 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b), 411. 78 David Bunis, A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992a), 9. 76

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

recognize vocabulary from this corpus, whereas this is not the case with the Classical Corpus. These two sets initially interacted with one another in that the Classical Corpus nourished the Integrated one for its speakers. Bunis accounts for over four thousand lexical items from Hebrew and Aramaic in Modern Djudezmo, from the early nineteenth century until the present.79 While Bunis collects personal narratives in addition to archival material, the latter shows an ample array of domains in which Hebrew and Aramaic were once used. If Hebrew and Aramaic elements were present, they appeared in either oral or literary genres. Oral genres include everyday matters as well as specialized (humorous, learned) themes, while literary genres include religious/ traditional texts or secular (journalistic, humorous, scientific, belles-lettristic) matters. The Late Modern Period, which spans from World War I until the present day, encompasses the linguistic developments that have taken place primarily due to historical events in Sephardic communities and their greater surroundings. The Ottoman lifestyle of the Sephardim, as well as their language, would experience a shift toward secular and Western ideology during this period. Major historical events leading up to this period include the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913, and the start of World War I in 1914. The beginning of this period is characterized by the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and, thus, the way of life that the Sephardim became accustomed to in the centuries after their expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula. The formation and recognition of nation-states, including that of Israel in 1948, brought about major emigration. Within cities throughout Turkey and Israel, Jews were pressured into speaking their newly reformed and established languages, with corresponding “Citizen Speak ‘X’” campaigns and slogans. In Turkey, a lesser Arabic- and Persian-influenced Turkish replaced Ottoman Turkish and was hegemonically imposed upon all of its citizens. In Israel, Modern Hebrew was imposed on Jews as the national language, which would ultimately replace—and endanger—other Jewish languages such as Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, and Judeo-Arabic. It is the series of events during World War II, however, that would forever change the landscape of world Jewry, as the Nazis murdered six million Jews—of all backgrounds—and annihilated vibrant Jewish communities in a few short years. All Sephardic populations were affected in one way or another. Flourishing Jewish communities within Greece and Yugoslavia were left almost vacant after over ninety percent of their Jewish populations were to perish during the Holocaust.

 79

Ibid.

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While Sefarad III continues to the present day, its linguistic features take on a new set of criteria. The series of events occurring during this period have greatly endangered the vitality of the language. This is a direct result of the destruction of Sephardic communities and hegemonic language policies for those communities that remained intact. JudeoSpanish speaking communities expanded into other parts of the world during Sefarad III including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil, among others. The Djudezmo printing press also flourished in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century with over twenty newspapers; however, none have existed for over half a century.80 Judeo-Spanish, nevertheless, continues to develop due to superstrata of new co-territorial languages where the Sephardim reside. Pockets of Judeo-Spanish speaking communities—or speakers—are found throughout the world, and many are active in the preservation and revitalization of the language. Judeo-Spanish has reached a post-vernacular status today. BrinkDanan differentiates a vernacular from a post-vernacular in that the former allows for everyday communication, whereas the latter does not. 81 Speakers of languages that are thriving today do not necessarily realize, nor need to concern themselves with, the external levels that the utilization of a language may take on. In the case of Judeo-Spanish, the postvernacular model suggests that the use of the language by a speaker (today) represents much more than just communication. Use of a postvernacular Judeo-Spanish represents the Sephardim’s perseverance and history dating back to the Iberian Peninsula and the efforts to preserve the language in order to assure its longevity. Although Judeo-Spanish varieties are indeed used currently for purely vernacular motives, all socialization in the language represents much more than just its use. This is particularly due to the fact that today’s speakers of Judeo-Spanish are fully competent in another language, if not several. These other languages have made their way to the forefront of most domains and, for most, the use of JudeoSpanish is applied to very specific and limited ones. The historical, linguistic, and sociological developments of Djudezmo, however, only represent one side of the Judeo-Spanish spectrum. While many Sephardim settled in various cities throughout Turkey and the Balkans, others travelled to cities in North Africa, particularly those in



80 Aviva Ben-Ur, "The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 19101948," in Multilingual America, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998). 81 Marcy Brink-Danan, "The meaning of Ladino: The semiotics of an online speech community," in Language & Communication 31, no. 2 (2011).

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

Morocco. The Sephardim established themselves throughout a number of cities within Morocco, mostly northern ones such as Tetuan, Tangier, Alcazar, Larache, Arcila, and Chefchaouen. The Sephardim also settled into Ceuta and Melilla, which, however, pertain to Spain as autonomous regions. These newly entering Jews in Morocco were known as the megorashim, the expelled ones. This group of Jews contrast with the already native-indigenous Jews—the toshabim—who resided in Morocco for centuries, speaking Arabic as well as Berber. Madkouri notes that the migorashim, “tenían sus propias leyes y reglamentos comunitarios que diferían de los de los toshabim, así como su folklore y su literatura. De hecho, visto su pasado cultural andalusí, se consideraban en muchos aspectos superiores a los marroquíes.”82 The estranged Sephardim would experience strong feelings of nostalgia for their native language in the centuries to follow their expulsion from Spain. The Western JudeoSpanish variety of the Sephardim, Haketia, developed during the period of Sefarad II. The first major work detailing Haketia was that of José Benoliel (18581937) in his corpus entitled, Dialecto Judeo-hispano-marroquí o Hakitía, published in 1977. The term Haketia is thought to have two possible derivations, with the first being the more linguistically based and presumably appropriate selection. That is, Haketia comes from the Arabic root ‘HAK,’ meaning to speak or narrate, followed by a Spanish suffix— ía. The second explanation for this name is that it derives from the diminutive form of the biblical figure, Isaac, or Haquito, thus being the language of the Ishaquitos, along with the apheresis of his name to that of Haquito.83 This derivation, however, is prone to much scrutiny. The linguistic development of Haketia is rich in construct, primarily due to elements incorporated from local linguistic sources. In regard to the origins of Haketia, Raz writes, “como se sabe, la fondina (base) de la haketía es prencipalmente el castellano medieval jalteado (mezclado) con palabras de más manaderos (fuentes) lingüisticos.” 84 In comparison, the Spanish that the Sephardim took to the Ottoman Empire developed in a similar fashion to Haketia. This is primarily due to linguistic influences from the surrounding non-Sephardic communities. In regard to the similarities between the evolution of these two Judeo-Spanish varieties,

 82

Mohamed Madkouri, "La Hakitía, una lengua para la sociolingüística y la interculturalidad." in Revista Maguen 141 (2006), 28. 83 José Benoliel, Dialecto judeo-hispano-marroquí, o Hakitía. (Madrid Varona, 1977), 3. 84 Alicia Raz, "La historia de la ণaketía," in Voces de ণaketía. (2010), para. 1. http://www.vocesdehaquetia. com

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Djudezmo and Haketia are comparable due to their base of primarily Castilian lexicon, yet distinct in that Djudezmo relies on linguistic resources from languages such as Turkish, French, and Italian, while Haketia benefits directly from Arabic.85 While speakers of Djudezmo and Haketia can often understand one another, such differences, depending on their degree of implementation, can make it so that these varieties become unintelligible to speakers of the other variety. The uniqueness of Haketia is attributed, in part, to lexical and phonological incorporation from Arabic, particularly of the Moroccan variety. Madkouri suggests that such adstratal and superstratal elements were introduced not only by the toshabim who resided in these communities for centuries beforehand, but also by the non-Jewish presence of Arabic and Berber speakers.86 The status and marginalization of these Jews was conducive to the expansion of their language following the initial centuries after their expulsion. Due to the fact that Haketia has always been a primarily oral language, the corpus of literature that exists is quite miniscule. Bunis notes the scarcity of texts in Haketia prior to the latter half of the nineteenth century in that “it is only with the scholarly descriptions of popular Moroccan Sephardi speech and song… that we begin to get a detailed picture of the unique traditional language used by the Sephardim in Morocco.”87 Much of the documentation used after settlement into North Africa pertains to Ladino liturgical texts. The first French institution of L´Alliance Israélite Universelle came to Tetuan in 1862 in an attempt to modernize the Jews of Moroccan cities. Children received daily instruction in French and, therefore, the language soon became one of prestige among the Sephardim. While the Alliance introduced the French language to Sephardic communities in Northern Morocco—like it did in Southeastern Europe—the language and culture were also spread throughout the south of the country under the French protectorate. The minutes of the Jewish Community of Tangier, referred to as Las Actas, is evidence of the linguistic evolution in this city between the years 1860-1883. These documents recorded all doings within la comunidad hebrea de Tánger. Recently, transcriptions of the protocols and minutes of

 85

Gad Nassi, En tierras ajenas yo me vo murir. (Istanbul: Isis, 2002). See note 82. 87 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b), 45. 86

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

the meetings that took place during these years have been published in Latin characters.88 Minutes were recorded in the Solitreo alphabet. The year 1860 is a significant one for the linguistic development of Haketia. Sephiha has alluded to what can be two distinct periods with regards to the development of Haketia.89 The first period is that of 1492 until 1860, in which certain continuity could be found from medieval Spanish, with much influence from Hebrew and Arabic. The second period is from 1860 until the general forfeiture of Haketia as a primary means of communication. This period is marked by the Spanish occupation of Tetuan in the Hispano-Moroccan War, or La Guerra de África, from 18591860, a war that began due to Moroccan upheaval over the Spanish zones of Ceuta and Melilla. The goal of this war from the Moroccan perspective was to gain control over Ceuta and Melilla, while Spain’s goal was to gain control of Tangier and Tetuan, frequently referred to as ‘la toma de Tetuan.’ The Wad-Ras treaty in late April of 1860 brought an end to the war, with Spain as the ultimate victor.90 Therefore, the period following the expulsions of the Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula until 1860 can be referred to as Sefarad II for Haketia speaking communities. Subsequently, Sefarad III encompasses the years following 1860 until the present day. From this critical period at the start of Sefarad III, Haketia went through a period of rehispanization. As Haketia developed into a distinct variety from medieval Spanish by incorporating unique lexical and phonetic elements, the process of rehispanization slowly transformed this language into one much more similar to that of Castilian Spanish today.91 Textual sources from this time provide evidence of phonological change during this period. Bunis notes that some nineteenth century texts include lexical items spelled with a ʫ / ʧ which represented Castilian [x] whereas they were previously spelled with a ʹ [‫ ]ݕ‬or ’ʦ [‫ ;]ݤ‬examples include [mu‫ޖ‬xe‫ ]ݐ‬as opposed to [mu‫ݤޖ‬e‫‘ ]ݐ‬woman’ and [de‫ޖ‬xa‫ ]ݐ‬as opposed to [de‫ݕޖ‬a‫‘ ]ݐ‬to leave.’ 92 The process of rehispanization occurred at such a

 88

Gladys Pimienta and Sidney Pimienta. 1860-1883 Libro de Actas de la Junta Selecta de la Comunidad Hebrea de Tánger. (Jerusalem: Jem and Erez, 2010). 89 Haim Vidal Sephiha, La agonía de los Judeo-Españoles. (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2012). 90 Mitchell Serels, A History of the Jews of Tangier in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. (Sepher Hermon Pr, 1991). 91 See note 82. 92 David Bunis, A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992a), 12.

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rapid rate due to the proximity between Morocco and Spain, in addition to the politics between these countries during these years.93 The establishment of Spanish and French Protectorates in 1912 is considered an additional turning point for the dissolution of Haketia. Despite the somewhat limited lifecycle of Moroccan-Judeo-Spanish as a primary means of communication, remnants of the language are still present at various degrees in the linguistic repertoire of Sephardim of Moroccan origin who reside within or outside of the country. Paloma reveals that among the dwindling population of Sephardim in Morocco today, women use Haketia as a vector of power within the home and familial domains. 94 Acts of speech in Haketia are naturally carried out through song. Similarly, Benhamú-Jiménez notes that in his native Melilla, younger generations of Sephardim still utilize Haketia when speaking with their family members or friends on a variety of matters, mostly personal.95 The Spanish-Moroccan war of 1859-1860 initiated a major shift in the geographical homeland of the Haketia speaking Sephardim, as many began to immigrate to Latin America, with Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil among the most common of destinations. Cohen explains the reasons behind the migrations as two fold; the first, to take advantage of economic opportunity in new lands and the second, the ease the Sephardim found in migrating to lands where the language spoken in them was similar to their own native tongue. 96 Economic opportunities abroad, suppression in the homeland, as well as the facility of linguistic transition were key factors for the migration of Moroccan Jews into Latin America. In comparing Djudezmo and Haketia, the two major Judeo-Spanish spoken vernaculars, we are able to piece together and understand the linguistic development of the Sephardim. While the consensus among scholars is that a Judeo-Spanish language did not exist prior to the expulsions of the Sephardim during Sefarad I, evidence suggests that the Jews had access to a distinct repertoire that allowed them to distinguish themselves from their non-Jewish co-regionalists when appropriate.

 93

Bryan Kirschen, "The (not-so) distant relationship between Spanish and Arabic," in Voices 2. (UC Press, 2014). 94 See Part Three of this volume for Vanessa Paloma’s article on this topic. 95 David Benhamú Jiménez, “Spanish vs. Haketia in the Jewish Community of Melilla: Examples of the Current Variation and Assimilation of ‘la jaquetía de la perifería.’” 4th ucLADINO Judeo-Spanish Symposium. (Los Angeles. March 4, 2015). 96 Esther Cohen, "La función del judeoespañol en el desarrollo de la cultura sefardí," in Sefárdica: Djudezmo y Jaquetía, 16 (2006).

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

Furthermore, similarities in the lexicon, phonology, and morphology of Djudezmo and Haketia strengthen the argument for a linguistic commonality among the Jews in Sefarad I. These commonalities are best understood, however, in terms of the Ethnolinguistic Repertoire approach, 97accounting for the array of linguistic resources that the Sephardim used to express their identity through language.

4. Ladino: The Judeo-Spanish Written Calque Ladino, the common nomenclature for the language of the Sephardim today, presents a multidimensional discussion on Jewish language typology. In this section, I explore the origins of Ladino as a calque, its divergence from the Judeo-Spanish spoken vernaculars, and influence that the former has had on the latter since the expulsion of the Sephardim from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492 (Spain) and 1497 (Portugal). Examples to follow will illustrate the linguistic differences between the spoken and written (calque) Judeo-Spanish varieties. While Jewish language typology varieties A, B, and D (see section 2) all refer to some sort of spoken vernacular with varying degrees of Hebrew/ Aramaic substratum and adstratum, type C refers to “non-spoken languages of liturgy, [which] could be called ‘Judeo-calque’ languages.”98 A calque refers to the linguistic representation of a language using wordfor-word order, respecting the syntax of the original language, while translating the words from language X to language Y accordingly. Jewish languages have developed this particular type of written expression, primarily for liturgical purposes. In relation to the Sephardim, Ladino is the term used to refer to this Judeo-Spanish calque, which should be distinguished from any spoken vernacular over the centuries and throughout the many lands where the Sephardim have lived. Ivre Taytsh, the calqued variety of Yiddish, and Sharh, the calqued variety of JudeoArabic, serve as additional examples of type C Jewish language varieties. Wexler further notes that calqued varieties were iconized with sophistication in “recognizing that the ‘essence’ of a language resided in its syntax and word-formation strategies, and not in the lexicon.”99 Thus,

 97

See note 22. Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981), 107. 99 Paul Wexler, "Old Views, New Views, and Renewed Views." in Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of 'Jewish' Languages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006c), xvii. 98

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despite its relexification, the syntax remains the most symbolic component. Fishman explores the relation between the calque and its Lashon haKodesh (LK), holy vernacular, of either Hebrew or Aramaic and posits, “for traditional literacy-related purposes, they [calqued translations] are considered incomparably inferior to LK. For modern literacy-related purposes, their calque versions will not do.”100 From this, we are able to make a clear distinction as to when this form of written expression was used within a Jewish community. These translations can be defined as a “Jewish version of the CT [co-territorial] language since its lexicon and grammar are both highly impacted by the sanctified model text it shadows.”101 Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand how written and spoken varieties of a language—representative of the entire linguistic entity—are to be distinguished. Therefore, the pattern of translation, typically L1ÆL2, is best described as L1Æ LTÆ L2 where, in order to arrive at the second variety of the language (L2), the original language variety (L1) must undergo the process of relexification (LT).102 Rabbis often used calqued transformations in order to create translations of liturgical texts from Hebrew or Aramaic to that of a language understood by the larger Jewish population. Sephiha explains the calqued variety “era una manera de transmitir la herencia cultural y la tradición a los judíos hispano-parlantes y así mantenerlos en el seno de la sinagoga” which was made up of utilizing “los recursos de la lengua cotidiana, entonces llamada ladino, romance, o español, para calcar la lengua sagrada y producir un espejo revestido de español.”103 The degree of differentiation between the written variant and the spoken vernacular, however, remains under consideration. In a revised stance on relexification, Wexler asserts that the calqued variety of the Bible did not increase the knowledge of its entire readership; for those those unfamiliar with the syntax of Hebrew, reading a text of this style would be a difficult task.104 This variety, he claims, “was basically



100 Joshua Fishman, "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view,” in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985), 15. 101 Ibid., 14. 102 Haim Vidal Sephiha, "'Christianisms' in Judeo-Spanish Calque and Vernacular," in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Langauges, ed. Joshua Fishman (1985). 103 Haim Vidal Sephiha, La agonía de los Judeo-Españoles. (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2012), 30. 104 Paul Wexler, "Old Views, New Views, and Renewed Views." in Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of 'Jewish' Languages (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag,

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incomprehensible to the ordinary speaker of the language.” 105 Since relexified text relies primarily on the lexicon of the colloquial language, a plethora of terms were conceived to replace words from Hebrew and Aramaic. These relexifications were typically not used in colloquial speech and, therefore, unfamiliar to the majority of its readers. Translations into Ibero-Romance-based vernacular occurred in Ladino texts even when Hebrew or Aramaic expressions were common in the colloquial language of the community. The paradox, of course, lies in providing all speakers of Djudezmo and Haketia the opportunity to access liturgical texts of Hebrew or Aramaic origin while, nevertheless, removing all of the lexical items that may have been utilized (actively or passively) amongst the Sephardim. One may conclude, therefore, that the calqued variety does not reflect an accurate portrayal of the colloquial registers of its speakers. The Ladino language, apart from its syntax, may in fact be lexically more similar to the non-Jewish varieties of Spanish than to Djudezmo or Haketia. However, the calqued variety would appeal to a wider readership, taking into account those who were not able to read the liturgical texts in the Holy Language (LK). The need for texts in Ladino can be understood in that the mass population of Sephardim did not have a vast knowledge of the Bible; familiarity and comprehension pertained to rabbinic scholars and not the general congregation. These texts were produced in a language, therefore, that appealed to a wider audience who did not master Hebrew.106 Sephiha reasons that the general public’s lack of knowledge about the structure of these liturgical texts has led to a misunderstanding concerning the spoken and written modalities of Judeo-Spanish.107 This often creates generalizations toward the nomenclature of the language and the result has been a global phenomenon to name spoken varieties of Judeo-Spanish as Ladino. The term Ladino is often used in popular culture worldwide, among those who are familiar with the existence of the language as well as leading institutions that research and promote its use.108 Djudezmo and Haketia speaking communities alike used Ladino texts since its composition was meant to appeal to the same Iberian-originating

 2006c). 105 Ibid., xviii. 106 Perla Bumaschny, La historia del Ladino (Buenos Aires: Centro Educativo Sefaradí Sección Latinoamericana, 1981). 107 See note 43. 108 Such as the National Authority of Ladino, based in Jerusalem, as well as Ladinokomunita, an online forum with correspondence (in Judeo-Spanish, primarily Djudezmo) from Sephardim around the world.

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Jewish population. These texts were typically published in Rashi or Meruba characters given the majority of the population was familiar with their corresponding alphabets. Ladino texts, however, were also printed in Latin characters for Marrano readership. Marranos, or those who were converted to Christianity during the Inquisition, were unfamiliar with the Hebrew alphabet or its variants, especially within a few generations after conversion. Many covertly practiced some of the Jewish laws, traditions, and customs, but made sure to erase any Jewish markers from their speech so as not to be identified as a Marrano. Consequently, the Marranos spoke the same language of their co-regionalists and were familiar with their respective Latin-based orthographies.109 Upon returning to Judaism after migrating out of the Peninsula, these communities benefited from Ladino texts, fully transcribed in Latin characters and following the same unique structure as those texts printed in the Rashi or Meruba alphabet. The contrast between Ladino and Djudezmo, both varieties under the umbrella term Judeo-Spanish, can best be understood by comparing the former in relation to Lashon haKodesh (Hebrew) and the originating Coterritorial Language (CT), Castilian Spanish. To demonstrate the differences found in Ladino, let us examine the first verse of Genesis, including the Hebrew and Spanish equivalents. I. In the beginning God created heaven and Earth Ladino:110 En prisipyo kreo el Dyo a los syelos i a la tyera Hebrew: ʵʸʠʤ ʺʠʥ ,ʭʩʩʮʹʤ ʺʠ ,ʭʩʤʥʬʠ ʠʸʡ ,ʺʩʹʠʸʡ GLOSS: in-beginning he created God (Elohim) the heavens and < > the Earth Spanish: En el principio creó Dios el cielo y la tierra In this verse we see four examples of linguistic inquiry, unique to the Ladino repertoire. The use of el Dio as opposed to Dios of contemporary Spanish is often accredited to the monotheistic ideals of the Jewish people, noting the removal of the final –s, in addition to the use of the definite article el ‘the.’ 112 This peculiarity, however, cannot be associated completely with the calqued variety, especially since the given name of God used in the Hebrew verse, Elohim, is in fact plural, while still representing one. However, the use of el Dio as the hispanicized form in

 109

See note 44. provided here in Latin font 111 < > used to represent Hebrew “ʺʠ” –“et,” indicative of an object to follow 112 This can also be traced to Latin and the case system. Other Romance languages use a singular declension for this term (i.e., Italian Dio). 110

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

the calqued component replaces one of several denominations for God including adonay [h]akadosh ha barux [h]u ‘The Holy Lord, the Blessed One’, employed often in other contexts.113 The following is a list of the three calqued influences evidenced within this verse. The initial en prisipyo as opposed to Spanish en el principio114 is due to the Hebrew glossed version corresponding to ‘in beginning;’ the Ladino, therefore, replicates this structure and confirms the reason for the null article in this version. Similarly, the plural marked syelos ‘skies,’ as opposed to Spanish singular cielo ‘sky,’ is due to the original Hebrew source, possible only in the plural form. Finally, the use of the preposition ‘a’ twice within the Ladino, (a los syelos i a la tyera ‘the heavens and the Earth’ compared to the Spanish el cielo y la tierra), is due to Hebrew syntax, which makes use of the lexical placeholder ‘et’ for direct objects. The complexity of the Ladino structure becomes further apparent in examining written and spoken variations and their differences. This may be demonstrated simply with the word ‘tonight,’ as found in the Passover Haggada’s Four Questions. ‘TONIGHT’ LADINO

DJUDEZMO

La noche la esta / )-6.% )1 .''*5 )1

esta noche

HEBREW

PENINSULAR/ LATIN AMERICAN SPANISH

Ha.layla ha.zeh/ ʤʦʤ ʤʬʩʬʤ

esta noche

Figure 1.2 Ladino vs. Djudezmo, Hebrew, and Peninsular/ Latin American Spanish

The figure above illustrates that the Ladino syntax of ‘tonight’ is a word for word translation from its source language, Hebrew. As Hebrew syntax constructs ‘ha (the) layla (night) ha (the) zeh (this),’ with definite articles modifying both the noun layla and the demonstrative zeh, the Ladino version mirrors this in its calque, ‘la (the) noche (night) la (the) esta (this),’ once again representing the construction of the definite article modifying both the noun noche and the demonstrative esta. However, if we look at how one would typically say ‘tonight’ in Djudezmo, we see that

 113

David Bunis, A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992a). 114 Within these examples we are not comparing orthography but rather (morpho)syntactic differences.

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its construction is identical to that of Peninsular and Latin American Spanish esta noche, literally, ‘this night.’ The intersection between Ladino and Djudezmo becomes more onedimensional once we examine how Ladino, the calque, has influenced Djudezmo, the spoken vernacular, albeit to a linguistically minimal degree. Fishman explains that a part of the Jewish linguistic repertoire, the calque, “has its own dynamics, disproportionately influencing whatever other (usually marginal) written functions and possibly less marginal formal oral functions the newly developed language may acquire.”115 It is not uncommon to find a contemporary written text using la noche la esta instead of esta noche, while even being used at times in the spoken vernacular of the speaker. Implementing the former may be appreciated as more poetic or emphatic. Another example in reference to a Ladino construct extending to Djudezmo usage is that of karas116 or fases ‘faces,’ panim in Hebrew. This structure represents the syntactic structure of Hebrew. In the second verse of Genesis, the Ladino text reads, “I la tyera era vana i vazia i eskuridad sovre fases de abismo i espirito de el Dyo abolava sovre fases de las aguas,” ‘And the Earth was without form, and void; and darkness [was] upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved the face of the waters.’ Of particular interest in this verse is the word for ‘face’ appearing twice. Since the Hebrew word appears as “ʩʰʴ”117 in text, literally ‘faces,’ the Ladino text also appears in the plural form, fases. Therefore, this form, utilized in the spoken vernacular, is due to influence from the calque. Bunis attributes the prevalence of Ladino texts, “employed extensively among the Judezmo speaking Sephardim in the synagogue, school and home throughout the generations” as a factor that led to the preservation of the relexified hispanicized forms.118 The aforementioned examples serve to review the subtleties and, at the same time, the complexities behind the linguistic repertoires of JudeoSpanish. While the term Ladino is often used to describe the language of the Sephardim at all linguistic levels, evidence suggests that it is best suited to describe the written calqued variety. Ladino, from enladinar, or ‘to make Latin-like,’ describes the calqued process that was used for



115 Joshua Fishman, "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view,” in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985), 14. 116 Karas can also mean ‘cheeks’ in Judeo-Spanish. 117 Shortened form (smehut) of ʭʩʰʴ – panim due to noun + noun construction. 118 David Bunis, A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992a), 31.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

centuries to translate texts from Hebrew and Aramaic so as to make them more accessible to Sephardic communities. As such, the spoken JudeoSpanish vernaculars, while benefiting from the linguistic uniqueness of Ladino, remain a separate linguistic entity that must be analyzed according to its own characteristics and respective paradigms.

5. Ideological Stance Applied to Judeo-Spanish In examining the linguistic structure of Judeo-Spanish, we are able to better understand the hybrid identity of the Sephardim. By hybrid identity, I refer to the Sephardim’s distant Spanish past, their Ottoman or Moroccan roots, and their Jewish religion and how these realities interact with one another. However, as Fishman points out, this is only one dimension in understanding the qualities of a Jewish language, with sociological and psychological elements of equal importance.119 In this section, I will focus on the psychological and ideological stance surrounding various realms of Judeo-Spanish and its speakers. To this degree, a Jewish language may be defined as Jewish on “an attitudinal (i.e., cognitive-affective) basis, that is, they are Jewish because Jews or non-Jews believe them to be Jewish.”120 Benor also explores the nexus between language and identity and how ideology plays a fundamental role in a speakers’ linguistic performance.121 Therefore, I consider how the Sephardim conceive their language and identity, as well as how others—Jewish or not—view these dynamics. Irvine offers a fitting theoretical stance on language ideologies, stating that they are “a culture (or subcultural) system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” 122 The relationship between language ideologies and political interests is, therefore, integral in assessing hegemonic factors in a given nation. Hegemony is described by Rampton as “the relation of domination and subordination and one’s assignment and shaping of perceptions of ourselves and the world.”123 Hegemony, thus, refers to the saturation of national ideologies on its citizens and marginalized (minority) groups, a

 119

Joshua Fishman, "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view,” in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985). 120 Ibid., 6. 121 See note 5. 122 Judith Irvine, "When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy," in American ethnologist 16, no. 2 (1989), 261. 123 Ben Rampton, "Hegemony, social class and stylization," in Pragmatics 13, no. 1 (2003), 49.

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case with which Judeo-Spanish speaking communities are all too familiar. Prevailing national authorities with different linguistic objectives for their nation-states have taken great authoritative stance on such ideologies within Turkey, Israel, and the United States. 124 Callaway’s research on Judeo-Spanish in Turkey demonstrates how ideologies have shifted the socialization of its citizens in that, “standard language ideology is hegemonic: there is no escaping it, even for those who actively retaliate against its effects.”125 The language reforms of the 1920s under Ataturk reflected the beginning of a new nation, one in which future generations would grow up in a society quite different from their ancestors. In the case of Judeo-Spanish, Sephardim were no longer socialized into the same Ottoman Jewish networks as their immediate ancestors, which held their sense of linguistic community together for centuries after the expulsions of the Iberian Peninsula. The toponym Sepharad, Spain in Modern Hebrew, first appears in the Bible in the book of the prophet Obadia (verse 20), alluding to the entire Iberian Peninsula where Jews were to settle in the years of their diaspora. However, Papo states that the concept of Sepharad, “no es un lugar geográfico real.” 126 He explains the notion of Sepharad as a period of history spanning over 1,500 years, the time in which Jews dwelled in these lands and the circumstances that allowed them to have a passing homeland. While some Sephardim still express nostalgia for Spain, others consider Judeo-Spanish to encapsulate their rich mobile history. Nieto notes that for most Spanish speakers today, hearing Judeo-Spanish is quite an unequivocal shock.127 An encounter with the Judeo-Spanish language often represents “una especie de viaje en la máquina del tiempo hasta el castellano antiguo de las obras de Quevedo, de Cervantes.” 128 One of Callaway’s informants in Istanbul considers “her own Spanish to be purer than that of most contemporary Judeo- Spanish speakers, and that this pure Judeo-Spanish was closer to the Spanish of Cervantes than even contemporary Standard Spanish.”129 Callaway notes that others, however,

 124

Bryan Kirschen, "Language Ideologies and Hegemonic Factors Imposed upon Judeo-Spanish Speaking Communities," in Mester, 42, no. 1 (2013). 125 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 65. 126 Nieto, Miguel Ángel, El último sefardí: el legado oral de los judíos expulsados de España en 1492. (Calamar Edicion, 2003), 45. 127 Ibid. 128 Ibid., 71. 129 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 61.

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believe that any analogy regarding the purity of the language and its association to the days of Cervantes to be quite an entertaining rather than serious notion. While it is clear that Judeo-Spanish has developed considerably since the days of Quevedo (1580-1645) and Cervantes (15471616), who, nevertheless, were both born post-Iberian expulsions, many Sephardim and non-Sephardim often describe Judeo-Spanish as a fossilized language, primarily due to the retention of certain features previously discussed. The depiction of Judeo-Spanish (or any Jewish repertoire) as a language or dialect is not only a matter of categorization but ideology as well. There are no set criteria or parameters for classifying a vernacular as either a language or a dialect and so the matter is ultimately decided based on the attitudes of speakers and their community. 130 For many, while language is “thought to be ‘correct’, ‘beautiful’, ‘expressive’, etc, one that is ‘incorrect’, ‘ugly’, ‘crude,’ etc., is ‘only a dialect.” 131 This notion is prevalent in many societies where languages, whatever they may actually mean or represent, are valued over dialects. Conversely, a dialect often does not reach a high level of appreciation amongst its speakers given its supposed lower status. Jewish languages are often equated with jargons, vulgar forms of speech, and illegitimate means of communication. One of the goals of Comparative Jewish Linguistics, therefore, is to battle these preconceived misconceptions both within the language community and outside of it. Judeo-Spanish speakers express both positive and negative ideologies toward their mother tongue. Benor’s research in Seattle, home to one of the United States’ largest Sephardic populations, exhibits both sides of this spectrum. 132 One of her informants express that Judeo-Spanish was “bastardized in the Ottoman Empire by the addition of Turkish, Greek, and other non-Hispanic words,” alluding to the fact that a language with such a great deal of outside linguistic influence is not pure Judeo-Spanish. 133 Similarly, this informant notes the influence of the English language on Judeo-Spanish, and that many speakers are continuing to develop or, in her opinion, corrupt the language.

 130

Chaim Rabin, "What Constitutes a Jewish Language?" in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30, ed. Joshua Fishman (1981). 131 David Gold, "Jewish intralinguistics as a field of study," in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 30 (1981), 32. 132 Sarah Bunin Benor, "Ladino Language Loss and Sephardic Jewish Identity Case Study: Seattle." (Unpublished Manuscript, 1999). 133 Ibid., 11.

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The problem of Judeo-Spanish nomenclature, discussed throughout this article is—in reality—an ideological one. Despite often being the topic of discussion among speakers and scholars alike, there are still those who prefer to call the language by a given name with which they feel most comfortable or familiar, oftentimes representing the nomenclature into which they were socialized. Although unique epithets are not known for most Jewish languages, scholars have often described them as being Jewish variants of their non-Jewish variety. However, as Wexler points out, “knowledge of native names would deepen our understanding of how speakers perceived the relationship between the Jewish and non-Jewish variants through time and space.” 134 In fact, Djudezmo ‘Judaism’ and Djidyó/ Djudyó ‘Jewish’ are well documented as epithets of the language among the Sephardim since the second half of the nineteenth century. Such names “clearly testify to the once-popular Ottoman Sephardi perception of their vernacular as distinctly a ‘Jewish language’ rather than a mere dialect of Spanish, as some speakers conceive of it today.”135 In this respect, speakers often recognize their language distinct enough from their co-territorial non-Jewish variety to label their language as Jewish. Notwithstanding what has been documented, Fishman states that denominations that are prefixed with the word ‘Judeo’ can actually be offensive. 136 Such nomenclatures “are felt to imply that the unprefixed varieties are the original, genuine and unadulterated ones whereas the ‘Judeo’ varieties are, by implication, quite the opposite.”137 He notes that all of these factors form part of the ideological stance of a given speaker and their respective community at large. Regardless of the linguistic subtleties between a Jewish repertoire and its non-cognate variety, it is ultimately up to the speaker to position them against one another as significant or not. Sephiha observes that the Spanish of the Sephardim can begin to be described as Jewish around the year 1620, several generations after leaving Spain and Portugal and allowing for each variety to

 134

Paul Wexler, "Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework," in Language (1981), 114. 135 David Bunis, "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch," in Moreshet Sefarad , II, ed. H. Beinart (1992b), 408. 136 Joshua Fishman, "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view,” in Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages (1985). 137 Ibid., 10.

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

develop.138 Noting the ideological nature behind the language as a Jewish variety, Sephiha expresses how it has been accepted despite the fact that it may be a historical and linguistic misunderstanding. He compares JudeoSpanish to the French language that developed in Canada in that, “the French Canadians, were they Jews, would have been said to speak JudeoFrench.”139 For this reason, he continues, many Turks learned about the language of the Jews who dwelled in nearby millets and, therefore, referred to the language as yahudice ‘Jewish.’ Sephiha’s example, nonetheless, helps put the ideological abstractions related to JudeoSpanish into perspective. Westernization also brought about other pressing concerns within Sephardic communities. In 1860 the French Jews established the Alliance Israélite Universelle in order to westernize Near Eastern and North African Jewry. The Alliance was responsible for more than three generations of educating Jewish youth in an attempt to help them “succeed in the emerging world economy.” 140 Additionally, the Alliance wanted to expose the Moroccan and Levantine Jews to high standards of education, with a Western-European agenda. Aside from giving males the opportunity to receive a (secular) education from a culture of international regard, for the first time, many females were also able to receive an education. Sephardim were able to apply their knowledge of the French language and understanding of Western culture in their future undertakings, which made them grateful for such an education. The Alliance made their stance clear regarding the Sephardim’s Judeo-Spanish; French should replace their language in all domains. Rodrigue asserts the Alliance’s position on this in that, “though it wanted to render the Jews everywhere into good productive citizens, it could not accept the fact that the moralizing and ‘civilizing’ necessary for this could be done in any medium outside the French language, following nonFrench methods.” 141 Students learned French during their years of schooling and often integrated elements of the language into their JudeoSpanish. To these students, learning French provided opportunities to

 138

Haim Vidal Sephiha, "'Christianisms' in Judeo-Spanish Calque and Vernacular," in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Langauges, ed. Joshua Fishman (1985). 139 Ibid., 181. 140 Sarah Abrevaya Stein, “Introduction ‘Ladino in Print,’" in Jewish History 16, no. 3 (2002), 226. 141 Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 171.

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advance in life. A common ideology, thus, ensued in Sephardic communities: “A Jew spoke Judeo-Spanish, or at least spoke French and bragged about not speaking Judeo-Spanish.” 142 This ideology can be applied to the Alliance outreach in both Morocco and the Levant, as students thought French to be a more prestigious language, one with which they could impress others. While other languages were naturally present in these Sephardic communities, no other language had the same appeal and vigor as French in the global linguistic market. French became so integrated into everyday Judeo-Spanish that Sephiha suggests an additional variety of the language, Judeo-Fragnol.143 Across generations of Sephardim, the relationship between language and religion varies. Thus, for some Jews, “Spanish is a direct index of Jewishness; for others Ladino indexes old ignorant Jews, for others JudeoSpanish indexes the community’s rich heritage.” 144 These generational divisions, however, are not well defined, as Sephardim in similar age groups express a variety of beliefs concerning the nexus between language and identity. Nevertheless, it is apparent that something about the language feels Jewish to the Sephardim. These feelings, however, do not often correspond to speakers’ actual use of Judeo-Spanish, as most, in fact, only use the language in very specific domains. Another ideological matter that the Sephardim faced was the lack of acceptance among their Eastern European brethren, the Ashkenazim; this is particularly the case in the United States for a considerable part of the twentieth century. Relations between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim were not always amicable, as the former would not accept the fact that the latter were not able to communicate in Yiddish. Language was not the only determining element of the Sephardic identity that the Ashkenazim questioned, as their cultural and religious practices proved different as well. Often, Ashkenazim did not perceive the Sephardim as Jewish based on their appearance. With these ideological margins in place, Sephardic immigrants would go out of their way to prove to the Ashkenazim that they too were Jewish.145 Furthermore, the Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardim, while Jewish to them, was certainly not Jewish to the

 142

Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 38. 143 Haim Vidal Sephiha, La agonía de los Judeo-Españoles. (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2012). 144 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 68. 145 Stephen Stern, "Ceremonies of" Civil Judaism" among Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles," in Western folklore (1988).

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

Ashkenazim who already spoke a (or to some, the) Jewish language. BenUr claims that the fundamental issue was that many Ashkenazim did not accept the Sephardim as Jewish. She coins this phenomenon “coethnic recognition failure,” which represents “a central experience of a new group of immigrants that defied conventional categorization, defined as a person’s denial of a fellow group member’s common ethnicity due to mistaken identity.”146 This misunderstanding represents the experience of many minority groups in the United States and abroad. Sephardim, just like many other ethnic groups in the country, have to decide when, where, and with whom to use their mother tongue in an English-dominant society. For the Sephardim, the fact that they did not speak Yiddish was another obstacle to overcome. The efforts to promote English in the United States, however, can be seen as implemented bottom-up, as the Sephardim are often the ones who were to apply their own ideological stance on one another. Halio relates his personal experience in that “most of us kids wouldn’t speak Ladino at home. They would tell their folk, ‘Estamos en la Amerika, kale ke avlemos en ingles,’” of course, not worrying about the preservation of the language or its connection to their religious or cultural identity.147 Rather, their concern was how to assimilate into their greater settings. The narratives of many Sephardim in the United States represent similar testimony in interactions with the Ashkenazim and the tactics they implemented in order to prove their Jewishness. Their Jewish language, and even writing in the Hebrew alphabet or a variant thereof, was not considered sufficient. While speakers of Judeo-Spanish may have initially thought nothing pejorative of their language, contact with Peninsular Spanish made them question their native tongue. Callaway notes that “the language has become an objectified part of identity in a way that it probably never was ‘in the older days,’ when it was just the ways Jews talked to each other.”148 The “kwestyon dela lingwa” (sic) appears as early as the 1880s in JudeoSpanish newspaper El Tyempo of Constantinople.149 At this time, editor

 146

Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (NYU Press, 2009), 108. 147 Hank Halio, Ladino Reveries: Tales of the Sephardic Experience in America (Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1996), 96. 148 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 62. 149 David Bunis, "Modernization and the Language Question among JudezmoSpeaking Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire," in Sephardi and Middle Eastern

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David Fresco and others dedicated a portion of their writings to examining the relationship between their own vernacular and other varieties of Spanish. As the Judeo-Spanish printing press began to thrive, and modernization—to many synonymous with westernization—became prevalent, Sephardim began to question their language. Since as early as the mid-nineteenth century, speakers of JudeoSpanish began to question the validity of their language due to exposure to Peninsular and Latin American Spanish. Harris suggests that, among Judeo-Spanish speakers in the United States, this is still common.150 Many of her informants expressed negative attitudes toward Judeo-Spanish and considered it to be “an inferior form of Spanish, referring to it as an ‘impure,’ ‘incorrect’ or a ‘non-genuine’ form of Spanish.”151 While JudeoSpanish and Castilian are similar in linguistic construct, it is also the psychological and ideological properties of language that distinguish these varieties from one another, thus classifying the Spanish of the Sephardim as ‘Jewish.’ Although there has been no evidence for a printing press for publications in Haketia, a similar concept is described in a New York Times article from 1888. The newspaper published an article about a reporter’s time in Tetuan, noting differences between Moorish and Jewish communities. Their languages were described in the following manner: “The Jews and Moors are as separated in habits, occupation, and language as in their homes and workshops. The Moors speak their own tongue, and the Jews a corrupted Spanish.”152 The ‘corrupted’ Spanish that the article refers to is the Judeo-Spanish of the Moroccan Sephardim, Haketia. Like other Sephardim, speakers of Haketia often referred to their language as Spanish, with no ‘Judeo’ prefix attached. Thus, utilizing terms such as ‘Moroccan Judeo-Spanish’ or ‘Castilian Spanish’ to identify their language was not a concern for speakers. Sharing this experience, Raz notes, Esto lo digoy yo, pamorde (por causa de) que denantes (antes), yo jammeaba (pensaba) que stoy hablando, ni más ni menos, un español espejeado

 Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Indiana University Press, 1996). 150 Tracy Harris, "The sociolinguistic situation of Judeo-Spanish in the 20th century in the United States and Israel," in Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 4 (2) (2006). 151 Ibid., 118. 152 "Tetuan's Moors and Jews: Strange Phases of Life in this Morocco Town." New York Times. February 12, 1888. http://www.query.nytimes.com

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies (brillante) y puro como en España!... Agüera (ahora) ya sepoy (sé) la verdad amarga fiel (hiel; exp.), es dizir que yo habloy un jalteo!153

The idea of a pure Spanish that many speakers like Raz grew up with soon began to be realized as a jalteo, or mixture of Spanish and Arabic. Today, younger generations of Sephardim in Istanbul perceive JudeoSpanish in a different way than their grandparents may have. Callaway notes that, “Judeo-Spanish’s saving grace may be its connection to Standard Spanish.” 154 As language indexes identity, young Turkish Sephardim are trying to connect with Judeo-Spanish, although in a distinct manner. Many of these youth perceive Judeo-Spanish as a dialect of Spanish and, therefore, a useful language to acquire. One of Romero’s informants, a thirty year old from Istanbul who is a semi-speaker of JudeoSpanish, shares this opinion in commenting, “when I began to use my Ladino, for example, I was using trocar, instead of cambiar, because in Ladino I heard about it- trocar, but in real Spanish we are using cambiar.”155 It appears that this speaker does not consider Judeo-Spanish to be “real Spanish,” insinuating that it is less correct than other varieties of the language. Interest in Peninsular and Latin American Spanish is on the rise among the Sephardim not only as a means to connect in part with a language associated with their cultural heritage, but also due to its increasing value as a critical world language. This belief was common among several of Romero’s informants in Turkey. Those learning Spanish, however, often opt for Peninsular or Latin American varieties than that of Judeo-Spanish, with the former being offered in educational institutions throughout the country. Ideology plays an important role when speakers of any Sephardic community attempt to expand upon their Judeo-Spanish vocabulary. Judeo-Spanish speakers often select between synonymous words that have entered Judeo-Spanish from other languages, which adds an additional layer to the cognitive stance of the speaker. Speakers who have strong opinions on the purity of the language will certainly gear toward linguistic choices that reflect their personal or communal ideologies. To this, Callaway notes that “these decisions will reflect the multiple ties the community feels to the Jewish, Sephardic, Turkish, and local…

 153

Alicia Raz, "La historia de la ণaketía," in Voces de ণaketía. (2010), para. 1. http://www.vocesdehaquetia. com 154 Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 61. 155 Rey Romero, Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the JudeoSpanish dialect spoken in Istanbul (Libra Kitap, 2012), 80.

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components of its identity, and their implementation in speech and in writing will index those stances.” 156 These selections refer not only to lexical elements, but also to the way in which the speaker may represent their language orthographically. While Judeo-Spanish speakers no longer use the Rashi and Solitreo alphabets for writing, they express variation in the way they write using the Latin alphabet. Conventional norms have been established by the National Authority of Ladino, based in Jerusalem, Israel and their bi-annual journal Aki Yerushalayim, as well as the online internet discussion group Ladinokomunita.157 After much discussion on a standard Latin-based system, many Judeo-Spanish speakers adhere to these suggested norms. Others select orthographies representative of the French or Turkish Latin-based systems. However, not all speakers of Judeo-Spanish are aware of these contemporary norms, which have only come about in recent decades and, therefore, speakers transcribe their language as they deem best.

6. Concluding Discussion As demonstrated in this chapter, the Sephardim have carried their language with them for centuries following their exile from the Iberian Peninsula. Medieval Spanish evolved not only where the Sephardim settled in the former Ottoman Empire or North Africa, but also within Spain. Judeo-Spanish developed due to the Sephardim’s lack of exposure to the linguistic transformations occurring within the Iberian Peninsular as well as their exposure to new points of linguistic contact in each community where they resided. While Castilian Spanish is the foundation of the Judeo-Spanish language, the ‘Judeo’ component incorporates Hebrew and Aramaic elements into its vernaculars, alongside the ideologies associated with being Sephardic and Jewish. The Sephardim have taken what many refer to as a ‘fossilized’ Spanish and morphed it into distinct vernaculars as a result of their rich linguistic surroundings. Unique morphological, syntactic, and phonological features have

 156

Nicholas Callaway, Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft (2008), 65. 157 Michal Held, "‘The People Who Almost Forgot’: Judeo-Spanish Web-Based Interactions as a Digital Home-Land." El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture. Vol 4. (2010), 84; Held recognizes the importance of Ladinokomunita in the preservation of Judeo-Spanish in noting “towards the dawn of the twenty-first century, when JS almost ceased to exist as a spoken language, the Sephardi phoenix surprisingly arose from its ashes in the terra incognita of the World Wide Web.”

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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

developed in Judeo-Spanish, creating a complex language that must take several linguistic repertoires into account in order to properly understand how it functions. To summarize the linguistic development of Judeo-Spanish spoken vernaculars, I piece together the models of the scholars discussed in this article, suggesting the chronological paradigm in the following figure.

Figure 1.3 Judeo-Spanish Spoken Varieties: A Chronological Paradigm

In this figure, I take into account the two major spoken varieties of Judeo-Spanish, Djudezmo and Haketia. I do not place Ladino within this model since, as a written variety, it pertains to separate features discussed in section 4. Ladino texts, of course, were first crafted during Sefarad I and continue in their Rashi and Latin alphabets into Sefarad II. While these models serve to better understand the linguistic structure of JudeoSpanish diachronically and synchronically, they pay little attention to the multilingual lifestyle of the Sephardim. The ideologies that Sephardim have attributed to Judeo-Spanish, as well as the other languages in their linguistic milieu, have regularly shifted as a result of the historical

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conditions in each locale throughout time. This has, inevitably, played a crucial role in positioning one language against another both in familial and communal domains. Using the periodization of Sefarad I, II and III, I have categorized the Judeo-Spanish varieties given their historical and linguistic development. The linguistic resources that the Sephardim have had at their disposal to mark or unmark their speech allows us to utilize the Ethnolinguistic Repertoire to account for their language prior to exile from the Iberian Peninsular at the end of the fifteenth century. At the start of the sixteenth century, distinct Judeo-Spanish vernaculars emerge, Ottoman Djudezmo and Moroccan Haketia. Djudezmo and Haketia have a number of features in common apart from their Ibero-Romance foundation, thus strengthening the hypothesis that their common descendants of Sefarad I shared a myriad of Jewish linguistic resources. These vernaculars may have become divergent from their co-regional variety by the start of the seventeenth century, a few generations after the migration of the Sephardim into their new territories. For the Sephardim, this period allowed for the incorporation of linguistic features from their co-territorial non-Jewish languages as adstrata or superstrata in their respective JudeoSpanish vernaculars. While Sefarad II begins at approximately the same time for both Djudezmo and Haketia, the final stage of this period spans from the early nineteenth century (Djudezmo) to the mid-nineteenth century (Haketia). Sefarad II and III can be divided into early and late periods. The current stage of Judeo-Spanish vernaculars is that of Sefarad III. This stage can be considered as post-vernacular given the reduced number of speakers and communities using the language today. Though a fair assessment in comparison to the thriving latter half of Sefarad II, Djudezmo and Haketia are still used by some speakers. Use of JudeoSpanish vernaculars toward the end of the twentieth century and in the beginning years of the twenty first century has varied from speaker to speaker and community to community. Younger generations often find themselves relying on older ones to fortify their language proficiency and expand the domains in which the language can be used. The multilingualism of the Sephardim continues to present itself as both a linguistic resource and an ideological challenge, as speakers attempt to balance the ‘Judeo’ and ‘Spanish’ elements of their hybrid language and identity.



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Judeo-Spanish as a Jewish Language: Linguistic Realities and Ideologies

References Ben-Ur, Aviva. "The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 1910-1948." In Werner. Sollors (Ed.), Multilingual America. New York: New York University Press. (1998): 64-77. —. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. NYU Press, 2009. Benbassa, Esther, and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th centuries. University of California Press, 2000. Benhamú Jiménez, David. “Spanish vs. Haketia in the Jewish Community of Melilla: Examples of the Current Variation and Assimilation of ‘la jaquetía de la perifería.’” 4th ucLADINO Judeo-Spanish Symposium. Los Angeles. March 4, 2015. Benoliel, José. Dialecto judeo-hispano-marroquí, o Hakitía. Madrid: Varona, 1977. Borovaia, Olga. "The serialized novel as rewriting: the case of Ladino belles lettres." Jewish Social Studies 10, no. 1. (2003): 30-68. Brink-Danan, Marcy. "The meaning of Ladino: The semiotics of an online speech community." Language & Communication 31, no. 2. (2011): 107-118. Bumaschny, Perla. La historia del Ladino. Buenos Aires: Centro Educativo Sefaradí Sección Latinoamericana, 1981. Bunin Benor, Sarah. "Ladino Language Loss and Sephardic Jewish Identity Case Study: Seattle. " Unpublished Manuscript, 1999. —. "Towards a New Understanding of Jewish Language in the Twentyಣ First Century." Religion Compass 2, no. 6. (2008): 1062-1080. —. "Do American Jews Speak a ‘Jewish Language’?: A Model of Jewish Linguistic Distinctiveness." Jewish Quarterly Review 99, no. 2. (2009): 230-269. —. "Ethnolinguistic repertoire: Shifting the analytic focus in language and ethnicity." Journal of Sociolinguistics 14, no. 2. (2010): 159-183. Bunis, David M. A guide to reading and writing Judezmo. Adelantre!, The Judezmo Society, 1975. —. "A Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Judezmo and Yiddish." International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30. (1981): 49-70. —. A Lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic Elements in Modern Judezmo. Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1992a. —. "The Language of the Sephardic Jews: A Historical Sketch." (H. Beinart, Ed.) Moreshet Sefarad, II. (1992b): 399-422. —. "Modernization and the Language Question among Judezmo-Speaking Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire." (Harvey E. Goldberg, Ed.)

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Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era. Indiana University Press. (1996): 226-239. Bürki, Yvette, Beatrice Schmid, and Armin Schwegler (Eds.). "Una lengua en la diáspora: el judeoespañol de Oriente." Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana (RILI) , IV, 2006. Callaway, Nicholas. Judeo-Spanish and the Success of the Standard. Berlin: Verlag Dr. Müller Aktiengesellschaft, 2008. Chomsky, Noam. Knowledge of language: Its nature, origin, and use. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986. Cohen, Esther. "La función del judeoespañol en el desarrollo de la cultura sefardí. " Sefárdica: Djudezmo y Jaquetía, 16. (2006): 27-37. Fishman, Joshua A. "The sociology of Jewish languages from a general sociolinguistic point of view." Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages Leiden: E.J. Brill. (1985): 3-21. Gold, David L. "Jewish intralinguistics as a field of study." International Journal of the Sociology of Language, no. 30. (1981): 31-48. Halio, Hank. Ladino Reveries: Tales of the Sephardic Experience in America. Foundation for the Advancement of Sephardic Studies and Culture, 1996. Harris, Tracy K. Death of a language: the history of Judeo-Spanish. University of Delaware Press, 1994. —. "The sociolinguistic situation of Judeo-Spanish in the 20th century in the United States and Israel. " Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana, 4, no. 2. (2006): 115-133. Held, Michal. "‘The People Who Almost Forgot’: Judeo-Spanish WebBased Interactions as a Digital Home-Land." El Prezente: Studies in Sephardic Culture. Vol 4. (2010): 83-102. Irvine, Judith T. "When talk isn't cheap: Language and political economy." American ethnologist 16, no. 2. (1989): 248-267. Kirschen, Bryan. "Language Ideologies and Hegemonic Factors Imposed upon Judeo-Spanish Speaking Communities." Mester, 42, no. 1. (2013): 25-38. —. "The (not-so) distant relationship between Spanish and Arabic." Voices 2. University of California Press. (2014): 5-13. Kushner-Bishop, Jill. "More than a language, a travel agency: Ideology and performance in the Israeli Judeo-Spanish revitalization movement." Diss. University of California, Los Angeles (2004). Luria, Max. A Study of the Monastir Dialect of Judeo-Spanish on Oral Materials Collected in Monastir, Yugoslavia. Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1930.

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Madkouri, Mohamed. "La Hakitía, una lengua para la sociolingüística y la interculturalidad. " Revista Maguen (141). (2006): 23-53. Minervini, Laura. "El desarrollo histórico del judeoespañol." Revista Internacional de Lingüística Iberoamericana. (2006): 13-34. Nassi, Gad, ed. En tierras ajenas yo me vo murir. Istanbul: Isis, 2002. Nieto, Miguel Ángel. El último sefardí: el legado oral de los judíos expulsados de España en 1492. Edited by Miguel Ángel Nieto Solís. Calamar Edicion, 2003. Ornan, Uzzi. "Hebrew is not a Jewish Language." In Joshua Fishman (Ed.), Sociology of Jewish Languages. Leiden: E.J. Brill. (1985): 2226. Papo, Eliezer. "Serbo-Croatian Influences on Spoken Judeo-Spanish." European Journal of Jewish Studies, 1, no. 2. (2008): 343-363. Penny, Ralph. History of the Spanish Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. —. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pimienta, Gladys and Sidney Pimienta. 1860-1883 Libro de Actas de la Junta Selecta de la Comunidad Hebrea de Tánger. Jerusalem: Jem y Erez, 2010. Quintana-Rodríguez, Aldina. Geografía lingüística del judeoespañol. Estudio sincrónico y diacrónico. Vol. Sephardic 3. Berne: Peter Lang, 2006. Rabin, Chaim. (1981). "What Constitutes a Jewish Language? "International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 30. (1981): 19-31. Rampton, Ben. "Hegemony, social class and stylisation." Pragmatics 13, no. 1. (2003): 49-83. Raz, Alicia. "La historia de la ণaketía." Voces de ণaketía. Last modified January 2010. http://www.vocesdehaquetia. com Rodrigue, Aron. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860-1925. Indiana University Press, 1990.  Romero, Rey. Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the Judeo-Spanish dialect spoken in Istanbul. Libra Kitap, 2012. Sala, Marius. Estudios sobre el judeo-español de Bucarest. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. (1970). Schwarzwald, Ora. "Language Choice and Language Varieties Before and After the Expulsion. " (Yedid K. Stillman, & Norman A. Stillman, Eds.) From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Culture. (1999): 399-416.

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Sephiha, Haim Vidal. "'Christianisms' in Judeo-Spanish Calque and Vernacular." In Joshua Fishman (Ed.), Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Langauges. (1985): 179-195. —. La agonía de los Judeo-Españoles. Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2012. Serels, M. Mitchell. A History of the Jews of Tangier in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Sepher Hermon Pr, 1991. Spolsky, Bernard. "Jewish multilingualism in the first century: An essay in historical sociolinguistics." Readings in the sociology of Jewish languages 1. (1985): 35-51. —. The Languages of the Jews: A Sociolinguistic History. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. "Introduction ‘Ladino in Print.’" Jewish History 16, no. 3. (2002): 225-233. Stern, Stephen. "Ceremonies of ‘Civil Judaism’ among Sephardic Jews of Los Angeles." Western folklore (1988): 103-128. Stillman, Norman A. The language and culture of the Jews of Sefrou, Morocco: An Ethnolinguistic Study, no. 11. University of Manchester, 1998. "Tetuan's Moors and Jews: Strange Phases of Life in this Morocco Town." New York Times. February 12, 1888. http://www.query.nytimes.com Wexler, Paul. "Jewish interlinguistics: facts and conceptual framework." Language (1981): 99-149. —. "Ascertaining the position of Judeo-Spanish within Ibero-Romance [1977]." In P. Wexler, Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages. Wiesbaden : Harrassowitz Verlag. (2006a): 428-465. —. "Jewish linguistics: 1981-1991-2001 [1993]." In P.Wexler, Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of "Jewish" Languages. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. (2006b): 53-72. —. "Old Views, New Views, and Renewed Views." In P.Wexler, Jewish and Non-Jewish Creators of 'Jewish' Languages. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. (2006c): xv- xlvii.



DIALECT CONCENTRATION AND DISSIPATION: CHALLENGES TO JUDEO-SPANISH REVITALIZATION EFFORTS REY ROMERO UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-DOWNTOWN   

1. Introduction: Dissipation and concentration Judeo-Spanish (JS) is currently undergoing several revitalization efforts that range from university courses in Israel, Europe, and the United States to the creation of new linguistic domains and media in cyberspace where Sephardim can communicate and learn their cultural language. The revitalization movement has helped strengthen and expand the current domains in which JS has managed to survive, but it has also placed JS in new contexts and situations, with new functions that require its adaptation to the innovative communications of the 21st century. As the language expands to these new linguistic domains, JS speakers become aware of the distinctiveness of their dialect in comparison to Peninsular and Latin American (PLA) varieties. On the other hand, native speakers of PLA Spanish who wish to learn JS and participate in these new contexts must also become cognizant of dialectal features unique or characteristic of JS. Among the several publications and communications in contemporary JS,1 especially those produced online, these dialect distinctions are sometimes altered, thereby rendering a modified version of the language. According to Schilling-Estes and Wolfram (1999), speakers may choose to accommodate those dialect features which they perceive as being most divergent or salient from what they consider to be the standard or prestige 1

Although contemporary JS varieties include those dialects still used in traditional community domains such as home, humor, and the older generation, in this context I also include the written and cyber varieties of JS used by organizations to preserve and revitalize the language. The use of JS for non-traditional domains gained momentum in the early 1990s, after the quincentennial commemorations of the Edict of Expulsion from Spain.

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variety.2 That is, the JS distinct dialectal features, whether phonological, morphological, or lexical, will be avoided or changed to fit a more “mainstream” PLA version of Spanish. This is called a dissipation model because dialectal features are lessened or dissipated in favor of PLA Spanish. On the other hand, JS speakers may also choose to emphasize those dialect characteristics that most diverge or differ from PLA Spanish.3 In this strategy, speakers consciously select dialectal features that may set apart the language and minimize its mutual intelligibility with other varieties of Spanish. This is called the concentration model because particular dialectal features are strengthened and may even spread throughout the population and to new phonological, morphological, and lexical patterns not attested in healthier varieties of the language. In this paper, I will discuss the dissipation and concentration models in modern JS, especially in those domains where the language is used as part of revitalization efforts. I will discuss the motivations for these models, and their effect on language maintenance and transmission.

2. Distinct dialectal features Awareness of dialect features is the first step for dissipation and concentration. Some of these characteristics considered “divergent” are actually present in Old Spanish, and therefore the PLA dialects present innovative processes. Moreover, innovative phonological processes and lexical borrowings from Hebrew, Turkish, French, and other Mediterranean and coterritorial languages have also resulted in divergent phonological and lexical differences. Dialectal phonological features inherited from Old Spanish include etymological Latin [f], which has disappeared in PLA dialects, but it has been preserved in some JS dialects (Salonika and Monastir, among others), as in fermozo ‘beautiful,’ fazer ‘to do,’ and figado, ‘liver.’ Another feature is the voiced sibilant [z], devoiced as [s] or produced as the interdental [ș] in Peninsular varieties of Spanish, but preserved in JS as in kaza ‘house,’ roza ‘rose,’ and dezir, ‘to say.’ JS also maintained the Old Spanish palatal system of [‫ ]ݕ‬and [‫]ݤ‬, plus the phonemicization of [d‫]ݤ‬, as illustrated by disho ‘s/he said,’ mujer ‘woman,’ and djusto ‘fair, correct’ respectively. These Old Spanish palatals, for the most part, changed into the velar fricative [x] (or the lowland [h]) in PLA Spanish. In addition to the 2

Natalie Schilling-Estes and Walt Wolfram. Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language 75-3, 1999, 487. 3 Ibid. 488.

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preservation of Old Spanish phonology, JS features also include a series of phonological innovations. One of them is the labialization of [n] to [m] before the diphthong [we], as in muez ‘nut,’ muestro, ‘our,’ and ermuera ‘daughter-in-law.’ Another innovation is the palatalization of [s] to [‫ ]ݕ‬in coda position before [k], as in kashkara ‘peel,’ eshkola ‘school,’ and bushkar ‘to seek.’ Although some linguists have claimed this type of palatalization was a phonological process conditioned by [k] in the onset4, it seems to be a more sporadic mechanism, since forms such as eskuro ‘dark’ and eskapar ‘to finish,’ do not present palatalization, and eshpital ‘hospital,’ has a [p] in the onset. A third phonological innovation is vowel raising, especially in Balkan JS, in the dialects of Bucharest, Sarajevo, and Monastir. For instance, the Bucharest dialect consists of raising [e] to [i] and [o] to [u] in unstressed position, as in madre > madri ‘mother,’ and tomó > tumó ‘he took.’5 The Monastir dialect also includes the raising of [a] to [e], as in kaza > kaze ‘house.’6 Likewise, dialectal differences between JS and PLA Spanish are heightened by the lexicon. For instance, JS inherited a vast number of patrimonial lexical items from Old Spanish that have fallen into disuse or are considered archaic or rural in the PLA varieties. Examples of these include mansevo ‘young man’ (compare to PLA joven), trokar ‘to change’ (PLA cambiar), merkar ‘to buy’ (PLA comprar), and fraguar ‘to build’ (PLA construir). Further, like most Jewish languages, JS also contains a myriad of lexical items from the hagiolanguages (liturgical languages) Hebrew and Aramaic to denote religious, cultural, and judicial concepts.7 Examples of these include darush ‘sermon,’ get ‘divorce,’ hahám ‘rabbi,’ aynará ‘evil eye,’ and mazal ‘luck.’ Perhaps speakers and neophytes view this Hebrew/Aramaic element as the “Judeo” in JS, and it becomes a target for dissipation or concentration mechanisms depending on the speaker’s intention. Additionally, JS also borrowed hundreds of lexical items from 4

Max Leopold Wagner. Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Judenspanischen von Konstantinopel. Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1914, 106; see also Penny, Ralph. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 180. 5 Cynthia M. Crews. Recherches sur le judéo-espagnol dans les pays balkaniques. Paris: E. Droz, 1935, 30. 6 Max A. Luria. A study of the Monastir dialect of Judeo-Spanish based on oral material collected in Monastir, Yugo-Slavia. New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1930, 100. It seems that in Monastir other factors in addition to stress are causing vocalic raising. 7 Paul Wexler. Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework. Language 57:1, 99-149, 1981.

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coterritorial languages and languages necessary for trade across the Mediterranean. Some of these include pirón ‘fork’ (from Greek), tanta ‘aunt,’ mersi ‘thank you,’ vuatur ‘vehicle, car’ (French), kolay ‘easy,’ karishear ‘to mix,’ boyadjí ‘painter,’ (Turkish). In Modern JS, the French and Turkish lexical elements predominate due to intense language contact and bilingualism with these languages. French was promoted as the language of civilization and culture by schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which opened schools for Jewish children throughout the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and the Middle East from the middle of the nineteenth century. In Turkey, these schools were eventually closed through nationalistic language policies in the 1930s.8 French left a distinct lexical layer in JS language and culture, as it was associated with enlightenment, innovation, and science. It became the source for borrowings in these areas, and some JS publications even attempted to modernize the language by replacing words from other Balkan and Mediterranean languages with French or modified French lexicon to fit Spanish morphology to create a Gallicized JS variety.9 Some researchers have claimed that as much as twenty percent of Modern JS lexicon derives from French.10 Since bilingualism with French still exists in many communities, the language continues to influence JS as a source of neologisms or as part of code-switching. Lexical borrowings from Turkish entered the language in two waves. First, as part of the pan-Ottoman lexical repertoire, Turkisms present in many Balkan languages such as Bulgarian, Macedonian, and Serbo-Croatian. These constitute concepts of every-day life such as udá ‘room,’ mupak ‘kitchen,’ or yemí ‘boat.’ Many of these Turkisms probably entered JS via other languages such as Greek.11 The second wave of Turkish borrowings is the direct result of nationalistic language policies in the 1920s and 1930s that sought to

8

Howard Sachar. Farewell España: The world of the Sephardim remembered. New York: Vintage, 1994, 98-99; see also Ester Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the JS Community, 14th-20th Centuries. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000, 104. 9 Sarah Abrevaya Stein. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004, 69-70. 10 Nathan Weinstock and Haïm-Vidal Sephiha. Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, a European heritage. Brussels: Vanden Broele, 1997, 29. 11 Marie-Christine Varol-Bornes. “Influencia del turco en el judeoespañol de Turquía” in Winfried Busse and Marie-Christine Varol-Bornes (eds.) Sephardica: Hommage à Haïm Vidal Sephiha. Berne: Peter Lang, 1996, 216; see also Crews 1935, 1127.

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impose Turkish on all the minority populations.12 As Turkish took over the domains in which JS was used and as the Sephardim became proficient in Turkish, JS acquired more Turkisms, especially to designate modern concepts. Often, many of these lexical items were not accommodated to fit JS morphology or phonology, and they are present as nonce borrowings or as part of code-switching. Code-switching with Turkish and other coterritorial languages is the last dialectal feature that I will address in this study. As Sephardim’s bilingualism increased, the community utilized more than one language for daily life, either as language allocation (in which one language is assigned one particular domain) or as language shift (when one language takes over the domains of another). There are no more monolingual JS communities, and bilingualism or multilingualism appears to be the norm. These bilingual situations may trigger code-switching and additional lexical borrowings, thereby giving the impression that JS is just a random mixture of languages. For instance, when Wagner visited the Bucharest community in the beginning of the nineteenth century, he documented phrases such as: stuve unde el kroitor, me tomó la mazura d’una roke, me la izo tan potrivita par ke era turnat. This sentence mixes JS with Romanian (unde, kroitor, mazura, roke, potrivita, par, turnat), and Wagner considers it a jargonized version of the language.13 Code-switching with Turkish in the Istanbul community is also prevalent, as exemplified in this conversation: Ya estó saviendo, ya savo ya, de chikéz yaani küçükten kalmú, ö÷renmiúim bu úekilde devam ediyor.14 The communities in New York, Israel, and Greece also exhibit language mixing and code-switching with English, Hebrew, and Greek respectively. JS speakers and those PLA Spanish speakers who encounter the language readily notice that language mixing is the norm in these communities. In a previous study on the Istanbulite community, some participants even took pride in the multilingual nature of the Sephardim: Saves una koza, kon los djudiós es ke todos konosen sinko, sesh linguas i kuando avlamos mesklamos porke savemos ke ya vas entender. I una vez estava en kaza de mis parientes i unos amigos mios de kuarenta anyos ke están en la Amérika vinieron, i mis ijos estavan. Empesimos a avlar turko, fransés, inglés, espanyol, todo endjuntos, muy normal en kuatro linguas. No me apersiví ke es una koza anormal porke ansina avlamos. Kuando

12

Benbassa and Rodrigue 2000, 102; Sachar 1994, 104. Cited in Crews 1935, 29-30. 14 Rey Romero. Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the JudeoSpanish dialect spoken in Istanbul. Istanbul: Libra, 2012, 109. 13

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fuimos a kaza, mis ijos disheron al papá, “estuvieron avlando por dos oras kuatro linguas,” i les paresió muy komík esto.15 You know something, the thing about Jews is that they all know five or six languages and when we speak, we mix them because we know that it’s understandable. And one time I was at my relatives’ home and some of my friends who had been living in America for forty years were visiting, and my children were there [too]. We started talking in Turkish, French, English, Spanish, all mixed, in four languages, very normal. I didn’t notice that it was strange because that’s how we talk. When we returned home, my children said to their father, “they were talking in four languages for two hours,” and they thought this was very funny.

To summarize, among the main distinctive dialectal features of JS we find phonological differences in the distribution of initial [f], voiced sibilants, palatals, vowel raising, lexical differences in Old Spanish patrimonial lexicon, as well as borrowings and code-switching with coterritorial languages. These features are relevant to this study as JS speakers and writers choose to either overgeneralize them in the concentration model or omit or accommodate them to the PLA varieties in the dissipation model.

3. Concentration of dialectal features There are several mechanisms through which dialect concentration is achieved. First, speakers or writers become aware of certain features not present in other dialects. These features are then maximized or emphasized throughout the population, creating new contexts for their distribution, or simply creating new items selecting distinct features as models. Concentration may be present at any linguistic component. For instance, two often cited examples of the “mixing” of JS with Hebrew are ladronim, where Spanish ladrón ‘thief’ is combined with the Hebrew masculine plural -im, and haraganut, with Spanish haragán ‘idle, lazy,’ combined with the Hebrew nominalizer -ut ‘idleness.’16 Although these and other forms such as refranín (Spanish refrán ‘proverb’ + the adaptation to Spanish phonology of -im > -in) and meanot (Turkish meyhane > meaná ‘tavern’ + Hebrew feminine plural -ot) are attested in literary JS in the

15

Ibid. 82-83. Tracy K. Harris. Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish. Newark: University of Delaware, 1994, 18.

16

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eighteenth century,17 these examples are by far rare and do not represent a general pattern throughout the language. However, because these forms represent the morphological amalgamation of Spanish, Turkish, and Hebrew elements, they may serve as models for the concentration model. In fact, the form ladronim is often cited in Spanish linguistics textbooks that aim to introduce students to the JS dialect. This provides the misrepresentation of the language, as extrapolation from one example may lead to think that Hebrew -im is a productive plural marker in the language. In addition to the expansion of dialectal features, speakers may establish an indelible link between feature and speech. That is, if you speak X language, then you must produce Y feature in your speech, otherwise it is not X. Furthermore, this may also involve identity, and the association between ethnic group Z and feature Y. That is, if you are Z, then you must produce Y, otherwise you are not Z. These assumptions create linguistic myths and stereotypes, such as that all Spaniards “lisp” (interdental fricative [ș]) or that all Jews have a strong “ch” (velar fricative [x]) in their speech. Therefore, concentration of dialectal features may serve the metalinguistic purpose of asserting group membership or inclusion. Concentration may be a bottom-up process, in which some dialectal features are noticed by native speakers or language learners and thereby overuse them as a way to consciously distinguish JS from PLA varieties. Concentration may also be a top-down process, in which organizations seeking to provide instruction and linguistic materials consciously select those dialects that have more divergent features from mainstream dialects or promote the acquisition and intergenerational transmission of certain features. For instance, a JS textbook that solely focuses on Balkan dialects (with initial [f] and vocalic raising) and that has a lesson on Hebrew plurals may contribute to dialect concentration among its students. Not surprisingly, revitalization movements that seek to stress the unique character of the language may also choose and promote nomenclatures that set the dialect apart from its macrolect. The names Ladino and Judezmo do not convey a clear connection to Spanish as do Espanyol and Muestro Espanyol, which are also used by Sephardim. Keeping these mechanisms in mind, let us now examine several examples of dialect concentration in JS. The first two examples come from JS communities on Facebook. The third example comes from Wikipedia. In example (1), the writer was 17

David M. Bunis A lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements in Modern Judezmo. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993, 36-37.

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merely posting a clarification on spelling. In example (2), the writer posted a poem about Sephardic identity. Example (3) is meant to be more formal and informative, as an encyclopedic entry. (1) Avlo Ladino deshde chiko, antes del sefarad, y eshkribo en caracteres hebreos. No sey muy bién ishkibrir en karakteres latinos tal kual ustedes. No é el kostumbre de mishpacha shelí. Mas me kiero ensinyar I speak Ladino since I was little, before Spain, and I write it in Hebrew script. I don’t know how to write very well in Latin script like you all. It’s not my family’s custom, but I want to learn. (2) Entonses un día ehad me sentí tan triste/Una tristeza ke no savía por ke./ Yo me mirava defronte al espejo / Y no reconosía akeya fase / Si no era akel mi kuerpo, / Donde estava mi neshamá? / Levad me por los caminos seguros/ Salva de la confuzion mi neshamá / Faz ke la aretz tohu vavohu / Se torne en la aretz hatová. Then one day I felt so sad/ I did not know the reason for this sadness. / I saw myself in front of the mirror / And I did not recognize that face / If that was not my body, / Where was my soul? / Take me on the safe roads / Save my soul from confusion / Make the chaotic land / Become the good land. (3) Las linguas prinsipalas avladas en Yisrael inkluyen el ivrit i el arabo, linguas ofisiales de Yisrael. The main languages spoken in Israel include Hebrew and Arabic, the official languages of Israel.

These examples demonstrate the expansion of several phonological and lexical features. For instance, in (1) we see the palatalization of [s] to [‫ ]ݕ‬in deshde ‘since,’ eshkribo ‘I write,’ and ishkribir ‘to write,’ which does not occur in any variety of JS (the forms are desde and eskrivir, iskrivir, or skrivir). The invention of these forms occurs when neophytes or people who are new to the language make the wrong analogies based on PLA Spanish varieties or other languages. For instance, if PLA buscar is JS bushkar, then PLA desde must be *deshde. Other examples of concentration through erroneous phonological analogies (denoted with ::) from these samples include: ensinyar (based on PLA enseñar :: PLA señor : JS sinyor), defronte (PLA de frente :: PLA después : JS dospués), and levad (PLA llevad :: PLA lluvia : JS luvia). The form sey with the extraneous -y in (1) is not clear. Another strategy is the inclusion of Hebrew words in the three texts: Sefarad ‘Spain,’ mishpacha shelí ‘my

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family,’ ehad ‘one,’ neshamá ‘soul,’ aretz tohu vavohu18 ‘a wild and wasted land,’ aretz hatová ‘the good land,’ and ivrit ‘Hebrew.’ The Hebrew element might be emphasized as a way to assert that JS is a Jewish language, and therefore, as all Jewish languages, it must use Hebrew words. This might also be symptomatic of an underlying linguistic stereotype that all Jews speak Jewish languages. Therefore, the Hebrew elements, from which only Sefarad, ivrit, and neshamá appear regularly in non-Rabbinical literary works, decrease mutual intelligibility with PLA Spanish varieties and with the Spanish of non-Jews. A third element that all three texts present is the random mixing of languages. Although linguists have identified inter-sentential and intra-sentential patterns for code-switching, the texts above do not follow such models since they were not produced by native JS speakers in a bilingual community. Instead, the random mixing of Hebrew and Portuguese (é ‘is’ and fase ‘face’) echoes the initial impression of language amalgamation without rules, as explained by Halio Torres: Every Spanish-Jew who speaks the language of his ancestors knows that his dialect is not tightly governed by rules. Almost every one of them speaks differently, having come from a different somewhat isolated community under different influences.19

The perception of a language without tightly governed rules shapes language attitudes negatively, as speakers question whether or not such language is valuable or useful. It also encourages those who seek to learn JS to mix Spanish with Hebrew and Portuguese (and other languages) ad hoc and present it as an authentic representation of the language. In addition, the writers of (1) and (3) also failed to notice some of the lexical features of JS and produced PLA forms. In (1), the PLA pronoun ustedes is used, instead of the Judeo-Spanish vozotros, and ensinyar should be ambezar. In (3), the author uses the JS feminine plural prinsipalas, but fails to do so with the next adjective, writing PLA ofisiales instead of ofisialas. Thus, the resulting version of JS may include extremely divergent elements mixed with PLA items.

18

Tohu vavohu is a phrase from Biblical Hebrew, found in Parshat Bereishit (Genesis). It refers to earth being “formless and void.” Biblical Hebrew might be a source from which this author draws the Hebrew elements of his JS writings. 19 J. Halio-Torres. “Writing the Spanish-Jewish dialect” in Marc D. Angel (ed.) Studies in Sephardic Culture: The David N. Barocas Memorial Volume. New York: Sepher-Hermon, 1980, 96.

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Although these examples come from non-native speakers of JS and do not represent the majority of participants in online communities such as forums and social networks, they present opportunities for native speakers to push a concentration model in language planning policies that deal with neologisms, such as new terms for computing and digital technologies. This occurred before, in the late nineteenth century, as newspapers such as El Tiempo created new terms for transportation and other technological advancements, and even everyday lexical items, basing the neologisms on French forms. This created unintelligibility even among native speakers of JS who were not bilingual in French. This is illustrated by a contemporary satirical dialogue between a Salonikan couple: Ezrá: “Un grande sinistro devastó el mas grande edifisio sanitario de muestra sivdad.” Benuta: Ke kiere decir esto, Ezrá? Ezrá: Kien save Benuta; no mashkareí nada. Ben meldar, sen entender. El Dio ke los fieda a los djornales ke eskriven tanto enfrankeado para no pueder modrer ni una palavra20 Ezrá: “A great fire destroyed the biggest medical building in our city.” Benuta: What does that mean, Ezrá? Ezrá: Who knows, Benuta; I didn’t grasp anything. I read, you understand. May God strike these newspapers that use so much French that I can’t grasp a single word.

In the above dialogue, sinistro, devastó, edifisio, and sanitario are all neologisms based on French forms. Ezrá and Benuta complain that they cannot understand this kind of JS. Concentration can have a similar effect on modern revitalization efforts.

4. Dissipation of dialectal features. Dissipation consists of minimizing those dialectal features that do not exist in the perceived standard variety of the language by accommodating or eliminating them. Unlike concentration, native speakers of JS seem to be guiding this model, as accommodation to PLA varieties has been attested in the Sephardic communities of Tetouan, New York, Los Angeles, Istanbul, the Prince Islands, and others. Dissipation seems to be the result of contact with PLA Spanish varieties which leads to the awareness of dialectal differences and the accommodation of these features to fit the 20 David M. Bunis. Kolot mi-Saloniki ha-Yehudit. Voices from Jewish Salonika. Jerusalem: Graphit, 1999, 472.

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PLA systems. Contact may occur through migration, as Sephardim moved to Spain, Latin American countries, or the United States. For instance, Harris noticed that: The Spanish used by Puerto Ricans in New York and the Chicanos in Los Angeles, as well as the Spanish speakers in these areas, has had a great influence on the Judeo-Spanish of both New York and Los Angeles. This is due mainly to the similarities of the two languages and the everincreasing contact of the Sephardim with non-Sephardi Spanish speakers in certain work and school situations. […] There is even some Standard Spanish interference in Israel in cases where the informants have either studied Modern Spanish, traveled extensively, lived in Spanish-speaking countries, or have used Spanish in their work.21

But accommodation and dissipation may also occur in situations without direct or extensive contact, as long as speakers become aware of dialectal differences. For instance, many participants from Istanbul and the Prince Islands were introduced to dialectal differences through family members who had migrated, through interacting with PLA speakers during business and travel. Thus, dissipation can be a bottom-up approach, as it can be based on speakers’ perception of dialect differences and their knowledge on how to accommodate them or avoid them in the target variety. This can introduce great variation in the dissipation model, since its production will depend on speaker’s individual experiences and level of awareness. On the other hand, dissipation may also occur in a top-down fashion, especially when JS speakers enter the PLA Spanish classroom or, as the Instituto Cervantes has promoted, Spanish courses especially designed for Sephardim who speak JS. Dissipation may happen at the phonological level. For instance, the aforementioned JS palatals [‫]ݕ‬, [‫]ݤ‬, and [d‫ ]ݤ‬are often accommodated as PLA [x] in the dissipation model, although only in lexical items where there is a [x] in PLA Spanish. Speakers are aware of the palatal/velar distinction, as one participant from Istanbul remarked: (4) ... in Ladino we are using [‫]ݤ‬e, i[‫]ݤ‬a, uh, when I said 'Tienes i[‫]ݤ‬os' uh my friends from Mexico, when I was in Houston, I told, 'Do you have i[‫]ݤ‬as, i[‫]ݤ‬os?' She didn't understand: Sorry? Then I eh correct myself, 'Do you have i[x]os, i[x]as?' They understand. But in Ladino, we are spelling it

21

Harris 1994, 173-174.

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like 'i[‫]ݤ‬a,' 'mu[‫]ݤ‬er,' 'mu[x]er' for example, it's mu[x]er. It's i[x]o, i[x]a. But we are calling it 'mu[‫]ݤ‬er,' i[‫]ݤ‬a, i[‫]ݤ‬o, vie[x]a, vie[‫]ݤ‬a.22

Another participant from the Prince Islands, off the coast of Istanbul, agreed: (5) Mozotros eh ... ti[x]eras es lo djusto. Mozotros aki dizemos ti[Ҋ]eras, anteo[Ҋ]os. La [x]e se izo [Ҋ]e23. We uh .. ti[x]eras is correct. Here we say ti[‫]ݤ‬eras, anteo[‫]ݤ‬os. Letter [x]e became [‫]ݤ‬e.

These examples also illustrate language attitudes that lead to accommodation. In (4), the speaker equated accommodation to the velars as a “correction,” and in (5) the participant claims that the forms with [x] are the right ones. Furthermore, in (5), the PLA forms with [x] are thought to be the original ones, and the JS [‫ ]ݤ‬is a later development, when actually the opposite is true. The palatal to velar accommodation was also noticed by Harris in the communities of New York and Los Angeles: Besides lexical borrowing there is also a great amount of phonological interference [...]. Due to contact with Modern Spanish, the replacement of the [‫ ]ݤ‬and [d‫ ]ݤ‬as well as the [‫ ]ݕ‬sounds by the voiceless velar fricative [x] is quite widespread today in the Judeo-Spanish of my New York and Los Angeles informants.24

The phonological dissipation in favor of PLA [x] has also been attested in Indianapolis25, Mexico City26, Izmir27, and Tetouan28. In fact, Benichou’s 1960 study (based on data from 1950) indicated that:

22

Rey Romero. Palatal east meets velar west: Dialect contact and phonological accommodation in Judeo-Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6:2, 2013, 291. 23 Ibid, 291. 24 Harris 1994, l73-175. 25 Julie Nemer. Sound patterns and strategies: Loanwords in Judeo-Spanish. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University at Bloomington, 1981, 214-216. 26 Karina Donath. Estudios sobre el judeo-español en México. Mexico City: INAH, 1999, 72, 78-79. She calls this process recastellanizar or “make Spanish again.” 27 Paul Gregory Gilmer. Judeo-Spanish to Turkish: Linguistic correlates of language death. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1986, 54-55. 28 Paul Benichou. Notas sobre el judeo-español de Marruecos en 1950. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 14, 307-312, 1960, 310.

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Dialect Concentration and Dissipation En cuanto a los fonemas /ѻ/ y /Ҋ/ del castellano antiguo, ya se sabe que han sido suplantados en la última generación por la jota moderna, y que subsisten solo en casos y condiciones excepcionales...En conclusión, el material recientemente publicado confirma el triunfo casi general de la jota, ya observado anteriormente.29 In regards to the phonemes /‫ݕ‬/ y /‫ݤ‬/ from Old Spanish, we know that the last generation has replaced them with modern /x/, and these phonemes survive only in rare instances and circumstances…In conclusion, the recently-published material confirms the overall triumph of /x/, which had been observed previously.

The presence of accommodation to [x] in most modern JS communities demonstrates that it is a common mechanism to achieve dissipation, and that in some cases, as in the Tetouani community, it has led to a complete phonological change in favor of PLA Spanish (el triunfo casi general de la jota). This pattern was studied in great detail in Romero (2013). The researcher included data of 19 participants from Istanbul and the Prince Islands, and the results indicated that from the three palatals, [‫ ]ݤ‬is accommodated to [x] the most (27% of all cases).30 Most interestingly, the author also concluded that there was no token-age correlation, as all age groups (ages 30 to 85) exhibited [x] at roughly the same percentages. Furthermore, the same study also revealed that accommodation to [x] was not a phonological process, that is, it did not consist of merely replacing every [‫]ݕ‬, [‫]ݤ‬, and [d‫ ]ݤ‬with [x], but it only occurred in those lexical items with [x] attested in PLA Spanish. In fact, 84% of all accommodation instances occurred in just five lemes: ijo/ija, mujer, viejo/vieja, djudió/djudía, and djoven.31 Therefore, we must explore dissipation through lexical accommodation. JS speakers from several communities have demonstrated awareness of lexical differences between JS and PLA Spanish. For instance, 79% of Christodouleas’s informants from Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece) perceived JS to be distinct from Peninsular Spanish and 55% believed that it was different from Latin American Spanish. According to her interviews, the main difference was in the JS lexicon inherited from Turkish, French, and other languages, as explained by one participant:

29

Ibid. Romero 2013, 286-287. 31 Ibid, 288. 30

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(6) Ay diferensias bastantes porke kon el tiempo entraron en la lingua espanyola ke mozotros favlamos palavras turkas, fransesas, ispanizadas um poko. Porke, [komo] dishe, entraron siertas palabras turkas i frankeadas… debemos de fazer atension a ke ay las palavras turkas ke otros no tienen.32 There are many differences because, as time went by, Turkish and French words entered the Spanish language that we speak, Hispanicized a bit, because [as] I said, some Turkish and French words entered… we must be aware that there are Turkish words that others don’t have.

The informant above argues that JS speakers must be aware of these lexical differences with interacting with speakers of PLA Spanish. Specific examples were given by informants from Istanbul and the Prince Islands as illustrated in (7) and (8) correspondingly. (7) I think it’s like our Ottoman Turkish. The old people in Turkey are using a lot of Ottoman words; it’s like this, I think. For example we use in Turkish “success” baúar, but the old people are using muvaffakiyet. It’s like that… I was saying trokar instead of cambiar, because in Ladino I heard about it trokar, but in real Spanish we are using cambiar.33 (8) Trabajar es en espanyol, en ladino es lavorar. Yo si digo a uno en Espanya ‘lavorar,’ entiende? Puedeser. Dinero, akí el dinero se izo parás, moneda. Komo esto ay munchas palavras ke se trokó.34 Trabajar is Spanish, in Ladino it’s lavorar. If I say ‘lavorar’ to someone in Spain, will he understand? Maybe. Dinero, here dinero became parás, moneda. Like these, there are many words that changed.

Harris lists several PLA Spanish lexical items in the speech of her New York and Los Angeles informants, including enfermo (JS hazino), fósforos (JS kibrites), trabajar (JS lavorar), cambiar (JS trokar), and comprar (JS merkar). JS writers using new spaces for communication in cyberspace, including online communities such as those in Yahoo! and Facebook, also actively attempt to avoid Hebrew or Turkish words and replace them with Spanish. For instance, two Facebook participants wrote in (9) and (10) 32 Tina Christodouleas. Judeo-Spanish and the Jewish Community of 21st Century Thessaloniki: Ethnic language shift in the maintenance of ethno cultural identity. Ph.D. dissertation: The Pennsylvania State University, 2008, 96. 33 Romero 2012, 101. 34 Romero 2013, 292.

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Dialect Concentration and Dissipation (9) Yo evito en lo maksimo usar biervos turkos, ebraikos i arabos dainda ke los nonos los ayan uzado, (ya se ke no es errado uzarlos ama no me es gustoso) komo "afilu" "kolay" etc. ama es solo mi estilo.” I avoid as much as possible using Turkish, Hebrew, and Arabic words even if the grandparents used them, (I know that it’s not wrong to use them but it’s not pleasant) like “afilu” “kolay” etc. but it’s just my style. (10) De otra parte, ay tres byervos turkos uzados por los djudyos de Estambol: halbuki (ke traslado en franses por or), zaten ke traslado en franses por d’ailleurs, i andjak, ke traslado en franses por à la rigueur, sin ser siguro a syen por syen por lo ke es de esta ultima traduksyon. Mi kuestyon es: komo se diriyan estos tres byervos en el espanyol muestro sin emplear byervos turkos? Yo no se. On the other hand, there are three Turkish words used by Istanbulite Jews: halbuki (that I translated in French as or), zaten that I translated in French as d’ailleurs, and andjak, that I translated in French as à la rigueur, without being one hundred percent sure about this last translation. My question is: how would you say these three words in our Spanish without using Turkish words? I don’t know.

In (9), the writer readily admits that he does not like to use Turkish and Hebrew words, and the writer in (10) is consulting the forum on how to replace JS lexical items from Turkish by real Spanish words. Therefore, it is interesting that even in language spaces specifically designed for the preservation of JS, participants employ dissipation model strategies. Ultimately, the single cause that promotes dissipation in favor of PLA forms is the linguistic domain of professional activities. For instance, an informant from Istanbul explained: (11) Actually, most of clients were from Spain, so we have to speak Spanish, so first of all I was really afraid of using my language because I couldn’t think that, uh, they can understand me, but they could understood me, so it was really funny for me, so I began to go to meetings with them. I began to take them to the airport, to the hotel…

The speaker in (11) found that his acquisition of JS as a child could improve his professional activities by modifying it to fit a PLA variety. Other informants, such as the one in (12) from the Prince Islands, expressed that JS (which she calls Ladino) should be discarded in favor of other Spanish varieties that may create marketability elsewhere, such as the United States:

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(12) Castellano sí; Ladino... no lo veo tan importante. Es una lengua muerta o que no hay, entonces no lo veo tan importante. Pero castellano sí, porque hay gente que quiere ir a Estados Unidos y en Estados Unidos solo con inglés no vas a estar, tienen que saber un idioma más. (Romero 2011, 176)35 Castilian yes; Ladino… I don’t think it’s that important. It’s a dead language or it is no more, so I don’t think it’s important. But Castilian yes, because there are people who want to go to the United States and you will not make it in the United States with just English, you have to know one more language.

The risk of dissipation model strategies, such as phonological and lexical accommodation, is that eventually the dialect may die not through the lack of intergenerational transmission or the dearth of linguistic domains, but through enough linguistic change to lose its distinct features and become part of a mainstream variety.

5. Implications for Revitalization efforts: Agency, appropriation, audience Important implications for revitalization efforts become apparent by investigating the elements of agency, appropriation, and audience behind concentration and dissipation. By agency, I mean the actors promoting concentration and dissipation. For concentration, we identified that most JS writers pushing this model in online communities are non-native speakers, neophytes wishing to participate in language revitalization. For dissipation, we identified that most actors are native JS speakers who seek to accommodate their speech to PLA forms. Relevant to agency are the methods by which these models are achieved. Both concentration and dissipation utilize phonological and lexical features to achieve their goal. The goals for each model contradict each other. Whereas the concentration model aims to decrease mutual intelligibility with PLA varieties of Spanish, the dissipation model focuses on eliminating any distinct JS features and aid JS speakers acquire PLA Spanish. The aim of dissipation is best summarized by the Sephardic philologist Henry V. Besso:

35

Rey Romero. Issues of Spanish language maintenance in the Prince Islands. In Alejandro Cortazar and Rafael Orozco (eds.), Lenguaje, arte y revoluciones ayer y hoy: New approaches to Hispanic linguistic literary and cultural studies, 162-187. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, 176.

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Dialect Concentration and Dissipation Creo que España debe hacer fácil y posible la refundición del dialecto judeoespañol hasta la altura del moderno castellano, con lo que los sefardíes tendrían accesibles los tesoros de su literatura y de su ciencia. Creo que los sefardíes se pondrían con entusiasmo a aprender y practicar el español moderno -que ya es conocido por muchos de ellos- y que de un salto casi inconcebible y gigantesco lograrían salvar la distancia de esos pasados cinco siglos36 I think that Spain should make it easy and feasible the recasting of the Judeo-Spanish dialect to the height of modern Castilian, thereby Sephardim can gain access to its literary and scientific treasures. I think the Sephardim will start learning and practicing modern Spanish with zeal, and many of them already know it, and thus in one unbelievable and gigantic leap shorten their five-hundred year old distance.

Besso’s vision reveals several language attitudes in favor of Castilian, claiming it has “height” and modernity, as well as literary and scientific treasures. For Besso, dissipation would erase the past five hundred years of JS development in the Ottoman Empire, and it would incorporate JS speakers to all the linguistic resources and benefits PLA Spanish speakers have in the global arena. This, of course, would constitute the death of JS. Therefore, concentration and dissipation provide two distorted and exaggerated versions of JS, which coexist with other “authentic” forms and dialects of JS in the same linguistic spaces. Another issue relevant to language revitalization is linguistic appropriation. In other words, why do non-Sephardim use JS? Although this is a complex and multifaceted question, it appears that JS in the concentration model is used to establish a clear link between the Jewishness of the language (Hebrew and language mixing present in other Jewish languages) and that of the writer. Linguistic appropriation may also determine the role of JS in the newly created spaces such as books, online communities, and music. What is the purpose of JS in these new spaces? How is JS used as a tool in these media? This is yet another complex answer. The use of JS in the concentration model (and also unaltered JS) is to emphasize its distinctiveness from PLA varieties, as a linguistic code that only an in-group member can understand or decipher. This is again closely linked with identity, how the author wants to portray him or herself or the language. Some modern publications in JS have produced JS in the 36

Henry V. Besso. Situación actual del judeoespañol. In Gregorio Marañón and Ramón Menéndez Pidal (eds.), Presente y futuro de la lengua española, Actas de la Asamblea de Filología del I Congreso de Instituciones Hispánicas, 306-304. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1964, 323.

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concentration model for literary or poetic effect. Such is the case of Dibaxu, a collection of JS poems by the Argentinian Juan Gelman. One of stanzas of Poem III is reproduced below: lembrara tu nagûita curilada/ tus fluris curiladas/ tus bezus curilados/ tu blanco curasón.37 He will remember your red skirt/ your red flowers/ your red kisses/ your white heart.

Several features of the concentration model in Gelman’s poetry include the random mixture of Portuguese lexical items (lembrar, vs JS akodrarse) and hypercharacterization of vowel raising (fluris instead of JS floris; the author raises the [o] in bezus, but not in curilados or blanco, etc.). The author also fails to use the JS diminutive –ika instead of –ita in nagûita. Gelman includes a translation into PLA Spanish right below the poem, thereby allowing the reader to compare the dialects and understand his JS. In the introductory notes, the poet clarifies that he is not Sephardic, but that he wanted to use JS in order to evoke sixteenth century Spanish: Como si buscar el sustrato de ese castellano, sustrato a su vez del nuestro, hubiera sido mi obsesión. Como si la soledad extrema del exilio me empujara a buscar raíces en la lengua, las más profundas y exiliadas de la lengua. Yo tampoco me lo explico.38 As if my obsession had been searching the substrate of that Spanish, a substrate that is at the same time ours. As if my extreme loneliness in the exile had pushed me to look for roots in that language, the deepest and most exiled roots in that language. I cannot explain it to myself.

For Gelman, the concentration model functions as a poetic effect, even if it is not an authentic representation of JS. Linguistic appropriation is also relevant to the dissipation model. For instance, who decides that JS should accommodate to PLA forms? Who designs courses and materials to facilitate dissipation among Sephardic communities? Does it matter if the agents are Sephardic, JS speakers, or not? The central question of linguistic appropriation in both models is how it affects the link between language, identity, and culture. Can Sephardim preserve their cultural and linguistic identity with a variety of JS closer to PLA Spanish through dissipation? Can one acquire “Sephardicness” by promoting a JS variety 37 38

Juan Gelman. Dibaxu. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1994. Ibid.

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further from PLA Spanish through concentration? Again, these are complex issues of identity that may have more than one answer. Finally, we must also consider how audience design drives the concentration and dissipation models. How do Sephardic spaces or spaces specifically created for the maintenance and revitalization of JS affect the concentration and dissipation model? What kind of JS is expected from a member of an online forum where JS is the main focus and purpose of such space? The idea that a dialect must be different from closely-related varieties simply because it is given a new name might affect the performance of JS writers, contributing to distinctiveness through the overuse of Hebrew and dialect features. On the other hand, if the forum is meant to communicate with Sephardim and other Hispanic Jews throughout the world, some of whom may not understand JS, then such space would activate the dissipation model. This depends on audience awareness and knowledge of linguistic systems. For instance, the concentration model may still be an effective method of communication in a forum or space where the audience is multilingual in Turkish and Hebrew and able to piece together the message. The audience may also be aware of vocalic differences among JS dialects, and thus accept this form of concentration by associating them with actual JS forms. JS speakers aware of lexical differences, like the previous participants from Istanbul, the Prince Islands, New York City, and Los Angeles, may also be able to understand JS undergoing a dissipation model. We must also question whether dissipation and concentration represent actual language change or just the development of a linguistic style shaped by audience and space. For instance, JS speakers may accommodate to [x] when they utilize Spanish while conducting business or traveling abroad, but they may revert back to the palatals for intra-group spaces like family or religious events. The concentration model may also represent just a dialect acquisition stage, and, as neophytes interact with more JS speakers, it can shift to match a more authentic representation of the language. After all, JS is an endangered language, and the community would benefit greatly from teaching authentic language outside its current population of native and heritage speakers.

6. Conclusion Concentration and dissipation models constitute a challenge to current JS revitalization efforts. Not only do these distribute an unauthentic, highly modified, and artificial variety of the language, but they also occupy spaces designed for JS maintenance, preservation, practice, and transmission.

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If these types of JS predominate linguistic domains, resources, and language policy, we run the risk of excluding the population of native speakers who can benefit the most from participating in revitalization efforts. Native speakers should also be seen as the models to follow, and they can provide invaluable information to anyone seeking to learn JS. Moreover, concentration and dissipation models obscure the real linguistic needs of the community. One of the most pressing is intergenerational transmission, as most native speakers are 60 or older. The language needs to be passed down to the next generation, but both dissipation and concentration distort the language of native speakers and thereby the transmission of JS. In addition, these models might also impede intelligibility with the older, more proficient generation. Another necessity is the maintenance and expansion into more linguistic domains. The advent of virtual communities and social groups can replace physical geographical space, and thereby unite JS speakers throughout the world, foment literacy, and create language spaces for the next generation. Dissipation and concentration in online communities hinders the creation of a viable, authentic linguistic community. JS revitalization efforts must also focus on the documentation of lexicon and other dialectal characteristics from as many Sephardic communities as possible. Concentration provides erroneous information on these characteristics, and dissipation omits them. The actual language mixing patterns from modern JS communities can provide for essential information for studies on bilingualism, structural change, heritage languages, and linguistic domains. Lastly, JS revitalization efforts must use authentic data from current JS communities to create functional didactic materials to promote its teaching, maintenance, and transmission. Materials that promote concentration or dissipation will only provide a version disconnected from linguistic reality, that may result in either incomprehension or dialect death. These challenges, if addressed timely, can fortify current revitalization efforts and infuse JS with renewed energy. Vidas largas.

References Benbassa, Ester and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Benichou, Paul. Notas sobre el judeo-español de Marruecos en 1950. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 14, 307-312, 1960. Besso, Henry V. Situación actual del judeoespañol. In Gregorio Marañón and Ramón Menéndez Pidal (eds.), Presente y futuro de la lengua

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española, Actas de la Asamblea de Filología del I Congreso de Instituciones Hispánicas, Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 307324, 1964. Bunis, David M. A lexicon of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements in Modern Judezmo. Jerusalem: Magnes, 1993. —. Kolot mi-Saloniki ha-Yehudit. Voices from Jewish Salonika. Jerusalem: Graphit, 1999. Christodouleas, Tina. Judeo-Spanish and the Jewish Community of 21st Century Thessaloniki: Ethnic language shift in the maintenance of ethno cultural identity. Doctoral dissertation: The Pennsylvania State University, 2008. Crews, Cynthia M. Recherches sur le judéo-espagnol dans les pays balkaniques. Paris: E. Droz, 1935. Donath, Karina. Estudios sobre el judeo-español en México. Mexico City: INAH, 1999. Gelman, Juan. Dibaxu. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe, 1994. Gilmer, Paul Gregory. Judeo-Spanish to Turkish: Linguistic correlates of language death. Doctoral dissertation, University of Texas at Austin, 1986. Halio-Torres, J. “Writing the Spanish-Jewish dialect” in Marc D. Angel (ed.) Studies in Sephardic Culture: The David N. Barocas Memorial Volume. New York: Sepher-Hermon, 1980. Harris, Tracy K. Death of a Language: The History of Judeo- Spanish. Newark: University of Delaware, 1994. Luria, Max A. A study of the Monastir dialect of Judeo- Spanish based on oral material collected in Monastir, Yugo-Slavia. New York: Instituto de las Españas, 1930. Nemer, Julie. Sound patterns and strategies: Loanwords in JudeoSpanish. Doctoral dissertation, Indiana University at Bloomington, 1981. Penny, Ralph. Variation and change in Spanish. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Romero Rey. Issues of Spanish language maintenance in the Prince Islands. In Alejandro Cortazar and Rafael Orozco (eds.), Lenguaje, arte y revoluciones ayer y hoy: New approaches to Hispanic linguistic literary and cultural studies, 162-187. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. —. Spanish in the Bosphorus: A sociolinguistic study on the JudeoSpanish dialect spoken in Istanbul. Istanbul: Libra, 2012.

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—. Palatal east meets velar west: Dialect contact and phonological accommodation in Judeo-Spanish. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 6:2, 2013. Sachar, Howard. Farewell España: The world of the Sephardim remembered. New York: Vintage, 1994. Schilling-Estes, Natalie and Walt Wolfram. Alternative models of dialect death: Dissipation vs. concentration. Language 75-3, 1999. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Varol-Bornes, Marie-Christine. “Influencia del turco en el judeoespañol de Turquía” in Winfried Busse and Marie- Christine Varol-Bornes (eds.) Sephardica: Hommage à Haïm Vidal Sephiha. Berne: Peter Lang, 1996. Wagner, Max Leopold. Beiträge zur Kenntnis des Judenspanischen von Konstantinopel. Vienna: Alfred Hölder, 1914. Weinstock, Nathan and Haïm-Vidal Sephiha. Yiddish and Judeo- Spanish, a European heritage. Brussels: Vanden Broele, 1997. Wexler, Paul. Jewish interlinguistics: Facts and conceptual framework. Language 57:1, 99-149, 1981.

LANGUAGE SHIFT AND SPEAKERS’ ATTITUDES IN SEATTLE LADINO1 MOLLY FITZMORRIS UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON, SEATTLE

1. Introduction The Sephardic Jewish community in Seattle, Washington is unique not only in its relative size, but also in its perceived cohesiveness.2 The community boasts two Sephardic synagogues, various religious and cultural organizations that meet regularly, and a group that convenes weekly to read texts in Ladino and discuss the language. In fact, Seattle is one of the few cities left in the world with a sizeable population of Ladino speakers. The first Sephardim to settle came from territories of the Ottoman Empire, namely the islands of Marmara and Rhodes. Most scholars agree that the first two Sephardic settlers were Solomon Calvo and Jacob Policar of Marmara, who were convinced to move to Seattle in 1902 by their Greek friend who had found work in Seattle.34 Also agreed upon is that Nessim Alhadeff was the first Rhodesli Sephardic immigrant, arriving in 1

This article draws upon previously published work and is republished here with permission. FitzMorris, Mary K., The Last Generation of Native Ladino Speakers? Judeo-Spanish and the Sephardic Community in Seattle (MA Thesis, University of Washington, 2014). 2 Margalit Bejarano and Edna Aizenberg, Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 40n2. 3 Molly Cone, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams, Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State, (Seattle: Washington State Jewish Historical Society, 2003), 60. 4 Lee Moriwaki, “Sephardic Jews To Remember,” Seattle Times, March 28, 1992. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/date=19920328&slug =1483418.

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1904.5 Once there were enough settlers from each geographic region, the community essentially split in two, with those from the Marmara region (Marmara, Tekirdag/Rodosto, Istanbul/Constantinople, and other cities) establishing the Sephardic Bikur Holim Congregation in 1914, and those from Rhodes establishing the Congregation Ezra Bessaroth in 1917.67 These two synagogues today remain more or less divided between the “Turks” and the “Rhodeslis.” Though the Seattle Sephardim are now associated with the neighborhood of Seward Park, where both Sephardic synagogues can presently be found, the Sephardim actually spent the first half of the century living in close proximity to each other in the Central District, and only migrated to Seward Park in the late 1950s and early 1960s; in fact, as the Central District became more and more crowded at the time, Seattle experienced a mini Jewish diaspora during which many Sephardic Jews left the city for the suburbs. Home to the “largest Sephardic community outside of New York before World War I”,8 today, Seattle is generally considered to have the third largest Sephardic community in the United States, behind only New York City and Los Angeles. As children of immigrants, a large percentage of the oldest current generation of the Seattle Sephardim grew up, if not speaking, at least hearing Ladino at home, but they did not teach the language to their own children. Theoretically speaking, Ladino is a dying language, and the oldest current generation is the last generation of native Ladino speakers that Seattle will ever see. This article analyzes interviews and surveys conducted with members of a specific self-selected language interest group within the Seattle Sephardic community for indications of the speakers’ language attitudes and the historical, religious, and cultural significance of Ladino. It also serves to gather linguistic data that help to determine the state of Seattle Ladino today.

5 Joseph M. Papo, Sephardim in Twentieth Century America: In Search of Unity (San Jose, Calif: Pelé Yoetz Books, 1987) 286. Cone, Droker, and Williams, Family of Strangers, 61-62. Albert Adatto, Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community (MA Thesis, University of Washington, 1939), 58. Moriwaki, “Sephardic Jews To Remember.” 6 G.W. Umphrey and Emma Adatto, Linguistic Archaisms of the Seattle Sephardim, Hispania 19, no. 2 (1936): 256. 7 Adatto, Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community, 41-42. 8 Marc Angel, La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982), 158.

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2. The speakers The focus of this study was a small group of about twenty speakers that meets weekly in Seattle’s Central District to read texts in Ladino and reminisce about growing up in the Ladino speech community. Shortly before their presentation at Seattle’s first ever International Ladino Day celebration in December of 2013, this group was nicknamed “Los Ladineros”9 as a tribute to their passion for the maintenance of their language. The age range among the members of this group spans approximately 20 years, from speakers in their mid-90s to some in their mid-70s. The group members come from families with origins in Turkey and on the island of Rhodes. The Ladineros demonstrate various degrees of proficiency in Ladino, from some who can be considered “native” speakers to one speaker who completed the entire interview in English. The individual respondents will be referred to throughout this article by coding that includes their gender and age. For example, F75 would indicate a 75-year-old female speaker.

3. Research questions and methodology Though also relying heavily on oral histories, this study is situated within the field of sociolinguistics. Using the studies of Tracy Harris and Rey Romero as models,10 11 I focus on evidence of the shift from Ladino to English in Seattle and language attitudes among the speakers. Studies on the Seattle variety of Judeo-Spanish are virtually nonexistent; since the 1930s, very little research has been done on the linguistic aspects of Seattle Ladino, and, until now, no sociolinguistic study had ever focused on the oldest current generation of Ladino speakers in Seattle. In this study, I sought to answer two main questions. Firstly, I wanted to investigate the state of Seattle Ladino today, especially the effects of the ongoing language shift. Secondly, I wanted to explore language attitudes and to study the speakers’ perceptions regarding the language shift. More specifically, I aimed to examine the extent to which Seattle Ladino has undergone language shift using evidence from Ladino speech and to look 9 As of June 2015, “Ladineros” continues to gain recognition among Seattleites who are familiar with the Sephardic community as a reference to this particular group of speakers. 10 Tracy K. Harris, Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994). 11 Rey Romero, Spanish in the Bosphorus: A Sociolinguistic Study on the JudeoSpanish Dialect Spoken in Istanbul (Istanbul: Libra, 2012).

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at language attitudes among the Ladineros in order to study these speakers’ perceptions regarding the language shift. I used sociolinguistic interviews to obtain the majority of my data, but I chose to complement the language attitudes data from the interviews with more quantitative data from a survey using Likert items. Including six months of informal participant observation, the research for this study took place from May 2013 to February 2014. I conducted eight interviews in late 2013 and early 2014 with members of the Ladineros. Five women and six men were interviewed, ranging from 93 to 76 years of age.12 Nine of the informants were born in Seattle, one was born on the island of Rhodes, which was an Italian territory at the time, and one was born in the city of Elisabethville (now Lubumbashi) in what was then the Belgian Congo. Three of the respondents’ families had Rhodesli origins, and the other eight had origins in Turkey, most commonly in Istanbul, Marmara, or Tekirdag. Six of these eleven respondents said that Ladino was their first language. The interview questionnaire consisted of 54 questions in Ladino with the following main topics or modules: Informasion basika, La chikez, La famiya, and La lingua djudeoespanyola i la komunidad sefaradi.13 14 The interviews ranged in length from 40 to 80 minutes. The survey portion of the study was administered to ten members of the Ladineros during one of their weekly Tuesday meetings in early 2014. Eight men and two women were surveyed, ranging in age from 93 to 74. Six of the survey respondents were also interviewed. The survey was written in English and consisted of nineteen statements; the respondents were asked to indicate their agreement or disagreement with each statement.15 The speakers were given five Likert items from which to choose a response to each statement, with 1 representing “strongly disagree” and 5 representing “strongly agree.” The prompts can be separated into four general categories: Six were about the speakers’ communicative competence in Ladino and their linguistic security, seven 12

Three interviews were conducted with single Ladino speakers, three with Ladino-speaking married couples, and two with Sephardic-Ashkenazi couples. Not including the Ashkenazi spouses (who did not and do not speak Ladino or identify as members of the Seattle Ladino speech community), the total number of Ladinospeaking informants is 11. 13 See Appendix A. 14 In English, these modules were called “Basic information and parents,” “Childhood,” “Family,” and “Judeo-Spanish language and the Sephardic community.” 15 See Appendix B.

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were looking for evaluative judgments or the speakers’ ideas about their identity, three were in relation to the speakers’ opinions about the status of Ladino today, and three were about the speakers’ group membership in the Ladineros and the wider Ladino speech community.

4. Results and findings The key results and findings of this study can be divided into two major parts: Structural changes and language attitudes. Structural changes are essentially grammatical aspects of the language that have changed as a result of the ongoing language shift. Although I will briefly discuss some of the most interesting examples of language mixing from my study of Seattle Ladino, the focus will be on two less commonly studied grammatical forms: Gender marking and Rhodesli vowel raising. Below I will also discuss language attitudes, or the speakers’ opinions, perceptions, and evaluations regarding Ladino. The speakers demonstrated linguistic insecurity and reported common ideas regarding the current state and the future of the language.

4.1 Structural changes Perhaps the most prominent structural change evident in the speech of the Ladineros was language mixing. I found many instances of code-shifting, in which the speakers switched from Ladino to English (or sometimes another language) because they felt more comfortable in that second language, but very few instances of code-switching in which the speakers switched seamlessly back-and-forth between Ladino and another language for stylistic purposes. As previously mentioned, the interviews were intended to be conducted in Ladino, and though I made it clear before each interview that Ladino speech would be most useful for my study, I invited respondents to speak English if necessary. The amount of language mixing varied from speaker to speaker, but all of the speakers used some English during their interviews. Carmen Silva-Corvalán refers to “code-shifting” as “a situation in which the bilingual speaker employs his or her less frequently used language in order to adapt or respond to the language preference of the listener,” but switches to his or her primary language out of necessity.16 In 16

Carmen Silva-Corvalán, “Code-shifting patterns in Chicano Spanish,” In Amastae, Jon and Lucía Elías-Olivares (Ed.), Spanish in the U.S. setting: Beyond the Southwest (Rosslyn, VA: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 1983), 73.

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my interviews, many of the speakers who were admittedly or apparently uncomfortable speaking in Ladino continued to speak the language as much as possible because I, the interviewer, had asked them to but were forced to switch to English from time to time. Ana Celia Zentella refers to this as “crutching.”17 Though this code-shifting typically consisted of switches to English as a means of crutching, the most unique and fascinating example of codeshifting from these interviews was provided by speaker F76 in the following response to a question about her date and place of birth: “Yo nasi en un pais de Afrika, Elisabethville, la…city…sivdad, Élisabethville, Belgian Congo, Congo Belge. En français, c’est Congo Belge. Et je suis née à Élisabethville, mil neuf cents trente-sept, nineteen thirty-seven, juillet dix-huit, July eighteenth.”18 As noted here, this speaker was born in the Belgian Congo, and though there were many Sephardic Jews in the community who spoke Ladino, the majority language at the time was French. Though F76 considers herself to be more proficient in Ladino than French, these switches may actually suggest that speaker F76 feels more comfortable speaking French than Ladino. Though speaker F76 was aware that I understood both French and Ladino, she seems to utilize repetition in English here as a means of clarifying her speech; perhaps she is selfconscious about her proficiency not only in Ladino, but also in French. Harris noted this type of repetitive code-shifting among many of her informants, in sentences like “Entonses mi kunyado avlo kon su lawyer, kon el avokato suyo.”19 20 Though I noticed other examples of repetition in English in apparent attempts to clarify or confirm Ladino phrases, trilingual speech like that of speaker F76 was not observed in any of the other respondents. Instead, the most common instances of code-shifting were observed in numbers, proper nouns, and transition and filler words. Much less commonly observed was the code-switching that is so often the focus of sociolinguistic study, which is “a way of speaking that alternates borrowings, single words, and larger stretches of speech in both 17

Ana Celia Zentella, “Spanish and English in Contact in the United States: The Puerto Rican Experience,” Word: Journal of the International Linguistic Association 33 (1982): 49. 18 Here I will mark the switches between English, French, and Ladino in this excerpt: “I was born in a country in Africa, Elisabethville, the city…city …Elisabethville, Belgian Congo, Belgian Congo. In French it’s ‘Congo Belge’. And I was born in Elisabethville, nineteen thirty-seven, nineteen thirty-seven, July eighteenth, July eighteenth. 19 Harris, Death of a Language, 187. 20 “So my son in law spoke with his lawyer, with his lawyer.”

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languages to achieve varied discourse purposes.”21 In contrast to codeshifting, which, as discussed above, is the usage of one language to fill gaps in another language, code-switching is typically seamless or unmarked and is considered to demonstrate proficiency in both languages, since “the integrity of both languages” must be maintained while switching.22 The best example of code-switching that I observed employed by a proficient native speaker of both Ladino and English can be seen in this response of speaker F84 to a question about the most common foods of her childhood: Oh, komidas, my mother was a great cook. Agora, antes teniamos de lenya i kimur estovas and gizavan las komidas kon savor i de alma i korason, you know? And kada viernes, well, first of all, on Thursdays, they would go shopping, and no avia automobil. Era todo kon shopping bags.23

Here F84 uses English words that she has demonstrated that she knows in Ladino, so it is not likely crutching. The speech also progresses very fluently, without the pauses or hesitations between the switches that I noted among the other speakers. Speaker F84’s proficiency in Ladino suggests complete acquisition as a child, and her linguistic history, as recounted during her interview, supports this. Speaker F84 said that she did not learn English until she started school, and reported that she spoke English with an accent at first. Both of these facts indicate that F84’s first language was, in fact, Ladino. It is common for Judeo-Spanish speech to feature hypermarkedness in terms of gender, meaning words that do not clearly indicate gender, typically those that end in -e, are given -o or -a endings according to their grammatical gender. This was a common phenomenon in the speech of the Ladineros, seen in words like intereso, interesanto, and arabo, among others.24 A fascinating and possibly related tendency among the Ladineros was a hypersensitivity to gender in words that describe people. For example, when asked if he had “ermanos,” a word that I adapted from the

21

Zentella, “Spanish and English Contact,” 49. Ibid. 23 Here I will distinguish between English and Ladino: “Oh, foods, my mother was a great cook. Now, then we had wood stoves and they cooked the foods with flavor and with heart and soul, you know? And every Friday, well, first of all, on Thursdays, they would go shopping, and there weren’t cars. It was all with shopping bags.” 24 These words, “interest,” “interesting,” and “Arab,” would be realized as “interés,” “interesante,” and “árabe” in standard Castilian. 22

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Spanish hermanos and intended to mean “siblings” in a gender-neutral way, speaker M93 responded confusedly: MKF: Tienes ermanos? M93: No. [pause] Oh, tengo una ermana. In his response, M93 stressed the word ermana as if contrasting it with ermanos, something that I found puzzling at the time, but did not look further into right away. I encountered similar confusion among the speakers when asking the questions, Kienes eran tus padres? and Kual es el pais natal de tus padres?25 Many of the speakers first responded by only giving information about their fathers and did not realize that I was meaning to ask about both parents until I said so. When I asked speaker F84 who her padres were, she admitted confusion, and after I repeated the question once in Ladino and once in English, she said, “Oh, parents. Me parese ke dizites ‘padre’.”26 When I later mentioned to speaker F84 that I was having problems with this question and asked if that might be due to the wording, she informed me that I should instead use the form tu padre i tu madre rather than tus padres. Based on my observations, it seems that, at least for the Ladineros, the masculine forms of nouns do not also carry a gender-neutral meaning when used in the plural form, as they do in Castilian Spanish. I would posit that many Seattle Ladino speakers outside of the Ladineros also demonstrate this hypersensitivity to gender, which would prove a fascinating topic of future study that could potentially shed more light on the development of Ladino from Medieval Spanish. I do not know if this hypersensitivity to gender exists in other dialects of Ladino, but I know that the grammatically gender-neutral word djenitores, though not used by any of my informants during this study, is often used by Ladino speakers to mean “parents.” Also of particular interest from the interview data were various instances of Rhodesli vowel raising. This phenomenon is especially remarkable because it constitutes one of the few remnants of the dialectal differences in a language in the advanced stages of shift. As previously mentioned, three of the interview respondents had parents from Rhodes.27 Despite varying levels of proficiency in Ladino, both self-identified by the speakers and observed by me during the interviews, each of the three speakers demonstrated the vowel raising that is characteristic to Rhodesli 25

Who were your parents? What is your parents’ country of birth? “Oh, parents. I [thought] you said ‘father’.” 27 One informant, speaker F82, noted that her father was actually originally from Turkey but immigrated to Rhodes as a young adult. 26

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speech. According to Hualde and Saul, Ladino has the same 5-vowel inventory as Castilian Spanish.28 Ladino speakers of Rhodesli origins in Seattle tend to raise the vowels /o/ to [u] and /e/ to [i] in unstressed syllables. This means that a word like Ladino, which would typically be pronounced [la‫ޖ‬dino] might be realized by a Rhodesli speaker as [la‫ޖ‬dinu].29 Though I have not yet found this particular linguistic phenomenon described in a previous study, the Ladineros are very aware of this vowel raising and recognize it as an important distinction between the two major subdialects of Seattle Ladino. The raising of the unstressed final /o/ appears to be the most common context in which the vowel is raised by these speakers, which speaker M77 demonstrated when asking me, “Of course, you’ve been in class when we’ve gotten involved with the o’s and the u’s, haven’t you?” Here, M77 is talking about the debates that sometimes break out among the Ladineros as to the “correct” pronunciation of the unstressed final /o/ of words. Going into the interviews, I expected to see a certain amount of Rhodesli vowel raising, but I expected it to be relatively marked and variable, possibly as an attempt by these speakers to assert their Rhodesli heritage linguistically. In the case of all three of the “Rhodesli” speakers, however, I observed unmarked and fairly consistent vowel raising for both /e/ and /o/. I also suspected that the speakers might unintentionally break the linguistic rule regarding vowel raising, and perhaps raise a stressed vowel, but I did not observe this in any of the three. In fact, I saw many words, particularly gerunds, which end in –do, being realized with the final vowel pronounced as [u]. I also noticed the final vowel, /o/, in the word anyos being regularly raised. One of the speakers, F76, also raised the /e/ in the words kinze and venir, and the /o/ in sinko, and speaker M77 demonstrated vowel raising in the first syllable of the word doktor. Further study of this vowel raising, and of other distinctions between Seattle’s two subdialects of Ladino, is necessary not only in order to better understand the effects of the Ladino-to-English language shift but also to more completely appreciate the most salient characteristics of the language as it is spoken in Seattle today.

28

José Ignacio Hualde and Mahir Saul. “Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41, no. 1 (2011): 102-103. 29 Alternatively, these words may be realized as [la‫ޖ‬ðino] and [la‫ޖ‬ðinu].

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4.2 Language attitudes Language attitudes constitute the second part of my results and findings. Though most of the survey prompts, especially those regarding linguistic security and communicative competence, elicited a relatively wide array of responses, some of the results suggested fascinating attitudes (whether shared or not) among the Ladineros. Arguing in favor of more aggressive revitalization attempts, Romero says, “Perhaps the single most important motivation for the maintenance of Judeo-Spanish is its subsequent association with Sephardic Jewish identity.”30 Unsurprisingly, in the survey, the Ladineros confirmed strong ties between Ladino and both Sephardic identity and their individual identities. I also noticed trends in the speakers’ responses to the questions in the fourth module of the interview, “Judeo-Spanish language and the Sephardic community,” especially in relation to the state of Ladino today and prognoses for its future. One surprising result from the survey data is a possible ambivalence among the speakers. For the statement “It is important to standardize Ladino by eliminating borrowed vocabulary and spelling variation so that all speakers can understand each other,” the respondents indicated the following opinions: Strongly disagree: 3 speakers Disagree: 1 speaker Neither agree nor disagree: 2 speakers Agree: 1 speaker Strongly agree: 2 speakers31 This very wide range of responses may suggest that the respondents are torn between facilitating understanding among the few remaining Ladino speakers around the world and maintaining the linguistic elements that represent the history of the Sephardic Jews.32 30

Romero, Spanish in the Bosphorus, 42. One speaker did not provide a response to this prompt. 32 It is also possible, however, that the speakers were unsure as to what was meant by “borrowed vocabulary or “spelling variation.” Since the survey only offered statements and a limited choice of responses, the speakers were not given any indication as to whether “borrowed vocabulary” meant, for example, Turkish words, French words, English words, or something else entirely. In future studies, it will be important to clarify all academic language before asking speakers for responses. 31

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The speakers also indicated fascinating opinions in their responses to the statement, “Ladino is a dying language.” Five speakers responded neutrally to the prompt, two agreed, and three strongly agreed. What is notable here is the high number of neutral responses. Though it is possible that the speakers did not understand the terminology in this statement, or that they thought that the expression “dying language” was too strong, it is clear that these speakers have witnessed the decline in usage of Ladino firsthand. As advocates of the preservation of the language and active members of Seattle’s Sephardic community, the Ladineros are almost certainly aware of scholars’ evaluations of Ladino as moribund. In fact, many of the speakers actually used the words “dying” or “dead” during their interviews when asked about the future of the language. Knowing, then, that these speakers are aware of the prognosis for Ladino, responding that they neither agree nor disagree that it is dying could suggest a form of resistance. It could be that the respondents understand that the language is dying, but by choosing not to agree with the statement, they are suggesting that they maintain hope for its revival. Another statement from the survey that elicited very surprising responses was “I can read and understand Ladino well.” This particular prompt was meant to measure the speakers’ linguistic security rather than their actual abilities, especially since I am somewhat familiar with each of the ten respondents’ communicative competence and reading comprehension abilities in Ladino. Two respondents indicated agreement with the statement and one respondent wrote in a “4 ½,” indicating a response halfway between “agree” and “strongly agree.” The other seven respondents responded neutrally. This data is very telling because basic reading and comprehension skills are necessary for active participation in the weekly Ladinero meetings, and all but one of these respondents are regular active participants. The large amount of neutral responses is quite possibly due to the inclusion of the word “well” in the statement, since the Ladineros reported generally low linguistic security. Linguistic security is essentially how comfortable or confident a speaker feels about his or her speech. Linguistic insecurity, which may or may not correspond with the speaker’s actual communicative competence, constitutes a negative language attitude. Indications of linguistic insecurity can be found in the metalinguistic commentary, or feedback and evaluations regarding their own language use, of every one of the interview respondents. Speaker M93 is arguably one of the most proficient and confident speakers of the group, and yet, after completing virtually the entire interview in fluent Ladino, he opted to preface his opinion about why Ladino is disappearing by saying, “Maybe I can explain it too, but I’ll

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have to do it in English. I think I’m a little more fluent in English than I am in Ladino, ‘cause I speak English more.” Speaker M83, who is, in fact, the leader of the Ladinero group, gave his first few interview responses in fluent Ladino, but then commented, “Kreo ke fuera mas bueno si avlava inglez.”33 Speaker F84, who was introduced earlier as perhaps the only proficient code-switcher among the Ladineros, demonstrated a low linguistic security that clearly did not correspond with her communicative competence, which was, in fact, very high. Toward the beginning of the interview, she seemed to apologize for what she thought was inadequate speech, telling me, “It may not sound like my Ladino is so good now, but it takes me a while to get started,” and then later commented that Ladino is “not a living language like when I grew up, and, unfortunately I don’t speak it all that well.” F84 offered remarkable insight into her linguistic insecurity, however, when she told me, “The last time I was in Israel, I went to the synagogue and [a] man asked, ‘Is that your mother tongue?’ because I was conversing with the members there and he overheard me, and I said, ‘No, I’m American.’” It is fascinating that F84 believes that because she is American, Ladino cannot possibly be her first language, especially in light of her answer to my interview question about her first language, to which she replied that she only spoke Ladino at home, and that, when she first went to school as a child, she spoke English “with an accent.” This response makes it very clear that Ladino was, in fact, her “mother tongue,” and what she interprets as a proficiency gap due to “Americanness” is most likely the loss of a minority language as a result of relative disuse. This idea of “Americanization” or assimilation came up in many of the interviews. In fact, many of the speakers reported pressure to assimilate to American culture, a pressure that discouraged the use of Ladino, when the speakers were children. Two speakers actually reported this pressure as coming directly from their own fathers. Speaker M77 said, though his mother was strict Orthodox, his father used to say, “When in America, do as the Americans do.” Speaker F84 reported a similar experience, saying, “Mi padre dezia, ‘Estamos en la Amerika; devemos de avlar en inglez. No se kere esto ladino. Olvidatelo.”34 F84 also actually used the term “Americanized,” observing, “People aren’t living that way anymore. We’re Americanized now.” Regarding the tendency of younger Sephardim to not learn Ladino, speaker F76 also alluded to this idea of assimilation, saying that her children are members of “a different generation.” F76 also 33

“I think it would be better if I spoke English.” “My father used to say, ‘We’re in America; we should speak English. [They/we] don’t want this Ladino. Forget it.’”

34

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mentioned the pressure from the public school system, reporting, “My parents spoke to [my children] in Ladino, and they understood. Once in a while, some words would come out, and then they went to public school, and that was the killer. You know, ‘speak English.’” Speaker M93 offered a similar but unique explanation for why the language is being lost in Seattle: It seems to me that where the Jewish people have a lot of freedom and are able to do what they like without fear of being oppressed, they tend to assimilate more and absorb more of the surrounding customs and languages and things. However, if they are threatened and oppressed, they gather together and retain what background they’ve got, and they preserve that way. And this has been the case of the Ladino language. They hadn’t been fully assimilated in the countries where they were. However, here in America, it’s much freer. We’re losing it because of that.

Ironically, according to M93, the Jews came to the United States to seek freedom, but they lost their language, and a piece of their culture, in so doing. The speakers’ opinions regarding the future of Seattle Ladino were also fascinating; many of the Ladineros showed optimism, making reference to what I will call Seattle’s ongoing “micro-revival.” Speaker F82, for example, said, Unfortunately, and I will emphasize that, we’re seniors, and, after us, you know, my daughters do not… I don’t think they really care that much, because things change, you know? And I think it’s really too bad. It can be a rich language with lots of good sayings and good customs, and I would hate to see it die, and that’s why I’m so happy that at the University of Washington they are reviving it, or trying to carry it on and continue the language.

Here, F82 uses the word “die,” recognizing that Ladino is in danger of language death, and yet she seemingly demonstrates feelings of optimism in using the language “I would hate to see it die” instead of suggesting that its death is imminent, and also in saying that the University of Washington is “reviving” the language. F76 also made a reference to the micro-revival, saying, Yo esto rogando al Dio ke la lingua va…35 regenerate. Pero,36 realistically, right now we’re riding a wave, and we’re getting some attention. It’s the 35 36

“I am praying to God that the language is going to…” Here, speaker F76 uses the standard Spanish word for “but.”

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generation, your generation, if they take an interest in it, it still will be alive, but what’s [going to happen with] the generation after that?

F76 recognizes that Ladino is being acknowledged and celebrated in Seattle now, but she wonders whether the generation after this current generation of Ladino activists will continue to contribute to the preservation of the language. Clearly both of these women are optimistic about the short-term survival of Ladino, but they wonder what will happen if and when this micro-revival loses steam. Speaker F84 also referenced the micro-revival, predicting that the language will never again be used as a daily means of conversation, but proposing that the language could be used in an academic context: “But that part’s not going to happen, as far as the [language being used for] conversation. It will be in the class and the programs that we put forth, but it may take a whole lot more. I don’t know.” Like the other two women, F84 is optimistic, but unsure about the future of the language. Like speaker F84, some of the men predicted domains in which Ladino could be used in the future. M82 said that his “generation is the last one” that speaks the language, indicating great feelings of guilt that the language is “not [being] kept alive.” He predicted a grim future for the language, suggesting, “It’s going to be a language, like a lot of languages, that’s only going to be for academicians. That’s it. And that’s sad.” In contrast to F84, who predicted that the use of the language in the classroom could help to preserve the language, M82 suggests that the language will be restricted to use in the academic sphere, and equates use of the language being limited to this domain with language death. Speaker M83 also made reference to his generation as the last generation of speakers, also suggesting that the language would die, but he predicted that Ladino will live on in the synagogue: “Aki in Seattle no se van a olvidar el ladino kompletamente,”37 he said, showing me multiple prayer books with verses in Ladino. After reading some of the prayers and explaining when, why, and how they are said, he concluded, “So this will never go away. It will always be carried on, even by people that don’t speak Ladino or understand what they’re saying.” M83 seemingly recognizes that use in the synagogue does not mean that people will speak the language in any other domain, but he clearly sees the religious domain as a means of preservation of this language. Speaker M85 made a much more optimistic prediction about Ladino, emphasizing the importance of the Ladineros to the future of the language: “We have to preserve [it], and that’s what this group is doing.” 37

“Here in Seattle, they are not going to completely forget Ladino.”

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These predictions beg the question as to which of them, if any, will come true. Will the language be carried on only at the university, or perhaps in the synagogue? Or, is there a real possibility of preservation, and perhaps even revitalization? Will we ever see a new generation of native Ladino speakers in Seattle? These, of course, are questions that cannot yet be answered.

5. Conclusion This paper focused on “Los Ladineros,” a self-selected group of Ladino speakers within the Seattle Sephardic Jewish community. Using data from sociolinguistic interviews, I was able to find specific structural changes in Seattle Ladino that demonstrate that the language is, in fact, in the advanced stages of a language shift. Most commonly observed were various types of language mixing, especially switching between English and Ladino. Of particular interest, however, were the less commonly discussed patterns of gender marking and the remnants of the vowel raising that is characteristic to speakers from Rhodes. In the same interviews, and in a subsequent written survey, the speakers also demonstrated trends in their language attitudes, often in the form of a discrepancy between linguistic security, or, essentially, perceived competence, and actual demonstrated competence. Many of the speakers were very linguistically insecure about their Ladino speech, even though they completed the majority of the interview in that language. The Ladineros also discussed different possibilities for the future of the language, alluding to an ongoing “micro-revival” in Seattle, while also wondering about the feasibility of preservation and revitalization. In 1939, Albert Adatto grimly predicted, “It seems that within a generation or two the majority of the American-born Sephardim will not understand or speak Spanish.”38 Though this prediction seems, on the surface at least, to be accurate, it is critical to remember that Seattle Ladino is not dead, and there is still time to save it. Seattle is home to one of the largest libraries of Ladino texts in the country and one of the only American universities that offers Judeo-Spanish courses.39 Of equal importance is the University of Washington’s Sephardic Studies program, which continues to build strong ties to the local Sephardic community. Although it is clear that Seattle Ladino is undergoing language shift, continued documentation and further research on the language are 38

Adatto, Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community, 34. During the 2013-2014 academic year visiting Professor David Bunis taught an introductory Ladino course in which students learned to write in Rashi characters. 39

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absolutely critical at this time, especially since the future of the language remains uncertain.

References Adatto, Albert. Sephardim and the Seattle Sephardic Community. MA Thesis, University of Washington, 1939. Angel, Marc. La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982. Bejarano, Margalit and Edna Aizenberg. Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012. Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History. New York: New York University Press, 2009. Cone, Molly, Howard Droker, and Jacqueline Williams. Family of Strangers: Building a Jewish Community in Washington State. Seattle: Washington State Jewish Historical Society, 2003. FitzMorris, Mary K. The Last Generation of Native Ladino Speakers? Judeo-Spanish and the Sephardic Community in Seattle. MA Thesis, University of Washington, 2014. Harris, Tracy K. Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994. Hualde, José Ignacio, and Mahir Saul. “Istanbul Judeo-Spanish.” Journal of the International Phonetic Association 41, no. 1 (2011): 89-110. Montrul, Silvina. El Bilingüismo en el Mundo Hispanohablante. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013. Moriwaki, Lee. “Sephardic Jews To Remember.” Seattle Times. March 28, 1992. Papo, Joseph M. Sephardim in Twentieth Century America: In Search of Unity. San Jose, Calif: Pelé Yoetz Books, 1987. Romero, Rey. Spanish in the Bosphorus: A Sociolinguistic Study on the Judeo-Spanish Dialect Spoken in Istanbul. Istanbul: Libra, 2012. Silva-Corvalán, Carmen. (1983). “Code-shifting patterns in Chicano Spanish.” In Amastae, Jon and Lucía Elías-Olivares (Ed.). Spanish in the U.S. setting: Beyond the Southwest. Rosslyn, VA: National Clearinghouse for Bilingual Education, 1983. Umphrey, G. W., & Emma Adatto. Linguistic Archaisms of the Seattle Sephardim. Hispania 19, no. 2 (1936): 255-264. Zentella, Ana Celia. “Spanish and English in Contact in the United States: The Puerto Rican Experience.” Word: Journal of the International Linguistic Association 33 (1982): 41-57.

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Appendix A: Interview Basic information and parents 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

What is your name? Where and when were you born? Who were your parents? What is your parents’ country of origin? Have you been to your parents’ country of origin? When? How was it? 6. What languages did your parents speak and how well? 7. When did your family arrive in Seattle? 8. Why did your family come to Seattle? 9. What did your parents do when they arrived in Seattle? 10. Did your parents already have family or friends in Seattle when they arrived? Childhood 11. What is your native language? 12. In what language did your parents speak to you when you were a child? In what language did you speak to your parents? 13. How did you learn Judeo-Spanish? 14. What other languages do you speak and how well? 15. Do you have siblings? Who are they? Do they still live in Seattle? 16. Where did you grow up? 17. Who were your neighbors? 18. Who was your best friend when you were a child? 19. What is your favorite memory from your childhood? 20. What was your favorite holiday when you were a child? 21. What was the neighborhood where you grew up called? Were there many Sephardic Jews there? 22. What other cultural or ethnic groups lived in this neighborhood? 23. Was there racism between the different groups in this part of the city? Was there anti-Semitism? 24. Were there divisions within the Sephardic community? 25. How was the relationship between the Sephardic Jews and the Ashkenazi Jews? Was there a lot of Ashkenazi influence in your life? In the Sephardic religion?

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26. Which synagogue did your family attend when you were a child? Was the service conducted in Judeo-Spanish? In Hebrew? 27. Which school(s) did you attend as a child? Where was the school? Is it still there? 28. Was it a Jewish school? Was it a religious school? 29. Was Judeo-Spanish spoken in your school? 30. Did you learn Hebrew in your school? 31. Did you attend a Talmud Torah after school? 32. Were you a member of a Jewish youth group? 33. Did you listen to Judeo-Spanish music when you were a child? Do you listen to it now? 34. Did you read Judeo-Spanish literature when you were a child? Do you read it now? 35. Did your parents (or you) read any Judeo-Spanish periodicals? Which one? 36. Which foods were common for you as a child? What was your favorite food? 37. Did you keep kosher? 38. Do you remember any Judeo-Spanish proverbs that your parents used to say? Family 39. Who is/was your spouse? Where is he/she from? What did he/she do for a living? 40. How did you and your spouse meet? 41. Does your spouse speak/understand Judeo-Spanish? 42. Do you have children? Who are they? Do they still live in Seattle? What do they do? 43. Do your children speak/understand Judeo-Spanish? 44. In what language do you speak to your children? Judeo-Spanish language and the Sephardic community 45. What other names do you know for the language that we are currently speaking? 46. In your opinion, are we speaking Spanish right now? Are we speaking a dialect of Spanish? 47. Do you speak standard Modern Spanish?

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48. How would you describe your heritage? Do you consider yourself a person with Spanish heritage? 49. Have you traveled to Spain? Have you traveled to any other Spanish-speaking country? Did you speak Spanish? Did the people understand you? 50. Have you had any interactions with the Spanish-speaking community in Seattle? Have you spoken Spanish with American Spanish-speakers? Did they understand you? 51. When and why did you decide to practice Judeo-Spanish with the “Ladinero” group? 52. What does “Sephardic” mean? 53. In your opinion, what unites the Sephardic community? What are the most important aspects of Sephardic identity? Religion? Language? 54. What do you think about the future of the Judeo-Spanish language?

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Appendix B: Survey Please indicate your opinion regarding each of the following statements. I am a native Ladino speaker. 1 2 strongly disagree

3

4

5 strongly agree

I am bilingual (or multilingual). 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

I can communicate effectively in Ladino. 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

I can read and understand Ladino well. 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

I speak Ladino as well as my parents did. 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

I am proud to speak Ladino. 1 2 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

3

As a child or teenager, I sometimes felt embarrassed to speak Ladino. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree Ladino is an important part of my identity. 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

Ladino is an important part of Sephardic culture. 1 2 3 4 strongly disagree

5 strongly agree

5 strongly agree

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I feel well integrated into a community of Ladino speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree Ladino is a dying language. 1 2 strongly disagree

3

4

5 strongly agree

It is important to pass Ladino on to future generations. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree Ladino is a variety of Spanish. 1 2 strongly disagree

3

Ladino is less important than Castilian Spanish. 1 2 3 strongly disagree

4

5 strongly agree

4

5 strongly agree

I feel comfortable speaking Ladino to Spanish speakers. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree Ladino is a useful language. 1 2 strongly disagree

3

4

5 strongly agree

It is important to standardize Ladino by eliminating borrowed vocabulary and spelling variation so that all speakers can understand each other. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree Practicing Ladino is the most important part of the Ladinero classes. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree

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Socializing and reminiscing are the most important parts of the Ladinero classes. 1 2 3 4 5 strongly disagree strongly agree

THE LADINO DATABASE PROJECT RESULTS AS INSIGHT TO THE CURRENT SITUATION OF JUDEO-SPANISH IN TURKEY KAREN GERSON ùARHON OTTOMAN-TURKISH SEPHARDIC CULTURE RESEARCH CENTER

1. Introduction In the 1970s Judeo-Spanish was a dying language in Turkey. The prestige of the language was extremely low; no one was interested in learning or preserving it; and everyone considered it “not a language but a deformed mixture of languages.” People thought that if they taught their children Judeo-Spanish, then those children would not be able to learn Turkish properly, would have a Jewish accent while speaking it, and consequently would be discriminated against. Judeo-Spanish was considered to be the language of the uneducated, and more so, because of the tendency of the speakers to supply their vocabulary needs with Turkish words. Whenever people started criticizing Judeo-Spanish, they immediately came up with the examples: “el vapor yanasheyo al kyupri” (the boat approached the bridge) and “mozotros no mos karisheyamos en los meseles del hukumet” (we do not get involved in government business) where most of the words are in Turkish. These examples were the basic detrimental force in the decline of the language. People were certainly not proud of speaking a language like Judeo-Spanish; they saw no use in teaching it to their children; and did not encourage them to learn it. Many factors contributed to this state of affairs in the 50 years that the Jewish community progressed from a mostly non-Turkish speaking community to a mostly non-Judeo-Spanish speaking community. I will very shortly summarize these factors, which dominated the Jewish social life starting in the 1920s. Firstly, the full effects of the Alliance Israelite Universelle schools were felt in the 1920s. The Alliance schools created a generation of native speakers of French, for whom French was the symbol of civilization and

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intellectualism. This generation was the offspring of parents who took great care in teaching their children French, the lingua franca of the time, from the moment they were born. This was also the generation that preferred to communicate in French amongst themselves and read nothing but French books, magazines and newspapers. Judeo-Spanish was the language of the uneducated and also of religion, which was also considered to be an obstacle in the way to modernism, intellectualism and civilization. Secondly, with the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the Turkification of Jewish subjects began, when the Jewish community refused to acquire special rights at the Lausanne Treaty and accepted full Turkish citizenship. In the matter of the language of education, the Jewish community was given the choice of having a “Jewish” language as the medium of education in their schools. This meant that they could use either Hebrew or Judeo-Spanish. At the time, however, Hebrew was the sacred language used only in religious environments and not used for everyday communication. Judeo-Spanish had never been used as the language of academic instruction. The community tried for French but they were refused because French was not considered a “Jewish language.” That is why the community finally opted for education in Turkish. Furthermore, the “Vatandaú Türkçe konuú”, or “Citizens speak Turkish” policies in the 1930s to 1940s put a lot of pressure on the Jews to speak Turkish in public places. There were also social pressures to get the Jews to speak Turkish properly, without a Jewish accent. It was time for Jews to learn Turkish after 500 years of inhabiting the land. One very important factor in the decline of Judeo-Spanish is the fact that the written treasury in Judeo-Spanish was lost with the introduction of Latin characters with the Alphabet Reform that Kemal Ataturk instigated in 1928. Until that date, Ottomans used the old Ottoman alphabet and Jews used the Rashi characters for publications and Solitreo characters for personal written communications. Figure 4.1 shows the monthly section of El Amaneser that teaches both the Rashi and Solitreo scripts. With the alphabet reform in 1928 aimed at increasing the rate of literacy, the whole country (the new Turkish Republic was founded in 1923) learned the much easier Latin script. After a couple of generations, very few people were left who could read texts in the old scripts. The Jewish community, educated in the Latin alphabet, was cut off from the old Judeo-Spanish publications with the result that by the 1970s, people were not even aware that a whole mass of published material existed in that language. The only remaining newspaper in Judeo-Spanish, the ùalom newspaper, which was founded in 1947, was not read extensively, and it

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was written in Latin charracters. Nobody, except forr a few religiious men, could read tthe Rashi alphhabet any more. Most peopple did not ev ven know that Judeo-S Spanish used to t be written with w the Rashii alphabet.

Figure 4.1 Raashi and Solitreo in El Amanesser

This was the situationn in the 1970 0s, and everyoone including g eminent academicianns like Tracyy Harris claim med that Juddeo-Spanish would w be “dead” in att most 10 - 155 years. In thee 1980s, howeever, certain social s and economic faactors created a new hope for f the future of Judeo-Spanish. The law that lim mited Turks too travelling ab broad only onnce every 3 years y was abolished annd people staarted travellin ng extensivelyy and frequen ntly. This enabled the Jews to realize that even a smatteringg knowledge of o JudeoSpanish wass useful for coommunicating g in all countrries where Spaanish was spoken. Durring those yeaars also, many y linguists, hisstorians, musicologists, ethnomusicoologists, sociolinguists and sociologistts came to Turkey T to research thee phenomenonn of the surviv val of Judeo-S Spanish for 500 years. This of couurse, producedd the halo efffect that soccial scientists are very much awaree of. The fact that prestigio ous academiciians were inteerested in what they haad been deniggrating for som me time, awakkened people’ss interest. Another facctor was the preparations fo or the quincenntennial anniv versary of the arrival oof Sephardic Jews in the Ottoman Em mpire in 1992, and the establishmennt of the Quincentennial Foundation. F A Again, at the beginning b of the 19900s, the openinng of the Cerv vantes Instituute in Istanbu ul and the

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great interest its directors showed in the Sephardic heritage made people realize the value of what they were about to lose forever. Today, the last generation of people that speak Judeo-Spanish as a native language was born between1940 and 1945, at the latest. For the generations born after 1945, Judeo-Spanish is at best a second language. However, the generation born between 1945 and 1965 learned JudeoSpanish by hearing their native parents speak. Those born after 1965 learned the language if they had grandparents who spoke it. For the last 40 years, Turkish has completely dominated the Jewish home in Turkey, and Turkish is the language of communication now. When the last person born in 1945 passes away, the last native speaker of Judeo-Spanish will have been lost. A review of my research among the young generations of the Jewish community in Turkey will further illuminate the present situation.1 The last generation of native speakers of Judeo-Spanish today was born before 1945. The youngest of these are in the age range of 61-70. When they are gone, there will be no native speakers left. The subjects of my research were the younger generations born after the 1980s. Their parents have learned Judeo-Spanish from their parents but not as their first language. Turkish is the parents’ native language and also the language of communication amongst themselves and with their children. Transmission of Judeo-Spanish to the next generations through natural means stops at this generation, the oldest of whom are between the age range of 61-65. We can, therefore, assume the cut-off to have occurred in the years 19451950. As to the subjects themselves, the following trends can be noted: 1. Their interest in Judeo-Spanish starts in the early 20s, when they are more mature and culture conscious. 2. They are aware that they cannot learn Judeo-Spanish in the family and they find their parents guilty of not continuing the tradition. 3. They would really like to learn Judeo-Spanish, but admit that the current life-style of Jewish families does not provide them with a good learning environment. In the past, when people lived in big families, learning Judeo-Spanish was automatic and easy. Today, with no grandparents around, learning is difficult.

1.

ùarhon, Karen; The period when an awareness and interest in Judeo-Spanish starts among the Turkish Jewry: reasons and analysis; conference paper presented at World Jewish Congress, Jerusalem; 2005

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4. They are conscious of the fact that in order to learn Judeo-Spanish they will have to spend time and money; and not many of them are willing or able to do that in today’s world, where everything is evaluated according to its functionality and financial rewards. 5. They would like to learn modern Spanish because it is the second mostspoken language in the world nowadays; it has functional and economical value. They deem it to be better to spend their limited time and money on a world language from which they feel they can make the transition to Judeo-Spanish easily and thus “kill two birds with one stone.” 6. If there were Judeo-Spanish courses, not many would attend because of time, work and school limitations and responsibilities. Therefore, it would be best to think of some other kind of activities during their socializing time slots by which to teach Judeo-Spanish. These could be activities like singing, acting or entertaining lessons. This being the current situation in Turkey, it soon became obvious that all native speakers of Judeo-Spanish would soon disappear and that it was paramount to at least try to document the spoken language while they were still around. So, in the years 2008-2010, the Sephardic Center of Istanbul conducted a documentation project on Judeo-Spanish called the “Ladino Database Project.” The aim of the project was to document as much of the spoken Judeo-Spanish as possible in order to create an archive of the contemporary spoken language for future reference. To do this, 69 native speakers and speakers with native-speaker fluency in Judeo-Spanish from Istanbul and 12 speakers from Izmir were interviewed with digital tape recorders. Our Center now has approximately 80 hours of spoken Judeo-Spanish recorded in digital form together with their mot-à-mot transcriptions. This impressive data corpus is to serve as research material for researchers and investigators of Judeo-Spanish. An analysis of this corpus would shed light on the current situation of JudeoSpanish in Turkey. The interviewees belong to the last generation of native and fluent speakers of the language and an analysis of their recorded conversations would be ideal for linguistic and sociolinguistic research.

2. A preliminary linguistic analysis on the spoken Judeo-Spanish of Turkey In 2008, with substantial funding from a foundation in the United Kingdom, we were able to get a team together and start the Ladino

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Database project. The team consisted of Karen ùarhon (coordinator), Coya Delevi, ùeli Gaon, Meri Schild, Dora Niyego, Feride Petilon and Anet Pase. The idea for such a project was the result of a conference organized by Michael Halevy in Germany, where Vanessa Pfister, member of the team working for Marie-Christine Varol at INALCO, talked about a similar database project they had been doing in Paris. I immediately thought it would be an excellent opportunity for us to implement such a project, as we still have many native speakers of Judeo-Spanish in Turkey. The Ladino Database Project aimed at collecting enough samples of the Judeo-Spanish language to archive for use in the future, when there will not be any native speakers of the language left. As the youngest native speakers of Judeo-Spanish were born around 1945, our timeline is, in fact, quite limited. Those born after that date acquired the language as a second language or as one of the family languages. That does not mean that this latter generation of speakers does not speak Judeo-Spanish fluently or very well indeed; however, for this project we used native and native-like speakers as our subjects. As preparation for the project, I devised a questionnaire so as to extract as much of the language as we could from the people we were going to interview.

3. Methodology The most important part of the project was to devise the questionnaire2 by which our interviewers would make the interviewees speak. I thought that since we wanted to document as much of the language as possible, we should formulate the questions in such a way as to elicit as many grammatical forms and structures as we could. So, apart from the usual questions asking them to describe parts of their lives in their youth, we also asked them to make comparisons, talk about the present, the future (if at all possible), make conditional sentences and also make associations with certain words they were asked. The questionnaire was constructed in five parts. The first part asked demographical questions to help future researchers in the social sciences make differentiations according to age, sex, education, demographical location, etc. In this section we added some uncommon questions like: “In what language do you count?” and “In what language do you dream?” the answers to which were quite varied and sometimes even quite surprising.

2

See Appendix

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The second part of the questionnaire contained questions about the interviewee’s past, and they were also asked to make comparisons with events in their past to those in the present, like the Bar-Mitzvahs of the past and those of today or the weddings of their youth and those of today, etc. Again, from these questions it was easy enough to see that there was more homogeneity in the society in the past than there is now. Even if people were quite wealthy in the past, the difference in the celebrations was not quite as pronounced as it seems to be today. The third section of the questionnaire contained questions about the present, what the interviewee’s life is like at present and what life in general is like today. The fourth part of the questionnaire was composed of questions asking about the future and also about some imaginary situations like: “Where would you like to have lived if not in Turkey?” or “What would you have done if you had had a lot of money when you were young?” etc. The final section of the questionnaire was devised with the aim of eliciting some spontaneous responses to certain words in Judeo-Spanish. We asked the interviewees to talk about the first thing that came to their minds on hearing those particular words, be it a proverb, a song, a poem, a tradition, a superstition, or a story. We conducted a pilot study at first for these words. We took out some of the words which we had thought would produce unusual responses but, in fact, blocked the subjects completely, eliciting nothing. So these words were finally replaced with others. In the first two years of the project our team was able to finish 69 interviews. Then a young Fulbright scholar, Sherry Cohen, recorded 12 more interviews for the project in Izmir. The interviews ranged from half an hour to two hours. It is interesting to observe that as the team members practiced more and more with their interviews, they were able to come up with more questions to get better and more detailed information from the interviewees, so our final interviews are quite long with a great deal of information and variety in the use of the language. The final data corpus comprises 81 interviews. Here is a summary of the project data: Ladino Database project data corpus: Total time for 69 interviewees (Istanbul): 63 hrs. 49 mins. 46 secs. Total time for 12 interviewees 3(Izmir): 14 hrs. 19 mins. 35 secs. Total time for 81 interviewees (Istanbul + Izmir): 78 hrs. 9 mins. 21 secs.

3

You can find the translations into English in the Appendix

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There were 12 more female interviewees than there were males, which, considering the age range we were working with was a normal proportion. Females tend to outlive males in our society. The age range of the interviewees by date of birth went from 1909 to 1960, with the majority of the interviewees in the 1921-1940 range (60 interviewees). The number of different words used by interviewees ranged from 1014 to 2302. There was also a question about what the interviewees called their native language. A lot of researchers in the academic world call this language “Judezmo”, so we wanted to know if the speakers themselves called it with that name. It turns out that the majority of Turkish speakers called this language “Espanyol” or “Judeo-Espanyol”. Only one speaker called it “Judezmo.”

4. Preliminary Findings At first glance, on hearing the interviews one cannot help but notice certain basic characteristics in the speakers’ discourse. The first issue that stands out is that the older the interviewee is, the more fluent s/he is when speaking Judeo-Spanish. However, even with the older native speakers, one notices hesitations when it comes to a more sophisticated kind of discourse. It is as if they are not used to making these conversations in this particular language, which is probably the case. These are the times when we notice more interference from other languages, especially from French and from Turkish. Here is an example from A.K., born in 1925 (all borrowings are in italics)2: Interviewer (INT.) A.K.

INT. A.K.:

A ke eskolas se hue? Si mos puede kontar un poko de estas eskolas? Si. Yo la primera vez estava en la Bene Berit, Musevi Lisesi, antes lo yamavan Bene Berit. Dospues me hui a la High School. Eskapi la High School sesh anyos, dospues me hui al College. Al engenieur direktamente kon egzamen. Dospues me hui a la Amerika, estuve kuatro anyos en la Amerika. Ke echo aze? I ke echo aziya? De mi grande padre era siempre fereriya ama los muestros lo trokaron en no fereriya, kijo dizir en kovre, kalay, este modo de matieres, vender, merkar i emportar.

There is also a noticeable effort made on the part of the interviewees to include as little interference from Turkish as possible. We notice pauses when they are trying to find the Judeo-Spanish word for a certain concept,

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and we also hear them ask the interviewer “How do you say ‘X’ in JudeoSpanish?” Here is an excerpt from the interview with M.G., born in 1948. INT. M.G.

INT M.G.

INT. M.G. INT. M.G.

M.G.

INT.

Komo era la vida en su chikez? Kontamos detalyos de la vida de al tiempo? Yo me engrandesi en Ortaköy. Kuando torni, vine de tres- kuatro anyos de Israel; i nasi en Ortaköy, me engrandesi en Ortaköy. Kuando tornimos de Israel; mi padre, mi nono teniya una kaza de tavla ke; el granpapa de mi nona, el nono de mi nona lavorava en la, al lado del sultan. I el sultan le aviya azido una kaza regalar, una kaza de tavla kon pozo i de agua, porke; era, era muy emportante el pozo de agua porke kaza akel tiempo de tavla, de agua era muy muy emportante. Deke? Porke; no aviya agua. Agua, mozos teniyamos en kada tiempo kon, en el pozo ke teniyamos. Kuando keriyamos teniyamos agua. Sino, enteresante, sino; en las otras kazas no aviya agua. Aviya sakas ke trayiyan la agua. Ama mozos, no teniyamos kuando mizma en muestra kaza aviya agua. Despues, despues kuando teniya, i por modo de esto teniya una vida muy muy ebraika. En Ortaköy todos lavoravamos, biviyamos komo ghetto. Fina el, el el komo se dize, el ke vende karne, El ke vende karne? El kasap, El kasap era djudyo ke vendiya kasher, el bakkal era djudyo, el balukchu, el balukchu djudyo Darsa, el uno era Musyu Pepo, todo, todo este modo los esnafes ke dizimos mozos eran todos djudyos. Todos djudyos, i todos morando en Ortaköy. I despues de sesh anyos yo me fui, ampesi a irme al Talmud Tora, a la Mahazeke Tora en Ortaköy i teniyamos... Yo me ampesi a ambezar, meldar en ebreo, dizir, azer todas mis aplikasyones ebraikas. I mozos, yo bivi muy muy ebreo. I mi padre era una persona ke aplikava todo sus kozas. I mi tio, i mozos todos bivimos en famiya. ------------Ama akel tiempo la koza el mas riko, el mas riko, el mas riko aziyas solo una komida uuu, aviya en komo se dize en Etoile d’Orient, “Union Française”

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INT M.G. INT. M.G.

INT M.G.

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kon Özgül, “Özgül Dü÷ün Salonu”, ke aviya en Taksim, la muy muncho todos es aya lo mas luksus. I lo mas luksus luksus ke se puede dizir, el mas riko aziya en Lido en Ortaköy una komida era lo mas. No, komo agora ke aziyan, estan azyendo... Agora komo estan las bar-mitsvas? Agora las bar-mitsvas esta; komo se dize compte de fées. Una fyesta una fyesta enorma, gastar paras, ama i yo lo ize por mi ijo. I yo, me ayego a azer i mis ijos. Izimos en el otel, despues en primero el tefillin, i en tefillin despues del tefillin una komida, una breakfast, despues del... una seuda, una seuda de tefillin. I despues shabat la noche lo izimos en un otel, en Sheraton. Despues lo izimos la bar-mitsva kon los ijikos tomaron leson de dans.

Somehow, interferences from French do not constitute as much a reason for discomfort as do the ones from Turkish. Needless to say, all borrowings from other languages are put into the grammatical forms of Judeo-Spanish, be they the conjugation of verbs or the pluralization of nouns, etc. Another noteworthy factor which comes to the forefront, but which may not come as a surprise, is the fact that the most fluent speakers were the rabbis whose native language is Judeo-Spanish. We were informed that during their rabbinical training, these older rabbis were asked to recite verses of the Torah in Judeo-Spanish from the original Hebrew texts. This is why they are extremely fluent, even in more complex bits of discourse using a wider range of sophisticated vocabulary. As pertaining to vocabulary, I also compiled lists of all the words used by the interviewees during their interviews. I was curious to see how many words people were using during conversation. Here too, not surprisingly, the more educated the interviewee the more words used in their discourse, which showed a range of 1600 to 2000 different words for this group. When we compare the “educated but not rabbis” group with the “rabbis” group, we see that the rabbis can utter much more sophisticated vocabulary than the non-rabbis. This is mainly because the non-rabbis were educated in a language that was not Judeo-Spanish and the rabbis, especially the older ones, had trained in Judeo-Spanish. Some interviewees were a bit uncomfortable in the beginning because they said they had not spoken in Judeo-Spanish for a long time. By this,

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they meant that they had not had such long conversations for a long time in only one language, in this case Judeo-Spanish. Usually what we see with these native speakers, especially the older ones, is that they continually change languages while speaking depending on the people to whom they are speaking. If the people they are conversing with know all the languages in question (in this case, French, Turkish and JudeoSpanish), then they will utilize all of these languages, sometimes even mixing all three in one sentence. As the interviewers in this project all spoke all of the three languages in question, there was a certain relief on the part of the interviewees to be able to express themselves in whatever manner they chose. If the people they are speaking to know only one of these languages, then they will make an effort not to mix the other languages into their discourse; however, this effort is usually made when the language in question is Turkish. This project required them to speak in Judeo-Spanish only, which was not something they were used to doing for a long time. So, for some interviewees, we notice the discomfort of trying to be faithful to speaking only in Judeo-Spanish. All speakers of Judeo-Spanish in the world today are immersed in the languages of the countries in which they live. Contrary to the situation in the Ottoman Empire, where there was very little communication with the people of the majority community, today we are looking at a global world, where there is a myriad of languages that co-exist. Judeo-Spanish has never been the language of a particular country; it was always one of the languages spoken in a certain geographic location, and a minority language at that. What is more, and this is of the utmost importance, starting in the year 1930, until the revival, which took place at the beginning of the 1990s, people did not read anything written in JudeoSpanish. The exception was the men who frequented the synagogues and read excerpts of religious texts in Judeo-Spanish. The rest of the native speakers, the women especially, did not read anything in Judeo-Spanish. In Turkey, for example, it is only from El Amaneser, a publication starting in 2005 that contains many manageable texts in Judeo-Spanish, that native speakers (women mostly, and men to a lesser extent) re-learned or just learned to read in the language. Even so, at first, most of them had to read the texts out-loud to understand what they were saying. Now after nearly 10 years, they have become much more proficient at reading in JudeoSpanish. When one listens to the interviews, even with the most fluent of them, one realizes that Judeo-Spanish is slowly disappearing into the background of their discourse repertoire because of the increased dominance of Turkish. They now have another language with which they are more

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comfortable, and that is Turkish. If the same exercise were to be repeated in Israel for example, you would find that Hebrew has pushed JudeoSpanish to the background. This should not be a very surprising phenomenon. Today we have the internet and many other opportunities like watching popular TV series to keep up with the languages, but how can we keep up with Judeo-Spanish? How many people interact in JudeoSpanish on a daily basis for it to develop more? When you listen to the interviews of our Ladino Database, it does not look as if any developments are taking place because people are immersed in Turkish, speak Turkish all the time, and are exposed to Turkish more than any other language they know. It is also sad to say that the number of people who can communicate in Judeo-Spanish is getting smaller every day because of an aging community. A lot of the interviewees in our project have already passed away unfortunately and soon there will not be enough native speakers left with whom one can communicate in Judeo-Spanish. On a more positive note, all the interviewees expressed their pleasure in having participated in such a project of the preservation of JudeoSpanish. They all also expressed their regret about the younger generations not speaking it and about the fact that this is part of our heritage that is slowly fading away. Some of them said that they are making a special effort to teach their grandchildren the language but the pressure of learning other world languages like English is currently making their job quite difficult. Some also noted that their grandchildren are interested in learning modern Spanish and that they are encouraging them to learn it because then, at least, they will be able to understand if they are spoken to in Judeo-Spanish. None of them, however, have any hope that there will be a revival of Judeo-Spanish because it is not the language in the modern Jewish home any more. Young Turkish Jews speak Turkish at home amongst themselves, answer their grandparents in Turkish even if they understand Judeo-Spanish, and definitely speak Turkish with their parents. I would like to emphasize one particular point that emerged in this project: even the native speakers of a language may lose their fluency in that language if they do not speak it as frequently as they used to. One then asks the question, how was it ever possible for the Turkish Jews to preserve Judeo-Spanish for more than 500 years? The answer to that lies in the structure of the community during the Ottoman Empire and the new structure that was built after the end of the Empire and the foundation of the Turkish Republic. During the Ottoman rule, the Jews lived in communities that were tightly knit and closed to any outside influences. The fact that the women never went out except to visit their relatives and neighbors, who very conveniently all lived on the same street (or maybe

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two streets away), which was populated by Jews anyway, helped to maintain the traditions that were crucial for the make-up of the ethnic identity of the community. With the foundation of the Turkish Republic and the decision of community administrators to integrate into the major culture also came the emancipation of women, who once outside the home lost most of their main function as the perpetrators of all the ethnic values and traditions, i.e. language, religious traditions, cuisine and music. Loss of fluency of Judeo-Spanish was some of the price that was paid for this emancipation. As the interviews show, today’s native speakers of Judeo-Spanish are quite fluent while talking about matters that concern the home, family, children, grandchildren, or cuisine and religious traditions, but are not that fluent when they start to talk about matters outside the home like politics, economics, world matters etc. It was interesting to note that most of them said they counted in Turkish and made mathematical calculations also in Turkish. This appears to be a good indicator of the loss of fluency and/or the shift in the strength of the primary language of a person. We now have to accept the fact that when we lose these native speakers, the youngest of whom were born in 1945 at the latest, we will not have any native speakers of Judeo-Spanish left in Turkey. When we have no native speakers left, then we cannot speak about the survival of a particular language. Judeo-Spanish will probably become a language to be studied at universities as a matter of academic interest. There appears to be little hope in the future for it to become the language of the Jewish homes in Turkey again. A few words here and there that will still help to distinguish the ethnic identity of the Jewish community from the other communities are all that will be left for the younger generations to use. The Ladino Database project realized by the Sephardic Culture Research Center in Istanbul will remain as an invaluable document of spoken Judeo-Spanish, and the fact that it will soon be accessed on the internet will make it doubly so. Hopefully with additional funding and support, we might be able to continue with the project to document as many additional native speakers as we can. Time is of essence and we must do what we can while it is still possible.

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Appendix I. The Questionnaire: KESTIONARYO PARA EL PROYEKTO “LADINO DATABASE”: PRIMERAS KESTIONES: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Komo se yama? Komo es su alkunya? De ande vienen sus djenitores? Kuando nasyo? Ande nasyo? En ke sivdad? Ande en esta sivdad? Ande bive agora? En ke mahalle? A ke eskolas se fue? Kontamos un poko de estas eskolas? Ken se iva a esta eskola? Kuantas klasas era? Aviya ijikas i ijikos endjuntos o no? Ke echo aze? / Ke echo aziya? Si no lavorava, kualo aziya? Kuala es su lingua maternal? Kualas otras linguas avla? En ke lingua konta shifros (uno, dos, tres ets...)? / aze kalkulasyones matematikas? En ke lingua ve es.huenyos? Damos un poko de detalyos si puede. Ke lingua avlava kon su papa i su mama? Ke lingua avlava kon su marido / mujer? Agora en ke lingua avlan? Ke lingua avla kon sus ijos? Kuando trokatesh la lingua de kaza? Deke? Ke lingua avla kon sus inyetos? Ke afita si les avlash en espanyol? Kuantos ijos tiene? Komo se yaman? Kuantos anyos tienen? Kontamos un poko sovre eyos. Tiene inyetos? Komo se yaman? Kuantos anyos tienen? Kontamos un poko sovre eyos. Sus ijos i inyetos entienden el espanyol? Lo avlan? En ke lingua pensa?

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Agora keremos ke mos konte en muncho detalyo lo ke le va demandar: EN EL PASADO x x x x x

x

x

x x

Kuando era chika / chiko, kualo teniya komo ideales en la vida? Komo era la vida en su chikez? Kontamos detalyos de la vida de al tiempo? Kualo era mijor i kualo era peor? La diferensya entre las bar-mitsvas de su chikez i las bar-mitzvas de oy. Komo se konosieron kon su marido / mujer? Damos unos kuantos detalyos. Kuando i ande vos kazatesh? Kontamos el kazamiento? Komo fue? Komo se preparo? Ande se fueron despues? Si kere puede empesar del espozorio. Komo fue? Komo se avlo de la dota i komo de desizion se tomo a la fin? Kualo aziyan las mujeres/ los ombres al tiempo? Kontamos un diya de una mujer/ un ombre antes kuarenta o sinkuenta anyos? Damos detalyos. Komo era el viajar en la sivdad? Ande se iva una persona para komer? Kualos eran los restorantes i las patiserias famozas? Ande era la rejion ande lavoravan los ombres? Aviya mujeres ke lavoravan al tiempo? Komo se veiyan estas mujeres? Teniyan buena fama o no? Ke aziyash noche de Shabat? Kontamos una noche de Shabat. Ke komidas era de uzo de komer kada noche de Shabat? Estos uzos kontinuan oy? Era de uzo de meter pishkado a la meza un noche de Shabat? Kual pishkado? Komo lo gizavash? Ke aziyash los week-endes, los Shabates i Alhades kuando no se lavorava? Kontamos lo ke aziyash ma kon muncho detalyo. Antes aviya munchos balos? Vos ivash a estos balos? Kontamos de estos balos. Ande se aziyan estos balos? Se tomava bilyetos para ir a estos balos? Kualo vos vistiyash? Ke bayles baylavash? Kuala muzika era mas popular antes? Komo de kantes kantava a sus kriyaturas? Mos puede dar un egzempio?

Agora ke mos konte un poko de la vida de oy: x Komo pasan los diyas oy? Kontamos komo pasa el diya. Ke empesa de la demanyana i ke mos konte kualo aze asta la noche ke se echa. x Tiene televizyon? Kualo mira en la televizyon? Damos egzempios i detalyos. Kual es su programa preferido? Deke?

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x x x

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Komo se troko su vida kon la yegada de la televizyon a las kazas? Ke afita si la televizyon se bozdea? Komo ve a los mansevos oy? Ke konsejos keria darles? Komo esta la vida oy? Le esta plazyendo? Damos egzempios. Oy la vida esta mas fasil o mas difisil? Ke pensa? Damos egzempios.

x Agora avlaremos un poko del futuro: x Tiene proyektos para el futuro? Ke pensa azer en el futuro? Ke kereria azer? x Si tenia munchas paras, kualo aria/azeria? x Si no bivia en este pais, en kual pais kereria bivir? Deke? x Komo de proyektos tienen sus ijos para el futuro? Ke keren azer? x Komo de proyektos tienen sus inyetos para el futuro? Ke keren azer? x Ke mos puede dizir sovre el futuro del mundo? Para ande mos estamos indo? Kuando pensa del futuro, ke modo de ideas le viene al tino? Agora le va dizir unas kuantas palavras. Kualo le viene al tino kuando los oye? Ke me konte. Si tiene alguna konsejika o si konose algunas dichas o proverbos sovre estas palavras ke me konte tambien. x x x x x x x x x x x x x

kazamentera kuchiyo/kuchara/piron novya/novyo mansana/bimbriyo aremendar ropa merkansia empyegado eskova espejo ojo pranso azno/perro/lonso/pasharo

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II. Translations of interview excerpts: Interviewer (INT.) A.K.

INT. A.K.:

Which schools did you go to? Could you tell us about these schools? Yes. I was first at the Bene Berit, called Musevi Lisesi (the “Jewish Lycée” in Turkish), they used to call it Bene Berit before. After that I went to High School (he means the English High School for Boys). I finished High School [in] six years, then I went to the College (he means Robert College, the American College for Boys). To engenieur (engineering) directly after passing an exam. Then I went to the US, I stayed there for four years. What do you do? What did you use to do? During my grandfather’s time they were blacksmiths, but [during my] father’s time this changed from blacksmiths to the tin business- kalay (Turkish for tin), matieres (French for materials) like that, selling, buying and importing.

Here is an excerpt from the interview with M.G., born in 1948. INT. M.G.

INT M.G.

What was life in your childhood like? Tell us about life in the past with details. I grew up in Ortaköy. When I came back, I arrived from Israel at three, four years of age; and I was born in Ortaköy, I grew up in Ortaköy. When we came back from Israel my father, my grandfather had a house made of wood that the grandfather of my grandmother, used to work for the sultan. And the sultan had given him this house as a gift, a house made of wood with a well and water because the well of water was very important, because water was very, very important at that time. Why? Because there wasn’t any water. But we had water all the time with the well that we had. Whenever we wanted we had water. Otherwise, it is interesting, otherwise, the other houses did not have water. There were sakas (Turkish for water bearer) who brought water. But we did not need, in our house we always had water. Then, then when I was (he doesn’t say how old he was)... and that is why we had a very Jewish life (he says hebraic life but what he means is “Jewish”). In Ortaköy, all of us worked, we lived

Karen Gerson Sarhon

INT. M.G. INT. M.G.

M.G.

INT. M.G.

INT. M.G. INT. M.G.

INT. M.G.

like a ghetto. Even the, how do you say, the person who sells meat, The one who sells meat? The kasap (Turkish for butcher), The kasap was Jewish, he sold kosher (meat), the bakkal (Turkish for grocer) was Jewish, the balukchu, (Turkish for fishmonger) the Jewish balukchu, Darsa, one of them was Musyu (French for Mr.) Pepo, all, all this type of esnafes (Turkish for tradesmen) like we say, were all Jewish. All Jewish and all living in Ortaköy. And after six years I went, I began to go to Talmud Tora, to the Mahazeke Tora in Ortaköy and we had... I started to learn, to read in Hebrew, to say and do all my duties in Hebrew. And we- I lived very very hebraic (he means Jewish). And my father was a man who observed all the rules. And my uncle, and we all lived in a family. ------------But at that time, the richest, the richest, the richest had only one dish during a meal, uuuuh, there was how do you say at the Etoile d’Orient, “Union Française”? with Özgül, “Özgül Dü÷ün Salonu”, (a locale where weddings were celebrated) which was in Taksim, that was the place that was the most luxurious. And the most, most luxurious you can say, the richest did (their weddings) at the Lido; in Ortaköy one dish (per meal) was the usual. Not like now, when they do, they are doing... What are the Bar-Mitzvahs like now? Now the Bar-Mitzvahs are; how do you say compte de fées. (French for fairy tales) A festival an enormous festival, spend a lot of money, but I did it for my son, too. I, too, (God made it possible for me) to do it for my children. We did it at a hotel, after that, first the tefillin, then at the tefillin, after tefillin, a meal, a breakfast, (he says breakfast in English) after the... a seuda, (breakfast in hebrew) a seuda of tefillin. Then afterwards on Saturday night, we did it at a hotel, at the Sheraton. Then we did the Bar-Mitzvah with the children [who] took leçon de dance. (French for dance lessons).

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References Altabev, Mary; Judeo-Spanish in the Turkish Social Context; The Isis Press, Istanbul, 2003. Bali, Rifat N.; Bir Türkleútirme Serüveni (1923-1945); Iletiúim Yaynclk A.ù; Istanbul, 1999. Harris, Tracy K.; Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish; University of Delaware Press, Newark, 1994. Rodrigue, Aron; Türkiye Yahudilerinin Batllaúmas ‘Alliance Okullar’ 1860-1925; Ayraç Yaynevi; Ankara, 1997. ùarhon, Karen Gerson. Language Change as Influenced by Cultural Contact. A Case: Ladino, M.A. Thesis, Bo÷aziçi University, 1983. —. The Relationship of Language Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Identity. A Case: Judeo- Spanish, M.A. Dissertation, Reading University, 1986. —. The Judeo-Spanish Language, Culture and Music, article, Multiculturalism: Identity and Otherness, Bo÷aziçi University Centre for Comparative European Studies, ed. Nedret Kuran Burço÷lu, (magazine), Bo÷aziçi University Press, 1997. —. Judeo-Spanish: Where We Are, And Where We Are Going, article, International Sephardic Journal, Volume 1 No. 1, 2004. —. The Period When An Awareness And Interest in Ladino Starts Among the Turkish Jewry: Reasons And Analysis. (conference), World Jewish Studies Congress, Jerusalem, 2005. —. Ladino in Istanbul – Versuch einer Wiederbelebung, article, (translation: Gisela Dachs) Jüdischer Almanach, Jüdischer Verlag, 2007. —. Culture and Music of the Jews of Turkey, article, Jewish Renaissance (dergi), Cilt 9 No. 2, Ocak 2010, Renaissance Publishing ltd. —. From Spain to Turkey, article, Jewish Renaissance, Vol 9 No. 2, Jan 2010, Renaissance Publishing ltd. Sephiha, Haim Vidal. L’Agonie des Judéo-Espagnols, Editions Entente, Paris, 1977.

ণAKETÍA: DISCOVERING THE OTHER JUDEO-SPANISH VERNACULAR ALICIA SISSO RAZ VOCES DE ণAKETÍA

“You speak Spanish very well, but why are there so many archaic Cervantes-like words in your vocabulary?” This is a question often heard from native Spanish speakers regarding ণaketía, the lesser known of the Judeo-Spanish vernacular dialects (also spelled ণakitía, ণaquetía, or Jaquetía). Although Judeo-Spanish vernacular is presently associated only with the communities of northern Morocco, in the past it has also been spoken in other Moroccan regions, Algeria, and Gibraltar. Similar to the Djudezmo of the Eastern Mediterranean, ণaketía has its roots in Spain, and likewise, it is composed of predominantly medieval Castilian as well as vocabulary adopted from other linguistic sources. The proximity to Spain, coupled with other prominent factors, has contributed to the constant modification and adaptation of ণaketía to contemporary Spanish. The impact of this “hispanization” is especially manifested in Haketía’s lexicon while it is less apparent in the expressions and aphorisms with which ণaketía is so richly infused.1 Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish calque language of Hebrew, has been common among all Sephardic communities, including the Moroccan one, and differs from the spoken ones.2 The Jews of Spain were in full command of the spoken Iberian dialects throughout their linguistic evolutionary stages; they also became well versed in the official Spanish dialect, Castilian, since its formation. They, however, have continually employed rabbinical Hebrew and Aramaic 1

Isaac B. Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía (Caracas: Centro de Estudios Sefardíes de Caracas, 2004), 49. 2 Haʀm Vidal Séphiha, “Judeo-Spanish, Birth, Death and Re-birth,” in Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, A European Heritage, ed. Nathan Weinstock, Haʀm Vidal Séphiha and Anita Barrera – Schoonheere (Brussels: European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages, 1997), 29-30.

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terminology when discussing religious matters, a practice that has been documented.3 The philologists José Benoliel, one of the first scholars to research and write about ণaketía, and Isaac Benharroch, author of a ণaketía-Spanish dictionary, have mentioned in their research several passages by Spaniards who not only incorporated Judeo-Spanish vocabulary in their work but also inserted expressions that are distinctly ‫ۉ‬aketiesque. Miguel de Cervantes, for example, implemented the characteristic expression common to all the Judeo-Spanish dialects des-mazal-ado.4 Mazal, means ‘luck’ or ‘destiny’ in Hebrew; however, the characteristic Spanish negative prefix and suffix added to the Hebrew noun convert it into an adjective that means ‘unlucky.’ Another passage in his novella El Casamiento Engañoso (The Fraudulent Marriage) characteristic of JudeoSpanish, and especially to the mode of speech still used in ণaketía today, includes the very typical oath Por el Dio (in God’s name). It is spelled Dio as in Judeo-Spanish, and not Dios as in Spanish.5 The “s” at the end of the word was erroneously understood by the Sephardim as an indicator of plurality. They seemed to have been unaware that the word Dios is singular, having its origin in the Proto-Indo-European concept for God, rather than a pluralistic challenge to monotheism. Yet, typical ‫ۉ‬aketiesque expressions, highlighted by Benoliel, are found in verses written by the Portuguese poet Luis Anrriques (cerca late fifteenth to early sixteenth century): ssaba ‘Saturday,’ beraha ‘blessing,’ minha ‘an afternoon prayer,’ kadoz ‘holy,’ guay ‘woe’ - exclamation of grief and distress, and defina- the traditional Sabbath meal of Moroccan Jewry to date.6 In addition to Hebrew and Aramaic, some vocabulary from Iberian Arabic, albeit not an extended one, is found in ণaketía as well as in the Djudezmo dialects from Turkey, Greece, and the Balkans. For example, the corresponding word in all these vernaculars for domingo ‘Sunday’ is al‫ۊ‬ad, which comes from wa‫ۊ‬ed, meaning one in Arabic.7 It is the only day of the week whose name derives from Arabic, just as it is the only day of the week whose Spanish name domingo makes a clear reference to 3

José Benoliel, Dialecto Judeo-Hispano - Marroquí o Hakitía (Madrid: Copisteria Varona, 1977), 6. Isaac B. Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 33. 4 Isaac B. Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 34. 5 Benoliel, Dialecto Judeo-Hispano – Marroquí, 5. 6 Benoliel, Ibid., 6. Ssaba and kadoz are phonetically spelled in the verse. It is according to their pronunciation in ণaketía, rather than according to their Hebrew pronunciation, which is: Shabbat and kadosh. 7 Paloma Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, the Jews from Spain, ed. and trans. George K. Zucker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 72.

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Domini – that is, to Christ. For obvious reasons, al‫ۊ‬ad, a word without any religious connotation has been preferred over domingo. Another example is the term that designates either news or current events: jbar (in ণaketía) and jaber (in Judezmo)8. The slight disparity in pronunciation is insignificant, and, in my opinion, the common origin of both is irrefutable. As Yaakov Bentolila and other scholars point out, most of the megorashim (those expelled from Spain) who fled to the nearby shores of North Africa settled, by and large, in Morocco and in western Algeria.9 It is suggested by scholars that a large number of them assimilated over time as they settled into the local Jewish communities and gradually adopted the native idioms. The gradual replacement of their Spanish vocabulary with the local Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect was characteristic to the Sephardim who settled in central and southern Morocco while the communities in northern Morocco have retained their language, which gradually evolved to the ণaketía vernacular.10 In Wazzan, Debdu, and Fez, for example, cities which are not considered part of the ণaketía-speaking communities, Judeo-Spanish has been spoken for generations, i.e. since the expulsion of 1492. This is evident in travelers’ testimonies and in records the communities have kept. Visitors to Wazzan were greeted with señores, buenos días ‘Gentlemen, good morning’ in 1883.11 The Castilian Takkanot, the ordinances for the expelled Sephardim in Morocco composed by the Sephardic rabbis of Fez, were initially written in Spanish. But, Spanish vocabulary has been gradually replaced throughout the years with vocabulary from the local Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect.12 The Takkanot were instrumental for 8

Pronounced as: /x/bar and /x/aber. Tamar Alexander-Frizer and Yaakov Bentolila, La palabra en su hora es oro: El refrán judeoespañol del Norte de Marruecos (Jerusalén: Instituto Ben-Zvi, 2008), 9. 10 Alexander-Frizer and Bentolila, Ibid., 9. Also discussed by numerous scholars: Joseph Chetrit, "Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish in Morocco and their Sociolinguistic Interaction," in Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages, ed. Joshua A. Fishman (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1985), 262. Haim Zafrani, Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco (Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2005), 516. André N. Chouraqui, Between East and West: A History of the Jews in North Africa, trans. Michael M. Bernet (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 91. Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 30. 11 Daniel Albo, “The Education in the Jewish Community in Wazzan at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century,” Brit, Summer (2011): 33. 12 Even though not all of them came from Castile, the communities of the expelled Sephardim of 1492 who settled in Morocco named their community “The Holy Communities of Those Expelled from Castile.” The Sephardim who escaped the 9

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guiding and managing the displaced community whose members had been abruptly uprooted from their birthplace in Spain and forced to relocate to a new and unfamiliar land. Although there were very few Spanish words left in the text of the Takkanot by the end of the eighteenth century, it seems that Judeo-Spanish continued to be spoken by the Sephardim of Fez throughout the nineteenth century. Edmundo De Amicis, an Italian author who visited Fez at the turn of the nineteenth century, came across a group of Jewish women at the house of the Italian ambassador. In his description of the encounter, he wrote the following: “They were beautiful women, with brilliant black eyes, fair skin, scarlet lips . . . and they all spoke Spanish.”13 While Spanish is no longer spoken by Jews in Fez, nor is it spoken in central or southern Morocco, the Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect still contains Spanish and Portuguese vocabulary, although speakers are likely unaware of the Iberian origin of these words.14 Benharroch estimates the number of Spanish words still in use in Judeo-Moroccan Arabic at a few thousand. Their pronunciation differs from Spanish, e.g. nigro, bandira, maistro, bestido, camiƵa. However, the pronunciation of the words, save for the latter one, is similar in Spanish and ণaketía, e.g. negro, bandera, maestro, vestido, camisa ‘black,’ ‘flag,’ ‘teacher,’ ‘dress,’ and ‘shirt.’ Although camisa is similarly spelled in both Spanish and ণaketía, the pronunciation in ণaketía is cami/z/a. Saya ‘skirt’ – one of the words in Benharroch’s list – still has the same denotation in Portuguese, ণaketía, and the Judeo-Moroccan Arabic dialect.15 Castilian, “the dialect with the most sociological prestige,” was the dominant language among the Jews in Spain well before the expulsion,

pogroms in Seville, during 1391, and settled in the city of Debdu still refer to their community by the name “The Congregation of the Sevillians.” See Abraham Laredo, Los orígenes de los judíos de Marruecos (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2007), 178. On the Spanish element in the Takkanot, see: Shalom Bar-Asher, ,ʤʧʴʹʮ ,ʱʠʴʡ ʺʩʣʥʤʩʤ ʤʸʡʧʤ ʩʸʣʱ :ʺʥʰʷʺʤ ʸʴʱ ,(1492-1753) ʥʷʥʸʮʡ ʬʢʥʨʸʥʴʥ ʣʸʴʱ ʩʣʥʤʩ ʤʬʫʬʫʥ ʤʢʤʰʤ (Akademon: Jerusalem, 1990), 52. Paloma Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, the Jews from Spain, 31-32. 13 Edmondo de Amicis, Morocco its People and Places, trans. C. Rollin-Tilton (London, Paris & New York: Cassell, Peller, Galpin & Co, 1882), 261-62, accessed on July 15, 2014. http://archive.org/stream/moroccoitspeople1882deam#page/260/mode/2up. 14 Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 667. Chetrit, "Judeo-Arabic and JudeoSpanish," 262. 15 Benharroch, Ibid., 676-677.

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regardless of their provincial origin in the Iberian Peninsula.16 It is reflected in ণaketía whose foundation is a conglomerate of predominantly medieval Castilian and other regional Iberian dialects (to be simplified as Spanish). This foundation, which contained certain Hebrew and Aramaic terminology pertaining to Jewish culture and religion and a limited vocabulary from peninsular Arabic, was the linguistic parcel that the megorashim brought with them to Morocco from Spain.17 The differing realities and life circumstances of the megorashim were evinced in their varying dialects. Over time, the detachment from contemporary Spanish language and culture created the necessity for additional vocabulary; as such, words have been consistently borrowed from the immediate surroundings of the megorashim. The Iberian “linguistic parcel” described above evolved into ণaketía, a fusion of predominantly archaic Spanish mixed with vocabulary from Hebrew, Arabic (mainly the local JudeoMoroccan Arabic), Portuguese, and, to a lesser degree, French and English. Another linguistic element, contemporary Spanish vocabulary, started replacing its archaic counterparts at the turn of the twentieth century. As a result, ণaketía, as it is spoken today, is a mixture of contemporary and archaic Spanish in addition to the previously mentioned components of ণaketía.18 ণaketía grammar usually follows standard Spanish grammar. However, archaic patterns are still noticeable in the conjugation of verbs and in the syntax, especially in aphorisms, expressions, and phrases.19 The ণaketía conjugation of the verb caminar ‘to walk’ in the simple past tense is caminí, caminátes, caminímos, caminátis (first person singular, second person singular, first person plural, and second person plural); whereas, in contemporary Spanish it is caminé, caminaste, caminamos, caminasteis. Sounds which are no longer pronounced in contemporary Spanish have been preserved in ণaketía, such as the sounds represented by IPA symbols /œ/, /z/, / ʄ/ and /‫ݤ‬/. According to the recently developed orthographic system for ণaketía, the sounds of /œ/, /z/ and /ʄ/ are represented by the characters “sh,” “z” and “ত” respectively, and /‫ݤ‬/ is represented by both ‘Ƶ’ and ƣ.20 Thus, ণaketía speakers say shabón rather than the contemporary 16

Benharroch, Ibid., 33. Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, The Jews from Spain, 73. Benoliel, Dialecto Judeo-Hispano– Marroquí, 6. Benharroch, Ibid., 35-36. 18 Benoliel, Ibid., 8. Benharroch, Ibid., 36-37. 19 Benharroch, Ibid., 49. 20 A group of scholars and activists headed by Dr. Yaakov Bentolila, professor emeritus at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, of which I was fortunate to be a part, developed an orthographic system. The system is being tested by several ণaketía writers. It has most recently been utilized in Nina Pinto-Abecasis’ 17

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Spanish jabón ‘soap;’21 hiƵo rather than hijo ‘son;’ ƣente rather than gente ‘people;’ riza rather than risa ‘laughter.’ The sounds and consonants in ণaketía have been further widened, owing to the preservation of the guttural sounds in imported vocabulary from Hebrew and Arabic, hence /ʄ/aketía rather than /x/aketía. Additionally, the initial /f/ has been usually maintained in ণaketía; forno, fuir, and ferrero are part of such vocabulary. Their contemporary forms are horno, huir, and herrero ‘oven,’ ‘to run away,’ and ‘blacksmith.’22 Formosa was the former name of Taiwan, given to the island by the Portuguese and Spaniard inhabitants for the lovely landscape seen from their boats at sea. Formosa in Portuguese and fermosa in archaic Spanish stand for beautiful. The Spanish pronunciation in the past was fermo/z/a. Hence, we can assume that the Spaniards would have named the island today /h/ermo/s/a. The /h/ would have replaced the /f/, and the /s/ no longer would sound like /z/. The archaic Spanish vocabulary that forms the foundation of ণaketía has been conserved either in its original form or with some modification. Examples of the archaic terms are cuarterón, fiel, and azedo as opposed to the contemporary Spanish cuarto, hiel, and ácido ‘quarter,’ ‘bitter,’ and ‘sour,’ while examples with some modification include nublina, faldiquera, and escuraña as opposed to the archaic niebla, faltriquera, and escuridad. The corresponding contemporary words are neblina, bolsillo, and oscuridad ‘fog,’ ‘pocket,’ and ‘darkness.’ Furthermore, there are words that differ in meaning. For example, the verbs faltar, quitar, and echar in ণaketía mean ‘to die,’ ‘to divorce,’ and ‘to sleep;’ whereas, in contemporary Spanish, they mean ‘to lack (something),’ to remove,’ and ‘to throw.’ The syntax of ণaketía usually follows contemporary Spanish rules with a number of exceptions—archaic patterns that still linger, intentionally spirited sentences with an unconventional word order, old patterns in aphorisms, expressions, etc. For instance, the common greeting to welcome someone in ণaketía is venido bueno, which is literally ʩʸʡʥʣʥ ʯʠʥʨʩʨ ʩʣʥʤʩ ʬʹ ʭʥʩʭʥʩʤ ʧʩʹʡ ʸʥʬʷʬʥʴʥ ʸʥʮʥʤ ,ʭʩʩʥʰʩʫ :ʤʹʩʠʤ ʩʶʧʥ ʵʤʥʢʮʤ ,ʱʥʥʨʤ ʤʩʩʺʒ˗ʧʔ ʤ (Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi institute, 2014), 9. The orthographic system is posted on the following website: http://www.vocesdehaketia.com/haketia/grafia.htm 21 The contemporary Spanish sound of “j,” the jota, is represented by the IPA symbol /x/. 22 However, the extent of its preservation varies from city to city; the initial /f/ is more prominent in the speech of Alcazarquivir than in Tangier or Tetuan. See Pinto-Abecasis, ʤʹʩʠʤ ʩʶʧʥ ʵʤʥʢʮʤ ,ʱʥʥʨʤ, 9.

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translated as ‘coming good’ (bueno is pronounced wueno). The greeting in contemporary Spanish is bienvenido, literally ‘well coming.’ It is common in ণaketía for sentences to be composed of present participles and simple past forms, which are very rarely used in Spanish, with the exception of literary poetic texts.23 An example of this would be Yo leyendo, vino mi amiga ‘(While) I am/was reading, my friend came.’ Sentences in ণaketía may be exclusively composed of Spanish vocabulary, including archaic words that are no longer in use in contemporary Spanish, as illustrated in the following sentence: ণaketía: La madre y la hiƵa shabonaron todo el ashuar nuevo que se mercó. Contemporary Spanish: La madre y la hija lavaron todo el ajuar nuevo que se compró. ‘The mother and daughter washed the entire newly bought trousseau.’

Similarly, another common phenomenon is for sentences to contain words, in addition to Spanish vocabulary, derived from other languages. The following sentence illustrates this concept; it is composed of vocabulary from English, Portuguese, Arabic, and Hebrew in addition to Spanish: ণaketía: El tipad aburacado que se topó en la kaisería fue una berajjá lebattalá. Contemporary Spanish: La tetera agujereada que se encontró en el mercado, fue inútil. ‘The perforated tea-pot found in the market was useless.’

The borrowed vocabulary in ণaketía may sound Spanish due to the method by which the imported words have been hispanicized. This has simply been done by applying the Spanish morphological rules to the nonSpanish words. This group of hispanicized vocabulary consists of stem words in various languages with the typical Spanish prefix and suffix. For example, muddá, which means ‘sleep’ in local Judeo-Moroccan Arabic, is joined by the Spanish suffix “ar” to become muddear, meaning ‘to sleep’ in ণaketía. Similarly, the word atornar, from the English word attorney, means ‘to protect’ or ‘to come to the defense of someone.’ These examples provide only a glimpse into the morphological innovations of ণaketía. 23 Alegría Bendayan de Bendelac, Voces Jaquetiescas (Caracas: Asociación Israelita de Venezuela 1990), 20.

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Whereas ণaketía has been the daily vernacular, the written liturgical language of all of the Sephardim has been Ladino, whose archaic vocabulary has been preserved nearly intact. Ladino, a creative and unique method for translating biblical and liturgical texts from Hebrew to Spanish, was developed during the Middle Ages by the rabbis in Spain. As Haïm-Vidal Séphiha and other scholars have noted, it was devised in order to make the sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts accessible and more understandable to those whose knowledge of these languages was limited.24 It was a word-for-word translation into medieval Spanish with Hebrew syntax. This linguistic fusion called Ladino is defined by Séphiha as “Hebrew clothed in Spanish or Spanish with Hebrew Syntax.”25 The vocabulary was almost exclusively archaic Spanish, save for religious terminology in Hebrew and Aramaic and for invented hispanicized concepts from Hebrew. Acuñadear (derived from the Spanish word cuñado, meaning ‘brother-in-law’) is an example Díaz-Mas uses for illustrating this type of calqued creation.26 According to Jewish law, the brother of a deceased childless man must marry his widowed sister-in-law in order to perpetuate his brother's name. Acuñadear is the invented verb in Ladino which signifies the act of fulfilment of this religious dictum by the brother-in-law. Before its formulation to Castilian, the spoken language in Spain during the early middle ages was known as Latino or Ladino, being of course a derivative of Latin. This explains why the rabbis called their translations Ladino. They used to denote their translation process as "doing it in Ladino" or a ladinar, which means to “Ladinize.” This unique translation-method has been maintained for generations throughout the entire Sephardic Diaspora. Haïm-Vidal Séphiha, one of the foremost scholars of the Judeo-Spanish languages, Paloma Díaz-Mas, and other philologists have argued that Ladino has never been a spoken language, nor could it be, because of its unique syntactic structure. Moreover, contrary to the almost hermetic character of Ladino, all Judeo-Spanish dialects contain a considerable number of words imported from the 24

Séphiha, “Judeo-Spanish: Birth, Death and Re-birth,” 29-30. A similar view point is expressed in Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, The Jews from Spain, 75-77. Gladys Pimienta and Sidney Pimienta, 1860-1883 Libro de actas de la junta selecta de la comunidad hebrea de Tánger (Paris-Jerusalem: Jem Y Erez, 2010), XXIV, 360. Alexander-Frizer and Bentolila, La palabra en su hora, 11. 25 Séphiha,“Judeo-Spanish: Birth, Death and Re-birth,” 29. 26 Díaz-Mas, Sephardim: The Jews from Spain, 76. The biblical name that designates such a brother-in-law is yavam (ʭʕʡʕʩ). The Hebrew verb that stands for the act of fulfilment with this religious dictum is le-yabem [ ʭʒˎʩʔ ʩʬʍ ].

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surrounding communities.27 Ladino has been the liturgical written language of all of the Sephardic communities in the world, and its archaic Spanish vocabulary was the basis of all the Judeo-Spanish vernacular dialects: ণaketía from Morocco and Djudezmo from the Balkans, Turkey and Greece. It is no wonder that Séphiha compares these two, i.e. Ladino and the variety of Judeo-Spanish vernaculars, to “el aguilá de dos cabezas” ‘the two headed eagle.’28 In recent years, however, the JudeoSpanish vernaculars of the eastern Mediterranean, such as Djudezmo – also named Spanyolit, Djidio, etc. until the latter years of the twentieth century – have assumed the name Ladino despite a continuous debate on the nomenclature of the language among scholars. ণaketía speakers have held on to the original meaning of the name Ladino, and as such, there is strong disagreement with this shift in meaning among ণaketía speakers as well as many non-ণaketía speakers. It is worth noting that the romances (ballads) of medieval Spain, which have been preserved by the expelled Sephardim, remained very near to their linguistic source. The archaic Spanish vocabulary of the romancero (musical compendium) functioned for centuries as a link to the Iberian language and culture of the past, and it has contributed to the preservation of an antiquated lexicon over the course of the last 500 years. In his monumental ballad collection, Romances de Tetuán, the renowned Spaniard musicologist Arcadio de Larrea Palacín wrote that Spanish ballads from the fifteenth century, otherwise lost to the Spaniards, have been preserved thanks to the Sephardim.29 Thus, it is no wonder that the musical compendiums of the Moroccan Sephardim and of the Eastern Mediterranean Sephardim consist of many ballads of similar themes, albeit differing in melodies and meters.30 Yet, while the ballads of the Sephardim in the eastern Mediterranean demonstrate musical influences from the Balkans, the melodies of the ballads preserved to date by the Jews of northern Morocco have been more in line with their original medieval 27

Séphiha,“Judeo-Spanish: Birth, Death and Re-birth,” 30; Díaz-Mas, Ibid., 76. There is actually a consensus regarding this by scholars of the Judeo-Spanish languages. 28 Haʀm Vidal Séphiha, “Hablas ibéricas de los sefardíes tras de la expulsión (1942) (hispanohablantes, judeo-hispanohablantes y lusohablantes),” in Los sefardíes de ayer y de hoy, ed. Richard Ayoun y Haʀm Vidal Séphiha, trans. Tomás Onaindía (Edaf : Madrid, 2002), 330. 29 Larrea Palacín, Arcadio de, Romances de Tetuán, Recogidos y transcritos Vol. I (Madrid: I.D.E.A. 1952), 7. 30 Susana Weich-Shahak, Moroccan Sephardic Romancero: Anthology of an Oral Tradition, trans. Vanessa Paloma Elbaz (Santa Fe: Gaon books, 2013), 26-27.

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melodies.31 Manuel Ortega, who wrote an extensive volume on the Jews of Morocco, cited the philologist and historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal; he states that the romancero of the Moroccan Jewry is “superior” to that of the Sephardim of the Eastern Mediterranean – a statement that refers to the preservation of the original musical elements.32 As for the name ণaketía, there are several theories regarding the origin of the word. Some scholars, such as Jose Benoliel, argue that it stemmed from the Arabic ‫ۊ‬akka, which means ‘to chat’ or ‘to tell.’33 As stated previously, ণaketía has served as the vernacular, not the literary language of the community. For this reason, Benoliel’s theory appears to be most plausible. Others, however, especially Isaac Benharroch and Joseph Toledano, reason that the word ণaketía alludes to the Hebrew name Is.তaq (Isaac), which is a common Jewish name. Since the use of the diminutive form is very characteristic of Sephardic culture, Is.তaquito, the diminutive of Is.তaq, may have evolved to ণakito and by extension to ণaketía – that is, the language of the ণakitos (referring to the Jewish people who speak the language).34 Though it seems quite extraordinary that a community that avoided mastering the local Arabic language while harboring a strong connection with the Spanish culture and language would choose an Arabic name for its Judeo-Spanish dialect, Alegría Bendayan de Bendelac and other scholars tend to accept Benoliel’s explanation.35 However, not until Manuel Ortega mentioned the name Jaquetía, in his Los hebreos en Marruecos (The Hebrews in Morocco) in 1919, was the name recorded or referred to in any source.36 Tetuan and its surroundings remained under Spanish occupation for two years since 1860, following the Spanish-Moroccan war. The Spanish soldiers in Tetuan referred to the language of the local Jews as “castellano…con un acento particular… distinto del de todas nuestras provincias,” Spanish for ‘Castilian… with a special accent…different from all our provinces.’37 Years ago it was 31 Samuel Armistead, “Una nueva cosecha de romances de Alcazarquivir: Caracteristicas e interés de la colección,” in Romances de Alcácer Quibir, ed. Kelly Benoudis Basilio (Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2007), 77-80. 32 Manuel L. Ortega, Los hebreos en Marruecos (Madrid: Editorial hispano africana 1919), 207-209. 33 Benoliel, Dialecto Judeo-Hispano– Marroquí, 4. 34 Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 38. 35 Alegría Bendayan de Bendelac, Diccionario del Judeoespañol de los Sefardíes del Norte de Marruecos (Caracas: Centro de estudios Sefardíes 1995), XXXIV. 36 Ortega, Los Hebreos, 203. 37 Pedro Antonio de Alarcón, Diario de un testigo de la Guerra de África (Madrid: Ediciones del Centro, 1859), 354.

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simply named by its speakers as español rather than ণaketía. However, it was José Benoliel who first adopted the term in his Dialecto JudeoHispano-Marroquí O ‫ۉ‬akitía (a collection of research articles originally published between 1926-1952). Whatever the origin of the name, ণaketía manifests warmth, grace, wit, and laughter – all cultural characteristics of Moroccan Jewry. It is a very colorful language, having been enriched by different cultural and linguistic sources, and ণaketía contains a wealth of expressions, aphorisms, and synonyms. Alegría Bendayan de Bendelac noted 47 synonyms used for describing ugliness.38 The number of expressions that illustrate traits, such as endearing, or even blessings and profanities, are numerous: delgado como un filo and flaco como una solombra describe a very skinny person—‘skinny like a thread’ and ‘skinny like a shadow.’39 Largo como un día sin pan and largo como dolor de muelas en noche de invierno—‘long like day without bread’ and ‘long like a toothache on a winter night’ are a few of the expressions used for denoting a very long period of time. When sweets or flowers are offered, they are reciprocated with the expression durse lo vivas ‘may you live sweetly’ and florido lo vivas ‘may you live flowery,’ that is to say, surrounded by beauty.40 Mi reina/rey, mi luz, and mi alegría ‘my queen/king,’ ‘my light,’ and ‘my happiness’ are other commonly used endearments among family members and friends. Ferazmal is an interesting synthesis of three words which together create a term that expresses both endearment and blessing: ferazde–mal.41 The expression stands for the following: ‘(may you remain) outside of calamities/ of evil/ of danger, etc.’ that is to say, ‘(may you remain) protected from all calamities, etc.’ In the past, this expression was exclusively reserved for referring to one’s husband or to a very dear family member. In Tetuan especially, one’s husband was called ferazmal rather than by his name.42 Naturally, in a society in which the husband was the only breadwinner of the household, his health and well-being were of the utmost importance and led to a host of continually utilized blessings and protective ‘verbal’ amulets. In recent generations, however, depending on the context and tone of voice, ferazmal is used in a humoristic and even ironical sense in addition to its original significance.

38

Bendelac, Voces Jaquetiescas, 20. Filo and solombra mean thread and shadow respectively, and their contemporary counterparts are hilo and sombra. 40 Durse is the ণaketía counterpart of the Spanish dulce. 41 Feraz means outside, and its contemporary counterpart is afueras. 42 Bendelac, Ibid., 89. 39

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ণaketía, a humoristic and comical language, allows for grammatical freedom either in the syntax or by the twisting and bending of words and expressions. Solly Levy mentions a similar rebellious spirit that pays no heed to linguistic rules in the dialects of Quebec and Buenos Aires: Joual and Lunfardo Porteño.43 This “linguistic liberty” garnishes any conversation in ণaketía with innumerable witty and comical expressions. For example, cazzamento means ‘marriage’ (in contemporary Spanish it is spelled casamiento), but cazzapreto is the satirical wordplay that suggests a ‘sour marriage.’ Cazza is the Spanish casa, meaning ‘home;’ preto is ‘black’ in Portuguese, but in ণaketía it stands for something negative and bad as well as for something dark. Alongside the colorful ণaketía vernacular, a high register of the language was used, especially by the educated upper-classes, in important writings, community records, rabbis’ sermons, and liturgical hymns (e.g. the piyutim). Though it contained an archaic vocabulary alongside a contemporary one, attention was given to formal syntax and grammar and to the exclusion of borrowed vocabulary, especially those words from Arabic.44 This formal language was intuitively employed as well whenever speaking with strangers. As a child, I remember how members of my family used a slightly different language, which registered distinctively in tone and vocabulary to my ears, when talking to Spanish speaking visitors. This tendency is demonstrated as follows in a note of gratitude written in 1830 by a woman named Jamila Buzaglo.

43

Solly levy, El libro de Selomó (Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2008), 21. Yaakov Bentolila, “La lengua común (coiné) judeo-española entre el Este y el Oeste,” in El Presente, Estudios sobre la cultura Judeo-Española del Norte de Marruecos, Vol. II, Ed. Tamar Alexander–Frizer and Yaakov Bentolila (Beer Sheva: Centro Gaon, Universidad Ben Gurion del Negev, 2008), 164. This tendency is apparent as well throughout the collected committee-meetings in Pimienta and Pimienta, 1860-1883 Libro de actas. 44

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De la Croixx Musiu (Moonsieur) De la Croix Musiu (Moonsieur) Morn ney Musiu Fressieny Musiu Marrc Yeunsen Mos han heecho la gracia de bbisitarmos mingo día de dom venti ocho de abril mil ocho ciientos y trenta y ddos Tanger Jamila Buzzaglo

Figure 5.1 Soource: The Judeeo-Moroccan Cu ulture Center, B Brussels (www.judaismemarocain.org)). Transcribed from Solitreo by b Professor Y Yaakov Bentolila and Dr. Jeffery Malkaa

Jamila’s note is writteen in Solitreo on a drawingg by Eugene Delacroix, D in which shhe is depicteed standing. Though T severral words are spelled phoneticallyy, the syntax iss normative Spanish S and thhe vocabulary is devoid of borrowedd terminologyy.45 In additio on, there is a compound sentence, hardly used in ণaketía: Mos M han hech ho la gracia dde bisitarmos, which is an old form m of the conteemporary Noss han hecho eel honor de visitarnos v ‘you have hhonored us by your visit.’ Another A interessting detail is referring to Sunday byy its Spanish name, n doming go rather than al‫ۊ‬ad, as in ণaketía. ণ Unlike tthe Sephardim m of the Ballkans, Greecee, and Turkey y, whose geographicaal distance from Spain acco ounts for the ppreservation of o most of the archaic S Spanish elemeents in their Djudezmo D varriants, the geo ographical circumstancces of the ণakketía-speaking g community were differen nt in that 45

The follow wing words are misspelled m becaause the writer sspelled them ph honetically as they are prronounced in ণaketía: ণ Musiu,, mos, bisitarm mos, venti and trrenta. The correct spellinng is as followss: Monsieur, no os, visitarnos, veeinte and treintta. ‘mister, us, visit us, tw wenty, and thirtty.’

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proximity to Spain has been a major factor. Though most of the ণaketíaspeaking community lived in relative isolation prior to 1860, the educated upper-classes, the well-off, and the merchants of the coastal towns in particular, maintained some contact with Spanish culture and language throughout the years.46 The year 1860 is seen as the turning point in the rehispanization of ণaketía, i.e. the readapting of ণaketía to contemporary Spanish norms. It was marked by the ending of the Hispano-Moroccan War and the occupation of Tetuan and its surrounding cities by the Spaniards for nearly two years. The rehispanization process, already noticeable by the end of the nineteenth century, accelerated during the twentieth century. Consequently, ণaketía has changed drastically in recent generations in which it has become a mixture of contemporary Spanish and ণaketía.47 An additional contributing factor to the rehispanization process included the sister-communities established in Gibraltar and in South America since the early eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Desperate from the extreme poverty and the severe oppression in Morocco, many young men left and established ণaketía-speaking communities in their newly adopted countries. By returning to their birthplace or through communicating with relatives left behind, a modernized Spanish was introduced into the community.48 Interestingly, Sephardic Jews from Morocco who immigrated to Argentina were hired by the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA) to serve as Spanish teachers to the newly-arriving Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe.49

46 See the paragraph on this by Paul Bénichou from “Observaciones sobre el judeoespañol de Marruecos” in Revista Filologia Hispanica 7 (Buenos Aires: Instituto de Filología, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1945), 209-58, quoted in Díaz-Mas, Sephardim, the Jews from Spain, 87. 47 Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 41. Alexander-Frizer and Bentolila, La palabra en su hora, 9. 48 Juan BTA. Vilar, Tetuan En el resurgimiento judío contemporáneo (1850-1870) (Caracas: Biblioteca Popular Sefardí, 1985), 73. Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 41-44. 49 Mario Eduardo Cohen “Un ejemplo de integración a través del idioma: Los sefarditas de habla judeoespañola en América Latina,” Cervantes.es, Congreso internacional de las lenguas españolas, 2010, accessed on July, 2014. (The organization JCA was created by Baron Maurice von Hirsch in 1891. It sponsored the emigration of oppressed Jews from Russia, and their resettlement in agricultural communities in Argentina and Brazil.) http://congresosdelalengua.es/valparaiso/ponencias/politica_economia_sociedad/co hen_mario_e.htm.

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Other key instances of a continuous European presence in Morocco that may have influenced Haketía include the following: European diplomats representing their countries in Morocco, Spanish enclaves in Ceuta and Melilla in northern Morocco, and the presence of Spaniards and Portuguese in the coastal cities of Mogador, Safi, Larache, Arzila, and Tangier, which were controlled by both countries at various times. The inevitable exposure to Peninsular Spanish, regardless of how minimal, contributed to a certain level of lexical modification. Yet, most of the rehispanization process may be attributed to the establishment of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, a school network first created in Tetuan in 1862. At the time, schools opened their doors to secular education, and French and Spanish were included in the curriculum. Some French vocabulary had been incorporated then into ণaketía, but it was not nearly as substantial as its influence on Djudezmo of the eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the Spanish protectorate in Northern Morocco since 1912 (Southern Morocco fell under the French protectorate) brought about the establishment of a non-Jewish Spanish community who lived side-by-side the Jewish one. Inevitably, this exposure to the contemporary Spanish language was reflected in ণaketía.50 The rehispanization process of ণaketía, which started in 1860, did not occur concurrently in all the communities of northern Morocco. The communities of Tangier and Tetuan were the first to embrace it, followed by other cities such as Arzila, Larache, and Alcazarquivir; the community of Chefchaouen was considered the least hispanicized. And thus, gradually, ণaketía kept evolving during the twentieth century, and contemporary Spanish vocabulary usurped its archaic counterparts. Subsequent to the widening exposure to contemporary Spanish and other European languages, ণaketía became regarded as a colloquial jargon of lesser value. The younger generations and the educated elite abandoned ণaketía in favor of contemporary Spanish and French, equating these languages with the fashionable European style. The figure that follows of the Benatar family best illustrates this transitional state; the woman is still wearing the traditional traje de berberisca (Keswa Kebira in JudeoMoroccan Arabic, meaning ‘the great dress’), but the men are depicted wearing fashionable European suits.

50 Benharroch, Diccionario de Haquetía, 41-44. There is actually a consensus on these contributing factors by scholars in this field.

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Figure 5.2 Source: The Judeo-Moroccan Culture Center, Brussels (www.judaismemarocain.org). The Benatar family, 1898.

The Jewish community left Morocco, almost en masse, following Moroccan independence in 1956, but a nostalgic attachment persists to the language that encapsulates beloved traditions and culture, anchored in both an Iberian and a Moroccan past. Most of the descendants of the ণaketíaspeaking community have been fluent in contemporary Spanish for generations now. Nevertheless, when conversing with each other, ণaketía speakers freely intermix Haketía with modern Spanish without conscious attention to this code switching. This practice is demonstrated in an interview personally conducted: “Yo no hablo ‫ۉ‬aketía…Y abuela tampoco hablaba, namás que Español! No, no...de verda, de verda…en cazza nada, nada de ‫ۉ‬aketía…soy andalusa, andalusa…”.51 “Namás” is the haquetiesque elision of the Spanish nada más, meaning ‘nothing;’ verda is pronounced as in Tetuan, where the last consonant of the word remains typically silent. Verdad signifies ‘true’ in Spanish; de verdad means ‘really’ or ‘honestly.’ Cazza and andalusa were pronounced similar to the ণaketía pronunciation of the words.52 The typical haquetiesque accent and the expressions throughout the dialogue not only produced laughter and

51

‘I do not speak ণaketía …nor did grandmother spoke it…only Spanish! No, no...really, really…at home nothing, nothing of ণaketía…I am Andalusian, Andalusian…’ 52 This (video-recorded) interview took place in June 2012.

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negated the statement, but also illustrated that, despite rehispanization, ণaketía culture and language are deeply rooted. Cultural characteristics of the Moroccan Jewry include joie de vivre and a sense of humor as well as graceful conduct and a passion for singing. For instance, the outbursts of laughter after each phrase, the vigorous self-laughter when “I am Andalusian” was said, the pleasant tone, and good-humored manner during the entire interview are all culturally typical. Equally characteristic of ণaketía speakers, as well as Judeo-Arabic speakers, is the tendency to repeat the same word in a sentence.53 The informant repeated the following words: Nada, nada; de verda, de verda; and soy Andalusa, Andalusa. Delightful singing of a stanza from an old song, accompanied by hand-clapping, followed the monologue. One of many cherished activities that still linger among the ণaketía-speaking community is singing. An old ballad will be spontaneously sung in the midst of a conversation in order to illuminate the meaning of an archaic expression or word; singing is a natural part of life, whether at a social gathering or while doing domestic chores. The geographical distance from the linguistic and cultural birthplace of ণaketía, where it was born and spoken for centuries, has affected the vernacular; not many are able to fluently speak it today. Fortunately, many are now ণaketía aficionados who strive to recapture forgotten words and preserve the language by using vocabulary and aphorisms from ণaketía in their speech. Despite the fact that most of the descendants of the ণaketíaspeaking community grew up in different parts of the world, ণaketía has remained the language of their soul, the language of affection that brings smiles to their faces and warmth to the hearts of its speakers. It is a language that carries on unique traditions and preserves heartwarming memories carried on from one generation to the next.

References Alarcón, Pedro Antonio de. Diario de un Testigo de la Guerra de África. Madrid: Ediciones del Centro, 1859. Albo Daniel. “The Education in the Jewish Community in Wazzan at the beginning of the twentieth century.” 33-50. Brit, Summer 2011. Alexander-Frizer, Tamar, and Bentolila Yaakov. La palabra en su hora es oro: El refrán judeo- español del Norte de Marruecos. Jerusalén: Instituto Ben-Zvi. 2008. 53 As demonstrated in the dialogues throughout Hertzel Cohen’s book ʸʥʤʨ ʹʩʹ ʩʰʡʠ (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004).

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Amicis, Edmondo de. Morocco its People and Places. Translated by C. Rollin-Tilton. London, Paris & New York: Cassell, Peller, Galpin & Co, 1882. http://archive.org/stream/moroccoitspeople1882deam#page/260/mode/ 2up. Armistead, Samuel. “Una nueva cosecha de romances de Alcazarquivir: caracteristicas e interés de la colección.” In Romances de Alcácer Quibir, edited by Kelly Benoudis Basilio, 77-88. Lisboa: Edições Colibri, 2007. Bar-Asher, Shalom. ʩʸʣʱ :ʺʥʰʷʺʤ ʸʴʱ ,(1492-1753) ʥʷʥʸʮʡ ʬʢʥʨʸʥʴʥ ʣʸʴʱ ʩʣʥʤʩ ʤʬʫʬʫʥ ʤʢʤʰʤ ,ʤʧʴʹʮ ʱʠʴʡ ʺʩʣʥʤʩʤ ʤʸʡʧʤJerusalem: Nakdimon, 1990. Bendayan de Bendelac, Alegría. Voces Jaquetiescas. Caracas: Asociación Israelita de Venezuela. 1990. —. Diccionario del Judeoespañol de los Sefardíes del Norte Marruecos. Caracas: Centro de estudios Sefardíes. 1995. Benharroch B., Isaac. Diccionario de Haquetía. Caracas: Centro de Estudios Sefardíes de Caracas, 2004. Benoliel, Jose. Dialecto Judeo-Hispano-Marroquí o Hakitía. Madrid: Copisteria Varona, 1977. Bentolila, Yaakov. “La lengua común (coiné) judeo-española entre el Este y el Oeste.” In El Presente, Estudios sobre la cultura Judeo- Española del Norte de Marruecos. Vol. II. Edited by Tamar Alexander- Frizer and Yaakov Bentolila, 159-176. Beer Sheva: Centro Gaon, Universidad Ben Gurion del Negev, 2008. Chetrit, Joseph. "Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish in Morocco and their Sociolinguistic Interaction." In Readings in the Sociology of Jewish Languages. Edited by Joshua A. Fishman, 261-79. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985. Chouraqui, André N. Between East and West: A history of the Jews in North Africa. Translated by Michael M. Bernet. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Cohen, Hertzel. ʸʥʤʨ ʹʩʹ ʩʰʡʠ. Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2004. Cohen, Mario Eduardo. “Un ejemplo de integración a través del idioma, Los sefarditas de habla judeoespañola en América Latina.” Cervantes.es, Congreso internacional de las lenguas españolas. 2010. http://congresosdelalengua.es/valparaiso/ponencias/politica_economia _soci edad/cohen_mario_e.htm. Díaz-Mas, Paloma. Sephardim, the Jews from Spain. Edited and translated by George K. Zucker. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992.

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Laredo, Abraham. Los orígenes de los judíos de Marruecos. Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2007. Larrea Palacín, Arcadio de. Romances de Tetuán. Recogidos y transcritos. Vol. I. Madrid: I.D.E.A. 1952. Levy, Solly. El libro de Selomó. Madrid: Hebraica Ediciones, 2008. Ortega, Manuel L. Los hebreos en Marruecos. Madrid: Editorial hispano africana. 1919. Pimienta, Gladys and Sidney Pimienta. 1860-1883 Libro de actas de la junta selecta de la comunidad hebrea de Tánger. Paris-Jerusalem: Jem Y Erez, 2010. Pinto-Abecasis, Nina. ʧʩʹʡ ʸʥʬʷʬʥʴʥ ʸʥʮʥʤ ,ʭʩʩʥʰʩʫ :ʤʹʩʠʤ ʩʶʧʥ ʵʤʥʢʮʤ ,ʱʥʥʨʤ ʤʩʩʺʫʧʤ ʩʸʡʥʣʥ ʯʠʥʨʩʨ ʩʣʥʤʩ ʬʹ ʭʥʩʭʥʩʤ. Jerusalem: Ben-Zvi institute, 2014. Séphiha, Haïm Vidal. “Judeo-Spanish, Birth, Death and Re-birth.” In Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, a European Heritage, ed. Nathan Weinstock, Haʀm Vidal Séphiha and Anita Barrera – Schoonheere, 2341. Brussels: European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages, 1997. —. “Hablas ibéricas de los sefardíes tras de la expulsión (1942) (hispanohablantes, judeo-españohablantes y lusohablantes).” In Los sefardíes de ayer y de hoy. Edited by Richard Ayoun and Haʀm Vidal Séphiha. Translated by Tomás Onaindía, 328-338. Edaf : Madrid, 2002. Vilar, Juan BTA. Tetuan En el resurgimiento judío contemporáneo (1850-1870). Caracas: Biblioteca Popular Sefardi, 1985. Weich-Shahak, Susana. Moroccan Sephardic Romancero: Anthology of an Oral Tradition. Translated by Vanessa Paloma Elbaz. Santa Fe: Gaon Books, 2013. Zafrani, Haim. Two Thousand Years of Jewish Life in Morocco. Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House, 2005.

PART TWO: HISTORY

COPING WITH NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRANSFORMATIONS: LADINO IN THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND EARLY TURKISH REPUBLIC CEREN ABI UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Ladino1 in the late nineteenth century Ottoman Empire and in the early decades of the Turkish Republic has an intertwined relationship with Ottoman Turkish, French, and modern Turkish languages. This relationship reflects the transformations of the nineteenth century that changed the social, cultural, political, and economic circumstances of the Ottoman Empire and its languages. In this paper I will follow the impact of these changes on languages of Ottoman and later Turkish Jews. I will show continuity and change both in the state policies as well as the policies of the Jewish community. Sephardic Jews came to the Ottoman Empire in the 15th century. There were already indigenous Greek-speaking Jewish populations called the Romaniots in the Empire as well as Arab, Georgian, and Kurdish Jews. However, by the 17th century Romaniots mostly were merged with the Sephardic Jews and took their language. Under the Ottoman administration they were ruled under the Millet system, which divided the peoples of the empire into religious groups headed by specific institutions that were responsible for them. For the Jewish millet it was the institution of Hahambaúlk. The Jews were considered one of the “peoples of the book” (along with Christians and Muslims) and were, therefore, allowed to teach their children their own languages, have religious institutions, and

1

Ladino’s current speakers refer to the language by various names in the contemporary Turkish state. From most popular to least, these are: Ispanyolca, Judeo-Espanyol, Ladino, Musevice, Judezmo, Sefaradca and Yahudice. Altabev, Mary. Judeo-Spanish in the Turkish Social Context: Language Death, Swan Song, Revival or New Arrival. Istanbul: Isis, 2003, 53.

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their own courts. Nevertheless, they were considered second class subjects under the Muslim empire. In the nineteenth century the Empire went through great changes. Facing internal and external troubles, the Empire started a series of reforms which culminated in the Tanzimat reforms in the second half of the nineteenth century and the introduction of the constitution. The Tanzimat reforms were aimed at the reorganization of the Empire along Westernized lines to improve the standing of the Ottoman state vis-à-vis the European powers and, at the same time, improve the empire’s domestic strength by unifying its subjects as equal citizens who would embrace the Ottoman state and Ottoman identity. In this citizen-creation project, education became a very important tool to inculcate the values and qualities that the Ottoman state desired and to fight against foreign influences. Accordingly, the state started establishing public schools and regulated the education system, including the educational institutions that belonged to the non-Muslims. This Ottoman citizenship project, which was used both by Sultan Abdulhamit II as well as the Young Turk movement, promised equality to all, yet by and large argued for Turkish and Muslim dominance in the Ottoman identity. Meanwhile, influenced by the nineteenth century transformations in the world and in the empire, a group of Ottoman Jews of Italian descent– but who were called the Francos– started an initiative to provide modern education to the “Oriental” Jews. The increased European economic presence in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as the growing involvement of Western Jews with the affairs of their Eastern coreligionists, brought the Francos into close contact with the new political and economic developments affecting world Jewry. In outlook and ideology, the natural allies of the Western European Jewish elite, soon came to accept the reforming impulse of the latter vis-à-vis their brethren in the East whom they considered less fortunate. They included Ottoman Turkish classes in their schools, which were opened in the 1850s. The Alliance Israélite Universelle, in establishing schools in the 1860s in the Empire, also showed similar impulses for reform. The Alliance aimed to emancipate the Jews and make them an integral part of their societies. The language of education was French. Nonetheless, their curricula included Ottoman Turkish classes and, to underline the unity of the Jews, Hebrew classes as well. On the stamp of the Galata Schools for Boys for example, there are three languages: French, Ottoman Turkish, and Hebrew.2 2

BOA, MF. MGM. 7/29.

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On the other hand, the Alliance looked down on Ladino and did not include the language in the curriculum. It was even banned in 1884 by the Alliance’s Central Committee. Nonetheless, Ladino did not disappear. It is even possible to come across schoolbooks from this period written in Ladino. øzak Yeúuva Efendi argued to publish a book on Ottoman history in Ladino in early twentieth century. He claimed that it was a necessity because Ottoman history books were in Ottoman Turkish, which Jewish pupils did not understand as well as Ladino. Or, they had to read some other books that were written by foreigners. This was the reason he wanted to publish the “Nosyonas Somaryas dela Istorya de el Imperyo Otomano,” (A Short History of the Ottoman Empire) and to make it a compulsory textbook at Jewish schools. Yeúuva Efendi was ultimately granted permission to publish his book.3 Moreover, the Ladino press continued to grow; in 1913 for example there were 389 periodicals in Ladino in Turkey and in the Balkans.4 Why did the Ottoman Jews accept education in French and Ottoman Turkish? One possible answer may lie in the rapid changes of the nineteenth century and the upward mobility that modern education promised. As for the demand for knowledge of Ottoman Turkish, it is possible that the Jewish elites considered this an opportunity to step into the role of the Greeks, who lost their elite political role with their independence from the Ottoman Empire, and of the Armenians, whose relationship with the state was getting more tense every day. An example of this last point can be seen in the following excerpt from a letter by Gabriel Arié, the principal of the Izmir Alliance School in the late 1890s: For the Jews of Turkey, this is the most favorable moment to seize hold of some influence over the affairs of this country. Did not the Greeks govern Turkey for three centuries? Since 1821, they have been set aside, and the Armenians are in turn losing the confidence of the Turks through their conspiracies, their revolutionary newspapers, etc. Why could not the Jews find themselves in a position to receive the inheritance of the Armenians? If they knew the language of the country well, why could not they succeed just as well as the Armenians, since they are a hundred times more intelligent?5

It is difficult to know how many of the Jews of the Ottoman Empire subscribed to the idea of replacing Armenians and Greeks. However, the 3

BOA, MF. MKT. 580/11, 18 Muharrem 1319 [7 May 1901], petition of Izak Yesuva Efendi. The permission was granted in July 1901. 4 Stein, Jewish History, Vol.16, No.3 Ladino Print Culture (2002), 226. 5 Benbassa & Rodrigue, A Sephardi, 138. The letter dated from 24 July 1894.

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socio-economic and cultural conditions of the Jews did change. French became the daily language of the middle and upper class Jews along with Ladino. The Alliance and its French education not only altered the socioeconomic conditions of the Jews but also altered their cultural milieu, allowing them to be closer to European currents. Yet another reason for the acceptance of Ottoman Turkish by the Ottoman Jews seems to lay in the rhetoric of the “welcoming Ottoman Empire” that allowed Sephardic Jews to the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century. An example of this ever-popular rhetoric, which was used by Jews (Ottoman or otherwise) and by the Ottoman state, can be found in an 1892 letter sent by the Alliance’s Central Committee to Sultan Abdulhamit II of the Ottoman Empire: Sir, In the spring of 1492, the Jews who were expelled from Spain found refuge in Turkey. While they were oppressed in the world, they had, in the states of your glorious ancestors, a protection that has never stopped. It allowed them to live safely, to work and to develop. Sir, this tradition has been kept in your reign. The Jews have had, in your Majesty, a protector whose kindness was manifested in all His deeds. They strive to be worthy. In their schools, that Alliance Israélite Universelle supports, children are raised in the love of their country and loyalty to His sovereign. They learn and prepare to make themselves useful in agriculture, commerce, industry and science. Your Majesty gives to these institutions incessant evidence of His care and His goodness. Jews remember the blessings of the past; they are full of gratitude for the present (...). 6

Finally, it can be argued that the rise of Zionism and the Ottoman Empire’s rejection of it contributed to the tendency of the empire’s Jewish population to follow the Alliance way in assimilating to the society that they were in.

1. Word War I and Beyond: Homogenizing and Nationalizing Projects of the Republic of Turkey World War I led to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of the Turkish Republic in 1923 after a long war of independence. The new state wanted to differentiate itself from the Ottoman Empire and 6

Bulletin Semestriel de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle, second series, n.17, 1st and 2nd semesters of 1892, 47-48.

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defined itself as a nation-state. This change from the empire to the nationstate entailed major transformations. The state was now much more homogenous due to causes like loss of Arab provinces and genocide. The years of war against the European powers brought a substantial degree of xenophobia and suspicion. The first decades of the Turkish Republic were thus catastrophic for the Jewish populations due to the fact that they were constantly asked to prove their loyalty: linguistically, physically, and monetarily. They were accused of being ungrateful to the nation. And, they were persecuted in social, cultural, economic, and political life. Language, which Turkey’s leaders defined as one of the manifestations of a nation’s identity, gained great importance in the first decades of the Republic. The state established, for example, the Turkish Language Association in the 1930s; one of its main duties was to “purify” the language from foreign words. This was also around the time when the Sun Language Theory appeared. This ideological rather than scientific theory argued that the Turkish language was the mother of all languages. Accordingly, the Turkish state embarked on a project of Turkification of its minorities, both Muslim and Non-Muslim (as well as Turkifying the Turkish-Muslim populations with the “right kind” of Turkishness). For the Jewish community this project took many forms. First of all, the institutions of the Jewish community were weakened or eradicated. The institution of the Hahambaúlk and the community schools that were attached to it were weakened not only because of the employment of the secularist principle of the Turkish Republic but also in order to undermine the unity of the community. For example, the state required the employment of Turkish teachers with extremely high wages. Some schools closed down because they couldn’t pay. The Alliance schools were closed due to the national unification of education. Meanwhile, the Jewish community was forced to renounce the articles of the Treaty of Lausanne– the peace treaty that ended the war and acknowledged the establishment of the Turkish republic–that oversaw the protection of minorities. Article 39 in Section III of the Treaty gave minorities the right to speak in any language they deemed fit: No restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language in private intercourse, in commerce, religion, in the press, or in publications of any kind or at public meetings. Notwithstanding the existence of the official language, adequate facilities shall be given to Turkish nationals of non-Turkish speech for the oral use of their own language before the Courts.

As well as establishing and maintaining their own schools:

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Turkish nationals belonging to non-Moslem minorities shall enjoy the same treatment and security in law and in fact as other Turkish nationals. In particular, they shall have an equal right to establish, manage and control at their own expense, any charitable, religious and social institutions, any schools and other establishments for instruction and education, with the right to use their own language and to exercise their own religion freely therein. 7

However, this was not to be. From 1928 until the 1960s, the state carried out the “Vatandaú Türkçe Konuú!” (Citizen, Speak Turkish!) campaign. This was a thinly veiled threat to all non-Turkish speakers. While this campaign was directed towards all minorities, the Ladino and French speaking Jewish citizens were persecuted the most since they were the most numerous and visible non-Muslim minority in the Republic. Apart from endless harassment, there were punishments and pressures. Many were dismissed from public offices as well as private businesses. These punishments and pressures were also a result of economic competition. The Turkish state was trying to create a “Turkish bourgeoisie” and thus trying to curb the language advantage of the Jewish citizens and using the accusations of ungratefulness to persecute them. They were being accused of being ungrateful to a country which “welcomed them with open arms” and yet, insisted in speaking the language of the country that expelled them. In response to all these developments, Jewish elites accommodated the demands of the state by establishing many institutions to teach Turkish to the Ladino-speaking community, along with encouraging them to send their children to the public schools–where instruction was in Turkish. The Jewish community started to Turkify their names as well. The Ladino press encouraged assimilation as well. For example, according to El Tiempo, “learning Turkish was a duty of citizenship and a wonderful opportunity to show allegiance to the state that embraced the Jews with open arms after the expulsion from Spain in 1492.”8 Thus, it was considered a way to participate in the political system of the state as well as to show allegiance. Anther response was migration out of Turkey. This accelerated with the Second World War and beyond. The remaining Ladino-speaking community increasingly used the Turkish language and Ladino witnessed real erosion. 7

http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Treaty_of_Lausanne Stein, Ottomanism in Ladino EUI Working paper, San Domenico: Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, Mediterranean Programme Series, 2002), 10-13. 8

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Nonetheless, despite the tireless efforts of the Turkish Republic to suppress Ladino, it has survived. The rhetoric of the “welcoming arms of the Ottoman Empire/Turkish Republic” survived as well. The other myth that claimed that the Jewish people did not make any effort to learn Turkish no longer is viable since assimilation (as well as the suppression of the Ladino language) was “successful”.

2. Conclusions The history of Ladino in the Ottoman lands at the end of the nineteenth century and in the Turkish Republic urges one to look at continuity and change. It is easiest to see the continuity and change in the state policy. While the empire encouraged Turkish education while keeping Ladino intact, the republic couldn’t tolerate its survival. Meanwhile, there is continuity too, especially about the myth of the welcoming Ottoman lands and the underlying demand for the loyalty of a community, which even after centuries, is still considered as outsiders. It is harder to examine language choice policies of the Ottoman and later Turkish Jewish community. First, even though I have used the Jewish community as a short hand in this paper, it is necessary to differentiate groups within the community, including but not limited to the rural/urban divide, class and occupational differences as well as differences of religious sects. Second, there is much less research on the experiences of the Ottoman and Turkish Jews compared to the body of work devoted to the general policies of the Ottoman Empire and Republic of Turkey. Nevertheless, it is possible to point out some elements of continuity and changes in Jewish policies, keeping in mind all of the previously mentioned caveats. For one thing, there were continuous efforts on the side of the Ottoman/Turkish Jews to learn the dominant language, but they were naturally and rightfully reluctant to give up their own language. Secondly, even though the aim to teach and learn Ottoman Turkish remained active but very limited during the Ottoman Empire, during the Turkish Republic everyone learned Turkish. Most of the current Jewish population in Turkey does not actively speak Ladino, notwithstanding the efforts of the Ladino press and Jewish community institutions. The project to learn Ottoman/Turkish was meaningful because it shows that the Ottoman and Turkish Jews were aware of the political, social, and cultural changes and also that they were participating in such. Regardless of the state projects, pressures, and punishments, they were agents of their own destiny.

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References Altabev, Mary. Judeo-Spanish in the Turkish Social Context: Language Death, Swan Song, Revival or New Arrival. Istanbul: Isis, 2003. Benbassa, Esther and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries Jewish Communities in the Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press; Subsequent edition 2000. Bulletin Semestriel de l’Alliance Israélite Universelle second series, no. 17 (1892): 47-48. "Treaty of Peace with Turkey Signed at Lausanne, July 24, 1923." Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Treaty_of_Lausanne. Prime Ministry Ottoman Achieves Istanbul: BOA, MF. MGM. 7/29, BOA, MF. MKT. 580/11. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. "Ladino Print Culture." Jewish History 6, no. 3 (2002): 225- 33. "Ottomanism in Ladino EUI Working Paper." San Domenico: Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies, 2002.

FRENCH VS. JUDEO-SPANISH: AN OVERVIEW OF THE ALLIANCE ISRAÉLITE UNIVERSELLE’S LANGUAGE POLICY IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ANA ûIRIû PAVLOVIû CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY, BUDAPEST

1. Introduction The aim of this article is to reveal how the Alliance influenced the utilization of Judeo-Spanish language through its educational curriculum. I argue that this organization had an enormous impact upon the demise of the language by actively promoting other languages. The latter was embodied in the public display of the Alliance’s members’ opinion and the introduction of French and other languages in the Alliance’s schools, none of them being Judeo-Spanish. What is more, the officials of this international association spared no words in arguing against JudeoSpanish, believing it was not a language but a jargon, incompatible with a modern, civilized and educated Jewish community that they strived to forge in the Orient. Examples of the three major Sephardic centers in the Ottoman Empire—Salonika (Thessaloniki), Smyrna (Izmir), and Adrianople (Edirne)—mirror the dynamics of linguistic acculturation of the community. The principal sources for my analysis are reports of the Alliance’s schools published in the Bulletin d’Alliance Israélite Universelle, the main organ of this organization in the period between 1860 and 1913. In addition, other historic circumstances exerted joint influence upon the decreased utilization of the Sephardic mother-tongue. Namely, the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of nation-states, especially in the Balkans, maximized the pressure on the Sephardim to assimilate and use more a domestic language. Another powerful demand was placed upon

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them at the turn of the century. The Zionist Executive sought to create a rather uniform concept of Jewishness, admitting no Sephardic particularity, and thus being equally hostile to separate Sephardic identity as the AIU. Hence, Judeo-Spanish had three influential opponents: the ideologies of the AIU, the building of nation- states, and Zionism.

2. The Alliance’s “mission civilisatrice” The Alliance Israélite Universelle represents a paradigm of Jewish solidarity. It had the specific purpose to help Jews in need to obtain national citizenship, gain material security, and make “moral progress”.1 After its foundation in 1860 in the French capital,2 the Alliance was primarily focused on advocating for the rights of their brethren in the East and establishing schools in the Orient based on the Western model. These activities were grounded in the belief of its founders that Eastern Jews were backward but could be “regenerated” through achieving political rights and having access to a proper education.3 Although it was an international organization with members living throughout the world, it was controlled by French Jews, which was mirrored in the very ideology of the Alliance. It embraced French republican values, among which secularization had a special place. In addition, the language of instruction in the schools was always French. What is more, the Alliance developed a strong diplomatic activity, advocating for the rights of their less fortunate brethren. For Balkan Jewry, their engagement at the Berlin Congress played a decisive role in promoting and ensuring their rights in front of the countries just gaining their independence. In fact, newly recognized states had to agree to respect their Jewish minorities by a contract with the Great Powers. One could assume that the Alliance actively promoted a better integration of Jews in the local societies, since in the teaching curriculum for boys

1

See “The Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860-1895)”, in Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, eds., The Jew in the Modern World, a Documentary History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 317-21. 2 In 1791, French Jewry was the first in Europe to be emancipated, that is, to become equal citizens. Additionally, they enthusiastically embraced the achievements of the French Revolution, endeavoring to apply the same model on the Sephardim of the Orient. 3 Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in the Nineteenth- Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 159.

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there were always one or more local languages.4 If one counts, that would be at least three languages taught in the school, that is to say, French, Hebrew, and one or two local ones. In the nineteenth century, JudeoSpanish was a language of the great majority of Turkish Jewry, excluding the relatively small Ashkenazi community. Rather surprisingly, most of the leaders of Turkish Jewry argued for the abandonment of the language of their forefathers,5 and precisely at the time of its renaissance, since “there was an explosion in Judeo-Spanish literary and journalistic activity”.6 They regarded this language as useless and anomalous, described it as “miserable” and “mean”, thus a part of the “civilizing mission” was to eradicate the language that was incompatible with modern civilization.7 Conversely, it is beyond any doubt that the organization “was very much the product of time and place”8 as the negative vision of the Orient was common-place in nineteenth century Western Europe. As the historian Aron Rodrigue indicates, the West European Jews assumed their moral superiority, as they had greatly benefited from the Industrial revolution maximizing their material achievements. Therefore, their mission in the Ottoman Empire was “a paternalist one” and is probably best described by the work of Isidore Loeb, a distinguished Judaic scholar and secretary of the AIU Central Committee (1869-92), who believed that Oriental Jews were “children, thoughtless, light-minded, superficial.”9 Moïse Fresco, a renowned member of the Alliance, director of its schools, and ardent opponent of Judeo-Spanish, pictorially portrayed his standpoint in one of his reports emphasizing that “Turkish [language] is borrowed, French is a

4

Female schools were usually founded later than male and generally girls did not learn local language. Consequently, their integration in the Ottoman and, afterwards, in the milieu of the newly created nation- states was slower. 5 Aron Rodrigue, “La guerre des langues,” in De l’instruction à l’émancipation: Les enseignants de L’Alliance israélite universelle et les Juifs d’Orient 1860-1939 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1989), 111-17. 6 Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: the Alliance Israélite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860- 1925 (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), 85. Paradoxically, some of those magazines in Judeo-Spanish were financed by the AIU and reflected a cultural mimicry of the Franco-Jewishness. See Sarah Abrevaya Stein,”Creating a taste for news: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish periodicals of the Ottoman Empire”, Jewish History 14 (2000): 9-10. 7 Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews, 85. 8 Ibid., 75. 9 Ibid., 76.

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gala suit, Judeo-Spanish is an old gown for a comfortable room where one feels at one’s ease”.10 The impact of the Alliance on the educational improvement and material welfare of Turkish Jewry is unquestionable. In the 1880s the Alliance had about 30 schools11 in the Ottoman territory, while in 1912 the number had grown to 115 schools and the total amount of students was about 19,000.12 Consequently, as Rodrigue affirms, the Empire was the main center of the Alliance’s educational activities,13 where the latter organization was a relevant catalyst of social amelioration by improving educational prospects of the local Jewry. However, it was not without bias because, while actively advocating against Judeo-Spanish, it affected the Ottoman Sephardic self-perception and self-esteem, leading them to believe that the language of their ancestors was inferior and unworthy, juxtaposing it always with French.

3. The Dynamics of Language Preferences The Bulletin d’Alliance Israélite Universelle was published annually and biannually and contained valuable information and reports about schools, decisions of the Centrale, detailed lists of members, and other useful data. This makes it a sine qua non reference point for researchers for it is a window into the Sephardic world in the Orient, no matter how small these communities might have been. The Bulletin’s 1893 issue informs that the syllabus concerning the studies was, in the beginning, somewhat uniform but it underwent changes, according to the needs of the respective country or region, in order to promote better integration with mainstream society. In the Ottoman Empire, Turkish was taught in all the male schools of the Alliance, and there was an effort to overcome the difficulties of teaching languages and especially the deficiency of competent professors. The same 10

Rodrigue, De l’instruction à l’émancipation, 115. Georges Weill, Émancipation et progrès: L’Alliance israélite universelle et les droits de l’homme (Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle, 2000),199. 12 Avigdor Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton, New Jersey: The Darwin Press, 1992), 164. Other authors, such as Aron Rodrigue suggest that the number of schools in this period was 108, see Aron Rodrigue, “Jewish Society and Schooling in a Thracian Town: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Demotica, 1867- 1924”, Jewish Social Studies, 45 (Summer-Fall 1983): 264. 13 Rodrigue, “Jewish Society and Schooling in a Thracian Town: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Demotica, 1867- 1924,” Jewish Social Studies, 45 (Summer-Fall 1983): 264. 11

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issue contains reports that in Asian Turkey, Tunisia, and Morocco, Arabic was taught by particular professors, while German, English, Italian, and Spanish were introduced alike in the AIU’s institutions throughout the Ottoman Empire, Middle East and Northern Africa.14 The following table shows the number of language teachers and students in the schools of three communities—Salonika, Smyrna, and Adrianople. The years 1882, 1901, 1906, and 1912 are chosen with respect to data availability, as they appeared in the Bulletin.15 Notes for Table: 1 The reports sometimes included a reference “other”, denoting usually the Talmud Torah schools, which were a separate entity. 2 These languages were taught by teachers, it does not necessarily reflect their nationality. 3 An evident shift from rabbis to Hebrew professors in the teaching personnel reflects the overall Alliance’s secularization strategy to provide an education that would be less based on religion while still maintaining the importance of Hebrew language. 4 The data displayed are from the year 1903 since those from 1901 for Salonika were not available.

14

Bulletin d’Alliance Israélite Universelle, January 02, 1893, 68-9, last accessed June 23, 2014, http://www.jpress.org.il/Default/Skins/TAUEn/Client.asp?Skin=TAUEn&enter=tr ue&sPublication=BUL&Publication=BUL&Hs=advanced&AppName=2&AW=14 03858307759. 15 The report in the Bulletin usually contained only statistical data about the Alliance’s schools, leaving the interpretation and explanation of their meaning to researchers and historians.

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Table 7.1 Number of students and language teachers in Salonika, Smyrna, and Adrianople; source: Bulletin d’Alliance Israélite Universelle

Salonika, the biggest Sephardic community in the Empire, was the most illustrative of the linguistic diversity introduced in the schools of the Alliance. Since the second half of the nineteenth century when the school for boys was founded, the teaching personnel consisted of teachers of Italian, Turkish, and Greek, also including rabbis who taught Hebrew. However, at the turn of the century, instead of Greek, German and English were included in the educational scheme. In Smyrna, boys had classes in Turkish, English, and Hebrew. According to available reports from this city, in the Talmud Torah schools, boys received classes in Hebrew, French, and Turkish.16 In comparison, the school of Adrianople, which had

16

BAIU, January 01, 1901, 138.

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the highest number of students, about one thousand on the eve of the Great War, had teachers of German, Hebrew, and Turkish.17 Apart from promoting languages other than Judeo-Spanish, the schools reduced the importance of religion. The increasing demand for the secularization at the beginning of the 1900s had an obvious repercussion. Namely, not only in Salonika, Smyrna and Adrianople, but also in almost all the Alliance’s schools in the given period, rabbis were replaced by Hebrew professors in both male and female institutions. At the turn of the twentieth century, the Alliance’s schools enabled Sephardic female education in the Orient for the first time. It was a decisive step forward for Sephardic women. However, the beginnings were rather modest if one compares their curricula with the male schools. As a general rule, girls received regular instruction in sewing, French, and one additional language, usually not the domestic one. For decades, the primary purpose of their education was not their factual empowerment, but their preparation for marriage. The syllabi of the female schools in Salonika during the 1880s are exceptional in terms of the quantity of languages introduced. Besides French, girls studied under teachers of Italian and Spanish. In the following years, only teachers of Italian appeared in the reports sent by the school to the Alliance’s Centrale.18 On the eve of the Balkan Wars (191213), girls learned Turkish and German.19 Strangely enough, Turkish was not normally taught in the female schools, however this undertaking in Salonika represented the effort to integrate Sephardic women in the overall society, since their male counterparts had been learning Turkish starting from the foundation of the first schools with the same goal. In Smyrna, girls were taught Hebrew and English courses, depending on the year when they attended classes.20 The girls of the biggest school, the one in Adrianople, learned only Hebrew. Based on the insight into the reports published in the Bulletin, one can conclude that boys were more exposed than girls to linguistic acculturation, since their teaching curricula comprised of a variety of languages. The superiority of French was assumed in most of contemporary Europe. Furthermore, female and male Sephardim alike interiorized the French language and culture as both dominant and elevated, given that it was the language of their brethren who founded and largely financed their schools. The latter understood the gradual retreat of 17

BAIU, January 01, 1901, 125. BAIU, January 01, 1906, 138-39. 19 BAIU, January 01, 1912, 120. 20 BAIU, January 01, 1906, 140. 18

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Judeo-Spanish, characterized as unsophisticated, from the public to private sphere, and indeed, for most of the Sephardic communities of the time, family was one of the last bastions of their distinctive Judeo-Spanish culture.

4. Conclusion The arrival of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in the Ottoman territory produced significant social changes among the local Jewry in various ways. First of all, it helped their faster integration in Ottoman society by enforcing the instruction of the Turkish language. Further, the Alliance contributed to the more rapid modernization of the Ottoman Sephardim by secularizing education. Together with plurilingualism, it enabled greater social and occupational mobility of local Jews, which would eventually maximize their chances for progress of every kind. Finally, and perhaps the most dramatic change introduced by this organization was the foundation of schools for girls in the last decades of the nineteenth century, pioneering female education in the Ottoman Jewish community. However, the Alliance propagated the demise of the Sephardic mothertongue, Judeo-Spanish, considering it as backward and useless. Besides the local language, numerous others were part of the syllabi, dominated by French, which was regarded as the most distinguished. Gradually, the Ottoman Sephardim themselves interiorized that Judeo-Spanish was a sign of their inferiority, while the French language and culture of their Western brethren denoted education, respectability and progress. Furthermore, a number of other factors contributed to the decreased utilization of the Sephardic language. During the long nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent a piecemeal disintegration, allowing the creation of nation-states, and thus producing the greater assimilation of the local Jewries. The linguistic adaptation and shift from Judeo-Spanish to local languages, which was promoted by the Alliance in the Empire, continued in the newly created states. Additionally, this eventful epoch was marked by an influential pan-Jewish ideology, Zionism, favoring the concept of one people for all Jews, which meant there was no place for a special Sephardic identity and their own language. Ultimately, the Shoah annihilated almost all Sephardic communities in the Balkans, particularly in the territories of Greece and Yugoslavia. It inevitably changed the local demographic landscape and, even more, endangered the transmission of Sephardic heritage (and language) to the following generations.

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References Antébi, Élizabeth. Les Missionaires juifs de la France 1860-1939. Paris: Calmann- Lévy, 1999. Benbassa, Esther and Aron Rodrigue, eds. A Sephardi Life in the Southeastern Europe: the Autobiography and Journal of Gabriel Arié 1863-1939. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1998. Borovaya, Olga. “Jews of Three Colors: The Path to Modernity in the Ladino Press at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s.15, 1 (Fall 2008): 110-30. Bulletin d’ Alliance Israélite Universelle 1860-1913, last acessed June 23, 2014. http://www.jpress.org.il/Default/Skins/TAUEn/Client.asp?Skin= TAUEn&enter=true&sPublication=BUL&Publi cation=BUL&Hs=advanced&AppName=2&AW=1403858307759. Kaspi, André, ed. Histoire de l’Alliance israélite universelle de 1860 à nos jours. Paris: Armand Colin, 2010. Laskier, Michael M. The Alliance israélite universelle and the Jewish Communities of Morroco 1862-1962. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Leff, Lisa Moses. Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth- Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Levy, Avigdor. The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire. Princeton: The Darwin Press, 1992. Mendes-Flohr, Raul R. and Jehuda Reinharz, eds. “The Alliance Israélite Universelle (1860-1895),” in The Jew in the Modern World, a Documentary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995 : 317321. Rodrigue, Aron. “Jewish Society and Schooling in a Thracian Town: The Alliance Israélite Universelle in Demotica, 1867- 1924.” Jewish Social Studies, 45 (Summer-Fall 1983): 263-286. —. De l’instruction à l’émancipation: Les enseignants de L’Alliance israélite universelle et les Juifs d’Orient 1860-1939. Paris: CalmannLévy, 1989. —. French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Israéite Universelle and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 1860- 1925. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. Schwarzfuchs, Simon, ed. L’ “Alliance” dans les communautés du bassin méditerranéen à la fin du 19ème siècle et son influence sur la

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situation sociale et culturelle. Jérusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1987. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. ”Creating a taste for news: Historicizing JudeoSpanish periodicals of the Ottoman Empire.” Jewish History, 14 (2000): 9- 28. Weill, Georges. Émancipation et progrès: L’Alliance israélite universelle et les droits de l’homme. Paris: Alliance Israélite Universelle, 2000. Winter, Jay. “Réne Cassin and the Alliance Israélite Universelle.” Modern Judaism 32, 1 (February 2012): 1-21.

A PILGRIMAGE TO A PERSONALITY: DOÑA GRACIA MENDES RIFKA COOK NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

“Rabot banot asu hayil, veat alit al kulana”. [Many women have done worthily, but you surpass them all]. Proverbs 31: 10-31. The purpose of this paper serves to share with you part of my research relating to an extraordinary Sephardi woman from the sixteenth century known as Doña Gracia Mendes. Rather than merely presenting her biography, I intend to describe, in particular, her remarkable courage and the values we have received from her legacy. I invite you, my readers, to travel with me to her hearth and her heart, and hope to trace her footsteps through two separate parts of this paper. First, I will offer a brief description of the political and historical period in which Doña Gracia first appeared. I will also describe in detail this intriguing female personage, including the various names by which she is known, as well as her journey from Portugal, the country of her birth, to Turkey, her last port-of-call. Secondly, I will present one responsa (term used to refer to an exchange of letters in which one party consults another on a matter of Jewish law), which reveals tacitly her life and is written in the language the Jews of that period used as their spoken and written language in their everyday life. It is my desire, at the conclusion of this paper, to leave the door open for continuing research on this topic. The year 1492 is familiar to all of us. Among other events that took place then, it was also the year in which the Jews were expelled from Spain by the document known as Expulsion Edict or Alhambra Decree issued on March 31, 1492 by the Spanish Monarchs. The Edict expresses

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that “No Jews were permitted to remain within the Spanish Kingdom, and the Jew who wished to convert was welcome to stay.”1 Many Jews believed that, by accepting the new religion (Christianity), their lives would be more tranquil and pleasant. Nevertheless, several Jews decided to escape from the horrors of the Inquisition. They settled in Portugal, Israel, Italy, and in countries under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Some of them moved to Portugal, where they were able to profess their Jewish religion, at least, until 1497, the year in which the son of King Juan II asked the Spanish King for the hand of his daughter in marriage. Nevertheless, there was a condition placed on this union: the princess demanded that all the Jews of Portugal be expelled. Consequently, some Jews in the region, even when they accepted Christianity, professed Judaism secretly. This group of Jews was identified as Marranos or New Christians. Among Jewish communities they are often known as anusim2. Among these anusim were members of the Mendes and de Luna families. Years later, in 1528, these families came together through the marriage of Beatriz de Luna and Francisco Mendes. Having pinpointed the historical context in which Doña Gracia appeared, we turn to the next segment of this article. Who was this extraordinary woman? Gracia Nasi Mendes was born in Portugal, in 1510, from an anus (the singular of anusim) family. Her parents came to Portugal in 1492, after fleeing the atrocities of the Inquisition. As time went on, she became known by different names. At birth, she received the name of Beatriz de Luna Miques. In 1528, she married Francisco Mendes, and changed her name to Beatriz Mendes. Before Francisco died in 1535, he left a will appointing her and his daughter Reyna as recipients to his fortune. In 1537, Doña Gracia Mendes fled from Portugal with her daughter Reyna and her sister Brianda, and arrived in Antwerp [Belgium], where they stayed with Diogo, Gracia’s brother-in-law. Two years later, Diogo married Gracia’s sister Brianda. They had one daughter, and she was called “La Chica.” Before Diogo died, in 1543, he had appointed Doña Gracia as the guardian of Brianda and La Chica. While she was in Antwerp, Doña Gracia invited her nephew Joao Miques [also known as Joseph Nasi] to work with her. He was appointed as a partner in their business. Moreover, she also took his last name – also using her Hebrew name Hanna, now choosing to be called Hanna Mendes 1

The Edict of Expulsion of the Jews - 1492 Spain. http://www.sephardicstudies.org/ decree.html. (Viewed August 4, 2013). 2 For more information about the concept of anusim, see Encyclopedia Judaica, Among the especially useful works cited there is Netanyahu, Benzion. Marranos of Spain from the late 14th to the early 16th Centuries. Vol. I (1966), 170-74.

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Nasi. Two years later, in 1545, Doña Gracia was forced to leave Antwerp after King Charles V asked Gracia’s daughter to marry a noble of his court. Gracia and her daughter, along with her sister Brianda and her daughter, moved to Venice, where she stayed for two more years, until her sister accused her in keeping with Jewish traditions. What were Brianda’s intentions? Was it to receive the inheritance, which her husband had left to her and her daughter; or to live the frivolous life of Venice in 1547 and not be under the tutelage of her sister? As a result of Brianda’s accusation, the Italian government confiscated all the possessions of both sisters. Moreover, Brianda was similarly accused of Judaizing. Later, with the help of Dr. Moses Hamon, the personal physician of the Sultan Suleiman of Turkey, Gracia managed to get out of jail with her daughter, sister, and niece. However, instead of going directly to Turkey, she decided to spend sometime in Ferrara. During this time, Benvenida Avrabanel, was one of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish women in the early Renaissance. She married her cousin Rabbi Samuel. While Doña Gracia was in Ferrara, she met Benvenida, and together, they created a charity center to help her fellow Jews. At the same time, Doña Gracia also sponsored several works of art by both Michelangelo and Titian. During her stay, the well-known Bible of Ferrara—in Ladino, for the Sephardic Jews—was published and dedicated to Doña Gracia. A version in Spanish—for Christians—was likewise published and dedicated to the Duke of Ferrara. It was translated by Yom Tov Athias (whose Christian name was Jerónimo Vargas) and Abraham ben Salomon Usque (whose Christian name was Duarte Pinhel). Finally, in 1552, Doña Gracia, along with her daughter, her sister, and her niece, decided to move to Turkey, accepting the invitation reissued by the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Suleiman the Magnificent. There, Doña Gracia is known, by the Jewish community as “Ha-giveret” (La Señora) because of her benevolent actions towards the Jews, especially during and after one of the darkest and most painful periods in Jewish history: the Spanish Inquisition. In order to illustrate her journey, let us look at the following map3:

3

Cecil Roth, Doña Gracia of the House of the Nasi. The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia-Jerusalem. (1977).

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Figure 8.1 Map indicating Doña Gracia’s life journey

Up until this point, I have described the itinerary of Doña Gracia/Hanna Mendes Nasi/La Señora since her leaving Portugal, up to the point of her arrival in Turkey. We also delineated, in a general manner, the problems and experiences that touched her life during this same period, from the time she fled from Portugal until her arrival as a guest of the Turkish Sultan. The following section of this article refers to the commentary on one of the responsa in which Doña Gracia is tacitly involved. This text is included in the book Avkat Rochel,4 a group of responsa, whose author is Rabbi Joseph Karo. Before analyzing this rabbinical text, let us briefly explore the nature of Jewish life at that time. I will then present some linguistic aspects that I feel are important. I also wish to clarify that, from now on, for purposes of clarity and simplification, I shall use only the name Doña Gracia to refer to this admirable – and amazing – character. The Jews of the Ottoman Empires were organized in kehilot (communities). The members of each kehila (community) lived in proximity to a synagogue and had their own haham (rabbi). Often, the names of these communities were taken from the land of origin of its 4

Yoseph Karo, Avkat Rochel. Edited by Yeruham Fishel (Leipzig, 1859), 69-72. (Viewed August 5, 2013). http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/vl/avkatrochel/avkatrochel10.pdf

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members –for instance, Catalonia, Aragon, and Toledo from Spain, and Lisbon and Evora from Portugal. The practice of retaining the names from their lands of origin served the purpose of preserving the rites, traditions, and languages or dialects embedded in, and associated with, that original region. All of these aspects pertaining to their origin were part of the identity of the newcomers. By the sixteenth century, Constantinople had between 40 and 44 synagogues and 3 Yeshivot (religious studies schools). One of these schools was subsidized by Doña Gracia and Joseph Ha-Nasi. The language adopted by all these communities was Judeo-Spanish, which also assimilated and reconfigured certain words from Hebrew and Turkish. Such adaptations in terms of both their spoken and written languages served these communities well when the inevitable need arose to communicate in quotidian matters – notably, to seek counsel. At that time, it was well-known that, when a person did not know what to do or how to act in the face of a problem, that person would write a letter to the rabbi, who would then decide what to do in that case. For this reason, the people wrote letters to the rabbis of their own localities, or of Israel, describing their situation and waiting for a reply. Upon receiving the letter, the case was analyzed by the rabbi(s) and an answer then was sent to the sender of the original query. Such an analysis and answer to a particular case was known as a responsa. This term, as it was mentioned earlier in this article, refers to an exchange of letters in which one party consults another on a Jewish law matter. Many of these letters were compiled into books under the Hebrew title Sheelot Uteshuvot (ʺˣʡ˒ˇ ʍʺ˒ ʺˣʬʒʠˇ ʍ ) – literally, questions and answers. One of these books, carrying only the title Avkat Rochel,5 was authored by Rabbi Joseph Karo ben Efraim. In this book, as in others, the majority of the responsa utilized Hebrew, with some expressions in Aramaic. Important to note is that the whole text is written in a form of Hebrew characters known as the Rashi script.6 In this paper, I will work with the second version of responsa #80, written in 1859, and edited by Yeruham Fishel. Both versions (1791 and 1859) contain some texts written in Judeo-Spanish as well. The question was received, analyzed, and answered by Rabbi Moshe ben Joseph

5

Ibid. Rashi' is an acronym for Rabbi Shlomo ben Itzhak, also known as rabbi Shlomo Itzhaki. Rashi script is a semi-cursive typeface for the Hebrew alphabet. The typeface (which was not used by Rashi himself) is based on 15th century Sephardic semi-cursive handwriting. Source: http://www.bje.org.au/learning/people/famous/rashi.html (Viewed August 5, 2013.)

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Mitrani, known also as the The Mabit7. After reading this responsa, we can safely infer that is related to Doña Gracia’s sister’s dispute over inheritance. As I have indicated, this particular responsa, the object of my study, is primarily written in Hebrew. It contains, however, four texts in Judeo-Spanish that may capture the interest of the reader. This responsa begins with a sentence in Hebrew, written in Rashi script, and summarized the content of the responsa. ʭʺʡʥʺʫʡ ʭʤ ʭʩʰʺʮʹ ʭʩʠʰʺʡʥ ʭʩʥʢʤ ʺʥʷʥʧʡ ʥʠʹʰʹ ʤʱʥʰʠʥ ʱʥʰʠ ʬʲ ʩʰʠʸʨʮ ʡʸʤ ʺʡʥʹʺ .8ʸʧʠ ʯʩʰʲʡ ʥʩʱʫʰ ʷʬʧʬ ʤʥʩʶ ʥʺʸʩʨʴ ʺʰʩʣʡʥ Translation: “Responsa of Rabbi Moshe Mitrani relating to an anus and an anusa (new Christians/ Marranos) who were united in marriage according to the laws of the gentiles and, under the conditions stipulated in the marriage contract, and at the time of his death, he left instructions to the effect that their properties were to be distributed in different ways."9

Note that, when Rabbi Mitrani presents his case, he alludes to the fact, precisely at the beginning of his answer, that the marriage was not carried out under the Jewish laws. However, we will see that, by offering his judgment at the end of the responsa, he expresses his decision that this marriage must be accepted and respected since it conformed to the laws of the country where the marriage union took place – in this case, Portugal. Thus, the marriage of these two persons, Francisco and Doña Gracia, is legal because it complied with the stipulated laws of Portugal. Moreover, with respect to the assets which Doña Gracia inherited, first from her husband and then from her brother-in-law, it was important to ensure that all the property remain in the family as a matter of principle. As we read further on in the responsa: “This is a usual practice accepted among them [referring to the anusim], in accord with what expresses, or supersedes, conformity to Jewish Law.” After this brief introduction in Hebrew, which might well be regarded as the summary of what developed in the responsa, the rabbi continues to present his case in Hebrew. The content of the case can be summarized as follows: Reuven and Shimon belonged to a group of anusim who were 7 http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/11304-names-personal (Viewed Web. August 5, 2013.) 8 Text is in Meruba (square script) letters. 9 Translation reviewed by Rabbi Kalman Worch of Skokie Kollel, Il. USA, August 2013.

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forced to convert to Christianity as stipulated in the Decree of Alhambra. The responsa presents the marriage of Reuven with Hanna (another anusa), and continues with a detailed description of aspects related to the testament, which Reuven wrote in a foreign language [ʦʲʬ ʯʥʹʬʡ] [bilshon la’az]. It also refers to the marriage of Hanna’s sister (Rivkah), with Shimon, brother of Reuven. The death and testament of Shimon is also included in the content of the responsa. Continuing to read the text, we find a description of Hanna’s travels and the places she visited – for example, England, France, Germany, and other lands. As the reader can see, these traits show clearly that this story is the same story as that of Doña Gracia, who is mentioned with the name Hanna, also alluding to her sister Brianda (Rivkah), as well as to their respective husbands Francisco (Reuven) and Diogo (Shimon). Important to note is that it is a customary practice, in texts such as those of the same nature as responsa, to employ the names of Hanna and Rivkah for females, and Reuven or Shimon for males, in order to protect the original names of the people involved in the case. Another aspect worth mentioning is that, throughout the responsa, there is only one name, which clearly identifies a key person in the matter of this inheritance. I refer to Agustin Enrikes. This name is mentioned only in one of the texts that appear in Judeo-Spanish—to be specific, in the second text. Birnbaum 10 says that Diogo, Francisco Mendes’s brother, designated Abraham Benveniste and Agustin Enrikes to help Doña Gracia in whatever capacity she might need. It increases the mystery surrounding this case that Diogo makes no mention of Brianda, his wife. Perhaps, as we shall see later in Doña Gracia’s story, this is the very perturbance, which precipitated and irritated the problems between the two sisters, the very situation from which the responsa itself evolved, compelling Brianda to pose a question to the rabbi. In summary, we can say that, with all of the above aspects developed in about 8 pages—inscribed in Rashi letters11, with the majority of the texts in Hebrew, and only four texts in Ladino—, Rabbi Mitrani presents this case and delivers his judgment concerning it at the end. The case is exceptionally challenging, and deals with an unusually tender situation, insofar as it concerned the marriage between anusim. In such a situation, matters of inheritance and resolutions arising from it do not lie within Jewish law, but within the law of gentiles. In the next section, I will 10

Birnbaum, Marianna. The long Journey of Gracia Mendes. CEU Press. Central European University Press. Budapest. New York. 2003. Print. 11 http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/Sephardim.html (Viewed August 3, 2013).

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provide an aanalysis of thee aljamiado teexts,12 which aappear in the responsa. I will brieflyy show somee linguistics asspects of the first text. Then, I will include the ttranscription of o the other th hree. This stuudy will incllude the folllowing aspeccts: external structure (formal) of tthe texts, worrds in Hebrew w, some linguisstic features (including the phoneticc, morphologiical, and lexiccal elements fo found in the teexts), and transliteratioon, according to the orthogrraphy used byy the Aki Yeru ushalayim magazine. A As to the extternal structurre of these ttexts: each on ne of the aljamiado texts is intrroduced with h expressionss—whether words w or complete senntences—in Hebrew. H Then, the beginninng of the text in i Ladino is identifiedd with parenthheses. It shoulld be pointed out that only y the first and second aljamiado teexts are enclo osed in parenttheses. The th hird only starts with pparentheses, whereas w there are no parenth theses at the end e of the text. The foourth is not inndicated by parentheses p att all. In each h of these texts, an inttroduction in Hebrew appears with thee complete ex xpression: “ʦʲʬ ʯʥʹʬʡ”” [bilšon la‫ޑ‬aaz] (in a fo oreign languaage)” - or with the abbreviationn “ ʬ"ʦʥ ” [ve ze leshono] (and this is hhis language)).” It can, therefore, bee inferred thaat what follow wed was writteen in Hebrew w, as well. In the text tthat follows, the expressio ons in Hebrew w are underlin ned. Note also the usee of parentheses in this firstt text (with itts transliteratio on on the left). Text A

12

A Spanish ttext written in Rashi R characterrs

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In Text A, we see that the responsa starts with a sentence in Hebrew: ʬ"ʦʥ ʦʲʬ ʯʥʹʬʡ [bilshon laaz ve ze leshono] (in a foreign language, and it is his language). A second noteworthy characteristic of this text is the inclusion of expressions in Hebrew in the middle and at the end. In the middle, there is the sentence: ʤʦʤ ʯʥʹʬʫ "ʠʥʥʶʡ ʣʥʲ ʡʥʺʫʥ ʴ"ʲ [Al pi vekatuv od betsavaa kilshon ha-ze] (orally, and written more in the testament, as in this language) and, at the end of this text, another expression in Hebrew: ʫ"ʲ [ad kan] (until here). It should be noted that, in the 9th line of this text, we also find the initials, in Hebrew: ʣʾʾʰ –Nidón didán (Text in Aramaic, literal translation: “the same theme/subject matter that we are discussing”). In summary, this text starts with a sentence in Hebrew– as can be seen in all other aljamiado texts of this responsa. It begins with the expression: ʬ"ʦʥ [ve ze leshono], as a way to inform the reader that the language will now shift– or that, until this point, the language being used is the “foreign” one. Translation: [These are his words.] I declare that, in all of my estate, my brother Simon should have half; I have another part in what he has of his own. Even if mine, he helped to earn it. This was always my intention. He only did this out of mercy. If he dies childless, I will make my daughter Sara the heir when she becomes of age. [It was also written in his will in this language.] He also says that his wife Chana owns half of his estate, and her daughter Sara is the heiress of two-thirds of the half. They should take whatever necessary of the last third to meet the payments stated in his will, the remainder should be given to his wife Chana. [The end]

In what follows, I present examples illustrating the morphological and lexical aspects found in the responsa. Likewise, I consider it useful to clarify that I will not be working with the phonetic aspect of the text, owing to the following reasons: First, the text with which I am working is not original. Rather, it dates back to 1859, and orthography in the Rashi alphabet differs completely with the Rashi used in this version. Second, the absence of a phonetic alphabet of the time makes it almost, if not entirely, impossible to determine the precise pronunciation of the grapheme employed at that time. Therefore, I have used the phonetic alphabet used by the journal Aki Yerushalayim to transcribe texts in JudeoSpanish.

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Text A

The underlined wordss above: [enlo], [kela], [amii], [asu], [ensu u], [dela], [loke], whicch appear writtten together in i the text, caan also be seeen written separately. T This is indicaated by the other o words uunderlined: [lo o ke], [en su]. Thereffore, as we have seen, a prepositionn (en/a/de) orr relative pronoun [kee] can be fouund either wriitten togetherr or written separately s from a pronooun [lo], an arrticle [la], or an a adjective [ssu]. In the abbove text, the adverbial sufffix -mente (onnly) appears written w in a single woord—solamennte [ʩʨʰʩʮʤʬʥʱ], or divided iinto two worrds—sola mente [ʩʨʰʩʮ ʠʬʥʱ]13, a forrm commonly y found in doccuments dating back to the fifteenthh through the seventeenth centuries. c It iss important to o mention that this sufffix originally came from Vulgar V Latin, ffrom the word d “mens” (mind). As H Hernández-Goonzález (2002 2) cited in herr article with reference to the evoluttion of this suuffix: In late Laatin texts, we discover indicaations that thiss noun (mens) moves into the status of a derivational d sufffix, because it is surround ded by adjectivess whose meanning is incom mpatible with tthe literal meeaning. Solamentte (only) can bee understood, att this stage, soleely as only, losiing the original iddea of mind, sppirit (132).

13

Meaning “oonly”

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This change (from lexical status to a grammatical status) can be explained with the term grammaticalisation, which Traugott & König (1991) define as a “dynamic, unidirectional historical process whereby lexical items in the course of time acquire a new status as grammatical, morpho-syntactic forms, and in the process come to code relations that either were not coded before or were coded differently.”14 In other words, this is a process where a word changes its function from lexical status (here from the initial meaning of mind), to a grammatical one (as a suffix), creating the word in Judeo-Spanish (and in Spanish) solamente. Another aspect that should be included in this section is the use of the Hebrew conjunction [ʥ] = “ve” in place of the conjunction in Spanish “y” in the second text: [ʳʱʥʩʥ] = “veYosef”, in the text B of this paper, which I explore at the end of this analysis. I note, however, that this phenomenon occurs only preceding Hebrew words as indicated in our texts.

1. Lexical Aspects In the light of the above analysis, I will comment, in the following section, on aspects related to code switching and the archaisms. Code switching, as used by Weinreich (1953), refers to a process when bilingual individuals switch “from one language to the other according to appropriate changes in speech situation.” 15 Today, this term is used in the area of sociolinguistics. This linguistic phenomenon is very common in JudeoSpanish. It was necessary for the Sephardic Jews to learn the new language of the country to which they came in order to facilitate their communication with the peoples living in there. However, many did not become proficient—another reason why the Judeo-Spanish remained their prominent language for centuries after the expulsion. At the beginning of this analysis, we noted this “switching-code” with the function of introducing the aljamiado text. In other passages within the texts, this linguistic phenomenon can be found, for example, in text B (see appendix), with the insertion of words of Turkish origin- [ʥʮ"ʩʠʥʢ] guemo, which means, in this context, “wealth”, and, in text C (see appendix), we encounter the word [ʠʸʥʨʸʠʨ] tartura meaning “tutor.”

14

Elizabeth Traugott and Ekkerhard König, “The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalisation revisited.” In Traugott and Heine, eds., Vol. 1 (1991), 189. 15 Cited in Rabia Redouane, "Linguistic Constraints on Codeswitching and Codemixing of Bilingual Moroccan Arabic-French Speakers in Canada,” (2005), 1921. www.cascadilla.com/isb4.html.

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2. Archaisms Although this linguistic phenomenon is very common in Judeo-Spanish, we found only the following instances: in the first text, the words [ʩʱʰʠ] ansi16, and [ʱʠʦʩʴʱʩʣ] despezas, which in modern Spanish corresponds to ‘expenses.’ A common aspect in the texts written in Ladino is the use of the word D-s given to refer G-d. In modern Spanish, the [s] is a plural marker, but not in this word. In Judeo-Spanish, however, the word has no plural, since G-d is considered as only one. With this sense in mind, the Sephardim opted to write and pronounce the name of Ha-Shem without the letter [s]. In our responsa, note in text B: [ʩʸʠʣʰʠʮ ʯʥʰ ʥʩʩʣ ʬʩʠ ʩʷ ʥʬ ] ‘whatever G-d does not give (us).’ Until this point, I have offered, in a very general manner, some of the features that can be detected in the texts that we have been analyzing. By way of conclusion, in comparison with modern Spanish, we can identify the differences, especially in the use of some words and the pronunciation of some sounds that are different from the Spanish of today.

3. Conclusions We have seen the historical context in which this remarkable woman, Doña Gracia Mendes, known to many as La Señora, lived. We have also commented on her career since she fled from Portugal with her daughter, sister, and niece, until she arrived in Turkey. We have described the experiences, some pleasant and some not, in her life, and why she received recognition not only from her people, but from important leaders like Sultan Suleyman from the Ottoman Empire. The second point of this article was a focused commentary and brief linguistic analysis of responsa #80, taken from the book Avkat Rojel, by Rabbi Joseph Karo. However, it is suggested that the author of the responsa in question is Rabbi Moshe Mitrani. In spite of the extremely harsh circumstances of her life, including the premature death of her husband, the inquisitional persecution, and the betrayal of her own sister, Doña Gracia stayed faithful to her Jewish religion. She also managed to maintain the economic wealth of her family and keep the family united by the marriage of Joseph Ha-Nasi with her daughter Reina, and Samuel with her niece Gracia la Chica.

16

In modern Spanish así ‘thus’

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Appen ndix To follow aare the transccriptions of th hree Rashi texxts from the responsa. Each of thesse texts is folloowed by a tran nsliteration annd a translatio on. Text B

Transliteeration: Od tsiva S Shimeon 'hanizzkar bisheat petirato, bileshon laaz, veze lesho ono: (i porke mii azienda esta derramada porr muchas i divversas partes para p la kovransa de ayi, kero kee se aga komo fista f aki por lo kual ago mi ku unyada o dela Hana testtamendera paraa ke kon Avraa'ham ve-Yoseef tengan kargo mandar kkovrar solamennte kon el kapittolo esto testam mieto aauten si kado porke yo me kontento de d todo lo ke lo os dichos izieroon kon tanto kee Hana 17 mi kunyaada sea prinsipaal i en falta suy ya lo ke el Dio non mandare enraa e Agustin E Enrikes a vienndo por firmiyii por vaildra [vvalidara] todo lo ke ladicha18 mi kunyada koon los otros izieron sin los pooder tomar en kuenta k o ke lo ningun guuemo19 ni resivvo ni otra djusttisia ninguna poorke yo konfio aran muyy bien, i komo izziera i teno echo o en sus kazienndas).

17

May be it rrefers to the worrd in Hebrew “aain-raa” (evil eyye) Read “la haa dicho” 19 In the conteext means “weaalth” 18

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Translatiion: Even orddered Simon, already a mention ned, at the tim me of his death h in a foreign laanguage, his laanguage. 20 (Because my farm m is distributed d over many diff fferent parts, forr collection fro om there, I wishh that it be don ne as it has beenn done until now. So I make my sisster Chana heiress, h as with A Abraham and Joseph, taking ch harge of sendi ding collect onlly with this chaptter of the will authenticated. a For, I agree withh everything theey did. Thereforee my sister-in-laaw Chana will be the main ben eneficiary. And,, if she is absent,, G-d forbiddenn, enrraa,21 Agustín Enriquez by my authoriization will apprrove everything which the named, n my sisster-in-law, wiith the others, w will do, withoutt taking into acccount any “beenefit”22 or recceiving any justicce, because I trrust that they will w do this welll as they did in n their estates).

Text C

Transliteeration: Od katav beshtar tzavaatto bilshon laaz veze leshono: I deklare ke i po or bien ke la dichha Hana mi kunnyada sea tutorra de la dicha D Dina mi ija i ad demais tartura23 i su azienda astaa dela dicha Dina mi ija sea enn edad de kazarr i dela poder rijirr i a de ministraar. ‘ad kan lesho ono. Translatiion: Even (he)) wrote in his will, w in a foreign n language, whhich is his langu uage: I declare thhat all the well-appointed Ch hana, my sisterr-in-law, is app pointed guardian of my daughteer Dina and gu uardian of the eestate until Din na, my daughter, is of age to be b married and will be able too direct and manage. m And this iis his language..

20 Although in the originaal there are no ot punctuation marks, I add ded in the translations, sso it will be eassy to read. 21 Reads “’ayyin Haraa” (Evill eye) 22 “Güemo” w was translated as a benefit meaniing “wealth” inn this context. 23 Reads “tutoora”

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Text D

Transliteeration: Ve ze lesshono24 i en fallta suya lo ke el Dio no manndare, entrad Agustin A Enrikes. Translatiion: And this is his languagee: And in his absence, a whichh G-d forbid, Agustín A Enríquez will take care of o them25

Epilog gue I hope that tthis article is simply one off many contrib ibutions on this subject and a preludde to other activities relating g to this fascinnating woman n who can be describedd as an Eshett Chayil26 who challenged the characterrs in “the story” to savve her people,, as did Queen n Esther in Peersia during th he time of King Ahasuuerus. Doña Gracia G is a no otable femalee figure that makes m all Sephardic Jeews and the whole w Jewish world w proud.

Acknowled dgement I am greatlyy indebted to Rabbi R Kalman n Worch of S Skokie Kollel, Il. USA, who arousedd my curiosityy to know and d learn about D Doña Gracia Mendes. M I also extend special thankks to my editiing angel whho helped me with this article. I exxpress my grratitude and appreciation a tto Yehuda Tzvi, T who reviewed m my transcriptiion in Judeo o-Spanish, annd thanks to o Liliana Benveniste in helping with w the transslation of thee text B into English. Special thannks to Bryan Kirschen K for his recommenndations, obseervations, and time.

24

“And this is his language”” “Entrad” w was translated with w this phrase based b on the coontext of the sto ory. 26 In Hebrew:: a “woman of valor” v 25

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References Birnbaum, Marianna. The Long Journey of Gracia Mendes. CEU Press. Central European University Press. Budapest. New York, 2003. Bodian, Miriam. "Doña Gracia Nasi." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. Jewish Women's Archive, 1 March 2009. . (Viewed in August 2013). Brooks, Andrée Aelion. The Woman Who Defied Kings: The life and times of Doña Gracia Nasi. Paragon House. Minnesota, 2002. Cecil Roth. Doña Gracia of the House of the Nasi. The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia-Jerusalem, 1977. García Moreno, Aitor. “El judeoespañol II. Características” e-excellence. 2010. . “Grafia del Djudeo-Espanyol sigun el metodo de Aki Yerushalayim.” Aki Yerushalayim: Revista Kulturala Djudeo-Espanyola. Jerusalem, Israel, April 2007. Hernández González, Carmen. “Observaciones sobre las formas adverbiales en –mente en el español sefardí.” eHumanista. Volume 20. Universidad de Valladolid, 2012: 191- 203. http://www.ehumanista.ucsb.edu/volumes/volume_20/pdfs/articles/mo nographic%20issue/10%20Hernandez.v20. pdf. Karo, Yoseph. Avkat Rojel, 1857. http://www.daat.ac.il/daat/vl/avkatrochel/avkatrochel10.pdf. Kurylowicz, Jerzy. “The evolution of grammatical categories.” Diógenes 51, 1965: 55-71. Levinsky, Manuel. Doña Gracia Mendes. Intelecto Hebreo. . (Viewed in August 2013). Lloyd, Paul. From Latin to Spanish: Historical Phonology and Morphology of the Spanish Language (Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society), 1997. Nassi, Gad, and Rebecca Toueg. Doña Gracia Nasi. Ed. Dahlia Gottan, Women’s International Zionist Organization, Department of Education, Tel Aviv. Israel, 1990. Nilep, Chad. Code Switching in Sociocultural Linguistics, University of Colorado, Boulder. 2006. http://www.colorado.edu/ling/CRIL/Volume19_Issue1/paper_NILEP.p df. Pawlikowska, Marta. “El estudio del cambio lingüístico: entre las motivaciones del code- switching.” 2013.

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(Viewed in June 2013). Ragen, Naomi. The Ghost of Hannah Mendes. St. Martin's Griffin, New York. 1998. Redouane, Rabia. “Linguistic Constraints on Codeswitching and Codemixing of Bilingual Moroccan Arabic- French, Speakers in Canada,” paper presented at the 4th International Symposium on Bilingualism, in Arizona University, 2005: 1921-1933. http://www.lingref.com/isb/4/149ISB4.pdf. Traugott, Elizabeth and Ekkerhard König. “The semantics-pragmatics of grammaticalisation revisited.” In Traugott and Heine, eds. Approches to Grammaticalisation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Vol. 1, 1991: 189-218.

PART THREE: CULTURE

THE POWER IN TRANSMISSION: HAKETÍA AS A VECTOR FOR WOMEN’S COMMUNAL POWER VANESSA PALOMA ELBAZ NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ORIENTAL LANGUAGES AND CIVILIZATIONS, SORBONNE PARIS CITÉ    Oral traditions in Haketía function as the collective voice of the Sephardic Community in Northern Morocco and have served as a crucial space of communal power-brokering. This chapter will discuss how women’s power in the private sphere is through the transmission of oral traditions sung in Haketía.1 Until the arrival of the Alliance Israélite Universelle schools in 1862 to Tetuan and the gradual acceptance of secular Jewish education for girls, most Sephardic women in Northern Morocco lived in a situation of primary orality. As an oral society, critical information was passed between individuals within the community with a collective voice. Haketía was the Sephardic intra-communal language of identification and encounter. Women’s discourse in Haketía reiterated their communal power on issues of family affiliations, women’s sexuality and their own piety - not surprisingly, the very issues that guaranteed the nonassimilation of this minority community.

 1

I must thank Naomi Seidman from GTU for her suggestions during the Posen Society of Fellows workshop that I reference Michel Foucault’s writings on power in relation to the women’s oral traditions, as well as Gaon Books Editor Ron Duncan Hart’s multiple readings and suggestions to polish this chapter as it was being completed.

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Figure 9.1. S Students from the t Alliance Isrraélite Universeelle, Tangier 1921-1922. Collection off Esther Azancoot

 This chapterr is based on the findings gleaned from m interviews conducted c between 20007 and 2014 with people who still livee in Morocco o, or who grew up in tthese communnities while th hey were still thriving on Moroccan M soil. The community thhat still lives in Northern Morocco in n 2014 is reduced to aaround fifty peeople. In Ceutta and Melillaa, two Spanish h enclaves in North Moorocco, there are a close to 1,000 Jews, maany of whom originate in Tetuan aand who speaak Haketía. Those T who diid not leave Morocco migrated to Casablanca, where w the larg gest communitty originating g from the North is fouund today in Morocco M proper. There are no official co ommunity statistics onn the number of Jews from m Northern M Morocco in Caasablanca, but there are at least 75, if not more, of first and ssecond generaation2 and that identifyy themselves as culturally y belonging tto the Judeo--HispanoMoroccan ttradition. Thiss article referrs to the wayy this Judeo--HispanoMoroccan ccommunity prresently relates to the impoortance of Haaketía and its oral tradditions as a way w to negottiate power w within the co ommunity

 2

First generaation are those who were borrn and raised inn the North, while w these communities were thriving; second generration are thosse who had on ne or both parents from the North andd who were bo orn and raisedd in Casablancaa, but still identify as haaving the particuular culture from m Northern Moorocco.

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historically, through their description of how community life was in previous generations. If one follows the history of this community through its written historical documents, it would appear that women were disempowered and had no role in decision-making within the Jewish community. Since the public institutions that made decisions that impacted the community as a whole drew their leadership exclusively from literate men, women are invisible in the written sources. However, women’s transmission of sung oral traditions in Haketía functioned as their space of communal power because of the narrative focus within these songs on power relations and the manner in which women’s purity situated them as the most powerful members of this society.  Michel Foucault’s theory on power (1982) focuses on the importance of understanding the mechanisms of power relations in society. He highlights the difference between institutions (legal and government) and power as well as power relations in the social nexus. Haketía, as a source of power in the Sephardic community of Northern Morocco, functions primarily in the social nexus. Foucault’s theory from The Subject and Power outlines crucial issues for the understanding of power relations within communities, such as Sephardic Northern Morocco: One can analyze [power] relationships, or rather I should say that it is perfectly legitimate to do so, by focusing on carefully defined institutions...However, the analysis of power relations as one finds them in certain circumscribed institutions presents a certain number of problems. First, the fact that an important part of the mechanisms put into operation by an institution are designed to ensure its own preservation brings with it the risk of deciphering functions which are essentially reproductive, especially in power relations between institutions. Second, in analyzing power relations from the standpoint of institutions, one lays oneself open to seeking the explanation and the origin of the former in the latter, that is to say, finally, to explain power to power. Finally, insofar as institutions act essentially by bringing into play two elements, explicit or tacit regulations and an apparatus, one risks giving to one or the other an exaggerated privilege in the relations of power and hence to see in the latter only modulations of the law and of coercion. This does not deny the importance of institutions on the establishment of power relations. Instead, I wish to suggest that one must analyze institutions from the standpoint of power relations, rather than vice versa, and that the fundamental point of anchorage of the relationships, even if they are embodied and crystallized in an institution, is to be found outside the institution (my italics). (1983: 222-223)



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To understand the construction of power, that is public and private forms of power, I will outline the Jewish institutions at the heart of the community and how these organized communal structures are perceived internally and externally.

1. Power in the Public sphere The public Jewish world in cities such as Tangier, Tetuan, Asila, Larache and Alcazarquivir, has left written documentation of their meetings, prayers and rulings. The three Jewish institutions in the public sphere in Morocco are:  1. The Synagogue(s)  2. The Jewish Community “Junta” 3. The Rabbinical Courts. 

1.1. The Synagogue(s) The synagogue is the most private of the public institutions. In these communities a synagogue or tefilá, was traditionally a gathering of men in small family tefilot, 3 which could hold between twenty and fifty worshippers. Most women rarely went to synagogue, appearing only during the afternoon of Yom Kippur, when they would finish out the fast in community and be present to hear the final shofar blast. Since women are not counted in the minyan, they are not required to be present for public prayer. Some women, such as Jan Bengualid’s grandmother, Alia Cohen, would pray daily at her family’s synagogue, because it was attached to their house, and she could walk from the second floor of her home straight into the women’s gallery.4 This was atypical, and most women would only appear at the synagogue for holidays such as Yom Kippur. The female population in the azará5 of Tangier during a regular Shabbat service was no more than five between 2007-2012. However, on Kippur of 2007, there were around thirty women in the late afternoon in Tangier.6

 3

synagogues Private conversation, J.B., October 27, 2008, Tangier. 5 women’s gallery 6 In October of 2014 the synagogue in Tangier, the last functioning synagogue in Northern Morocco, was having systematic difficulty to have a minyan, the 10-man 4



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Larger synagogues that were built towards the end of the 19th century7 and beginning of the 20th century held between 200 to 300 people.8 These more recent constructions held larger spaces for women’s attendance, implying that they were responding to a growing population of women who attended synagogue, as well as to the assembling of many more people from the Community in the same synagogue. The massive migration of the Jewish populations from Morocco during the 1960s and 1970s has left most of these synagogues all but empty. Some cities from the North, such as Alcazarquivir, Larache and Asilah do not have any more Jewish inhabitants. 

1.2. The Jewish Community The Jewish Community “Junta” gathers as needed to address issues of education, Kashrut, and help to the poor (Guemilut Hasadim). They are the representatives of the organized Jewish community who would address the Mendoub 9 or Caid 10 when needed historically and during the Protectorate, the representatives of the European powers. This made them the secular institutional group who served to address internal problems as well as being the interface with the government leaders. Every meeting of the Junta had its minutes recorded, and in the case of the Junta from Tangier, the first twenty-three years of their meetings have been transcribed from the aljamiado and published recently.11 Subsequent Junta minutes are still held in the Jewish community offices and rarely made accessible to researchers.

 minimum required for public prayer. It is possible that this synagogue will close as an active place of worship in the near future. 7 In Tangier, Maase Menashe in the Medina (mostly known as la esnoga de Nahón) was built by the Nahón family, who lived across the alley in a palatial house with a private mikveh. 8 Tetuan’s example was the numerous small tefilot in the judería which would comfortably hold around thirty to forty worshippers, la tefilá de Bengualid, la tefilá de la hermanita, la tefilá de Abudarham were intimate synagogues attached to family homes. Once the community started moving into the new city, El Ensanche Jews built the tefilá del Ensanche, which is in typical Art Deco style with a high ceiling and a capacity of up to 300. 9 Governor 10 Mayor 11 Gladys and Sidney Pimienta 1860-1883 Libro de Actas de la Junta Selecta de la Comunidad Hebrea de Tánger, Paris:JEM y EREZ editors, 2010.

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1.3. The Rabbinical Courts The Bet Din, or Rabbinical Courts, continues to this day to be a Jewish institution that is a part of the Moroccan legal system. Moroccan Jews have been and continue to be subject to Jewish law in matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance.12 The Bet Din offices are housed in Moroccan Justice Ministry’s public buildings and rabbinical judges form part of the Ministry’s employees. Arguably, this makes this public Jewish institution the most public face of Moroccan Judaism because of its links to the State. 

Figure 9.2. Bet Din from Tangier early 20th Century: L-R sitting: Rebbi Yudá Azancot; Rebbi Yudá Benchimol, president; Rebbi Yahya Nezri, magistrate and Don Moses Marrache, secretary. L-R standing: Don Haim Sonegro, Shej (mayor), Don Abraham Afriat, notary; Don Yamin Cohen, notary and Dr. Joseph Lugassi, counsel.Collection of Avraham Azancot.

 These three institutions serve as the ritual and political faces of Judaism for internal and external purposes. They could appear to an outsider to be the only valid sources of power within the Moroccan Sephardic community. If the only relevant power is assumed to be in the public sphere, then these three institutions hold the keys to the power in the community.

 12

Interview with the Rosh Beit Din, Rabbi Yosef Israel, January 8, 2008, Casablanca.

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2. Power in the Private Sphere I argue that there are other forms of power that are subtler and possibly even more influential than the public and ritual/political power held by the public communal institutions and those who controlled them. The power relations choreographed by women in the private sphere,13 and that affect the public sphere in multiple ways, is one of the relevant and often overlooked sources of communal power in these communities. Foucault delineates the centrality of non-institutional power relations:   Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a way in which certain actions may structure the held of other possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions. That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In any case, to live in society is to live in such a way that action upon other actions is possible —and in fact ongoing. A society without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power relations is not to say either that those which are established are necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. (1983:223)

3. The Family and Lineage as a Source of Power The Jewish Community of Northern Morocco is particularly focused on extended family units, delineating their ancestral lines, and drawing power from the importance of their familial line. In contrast to the urbanized North American and European nuclear families of today, the traditional Moroccan family, which continues existing and operating as such today, is the center of social life. In North America it is the synagogue, and not the home, which has become the center of social life, in contrast to the situation in Morocco. If you consider that the family is the center of Jewish life and that the woman has the primary responsibility for organizing and guaranteeing the ritual and moral purity of the family unit,

 13

Shlomo Deshen reiterates “the power of women lay primarily in… the domestic setting.” (1989), 113.

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then you begin to understand the primary role of the woman in Moroccan Jewish life.  Family lineages through names and collective identity are more important in Morocco than in North America or Europe, and these two examples demonstrate this: Descendants of the revered Rabbi Itzhak Bengualid, the Saddik14 from Tetuan, come to the hilloula15 every year from Madrid, New York, and Israel to commemorate the anniversary of his death, which was almost 150 years ago. At the three-day celebration they are treated as crucial and almost holy members of the gathering, because they, in their own selves, carry the legacy of Rabbi Bengualid’s kedushá.16 Even if they have never studied the teachings of their ancestor, they embody Bengualid’s importance today. The rest of the people gathered express their respect for Rabbi Bengualid through respecting his descendants.  In London today, a descendant of Sol Hachuel has her family’s lineage traced in a family tree, which she keeps guarded close to a portrait of her ascendant which is a Saddiká.17 In this tree, she can trace her family back to Gibraltar and then Tetuán and Tangier, where the Hachuel family originates. She recalls her aunts in Gibraltar telling her the story of the their holy ancestor when she would visit as a child. A large oil portrait of Soulika hung in the formal dining room, a daily reminder of the value and importance of having important family lines.18 These examples regarding lineage demonstrate a form of power that Foucault describes as one where the individual is transformed into a subject: This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings of the word “subject”: subject to someone else by control and dependence; and tied to

 14

Morocco has an active and ancient tradition of Jewish saint worship. Each city has at least one Tsaddik, and in some cases a female saint: Tsaddiká. These holy men were usually traveling rabbis or community leaders that were very pious. Praying at their grave, or going on a special pilgrimage to honor them and ask for their blessing is done mostly in cases of illness, barrenness or financial hardship. 15 pilgrimage 16 holiness 17 saintly Jewish woman 18 Private interview with R.F., London, March 13, 2013.

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The Power in Transmission his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subjects. (1982: 781)

4. Feminine Responsibility to Ritual Just as men are responsible for the transmission of liturgical rituals, women act as the guardians of ritual purity in the home and within the familial structure. The four areas of private sphere ritual responsibility, which women protect, are:  1. Kashrut 2. Shabbat and holiday preparation 3. Family Purity 4. Oral traditions in Haketía. These are interconnected because women sang Romances while they cooked, cleaned, and prepared kosher food. In a majority of occasions the songs they sang referred to issues of family purity - narratives delineating either humor around sexuality and fertility, or warnings to the negative consequences of adultery or incest.

4.1. Kashrut Kashrut in the home is in the domain of women, since women are in charge of the food preparation. Not only must food be prepared in a kosher way, but it must only be cooked by a Jew. The theurgic powers of food preparation and the transformation of food over fire are believed to be so powerful, that non-Jewish beliefs could infiltrate into a person’s belief system if they eat food prepared by a non-Jew. Traditional Jews would not eat bishul goy (food prepared by a non-Jew) and unmarried men often found themselves in the difficult situation of either hiring a Muslim cook or learning to cook themselves.19 An older widower in Casablanca was desperately trying to marry a woman from Alcazarquivir, so he would not have to eat bishul goy.20 Since food preparation and consumption is a daily activity, women converted this into a way to wield power in the family. A woman originally from Tetuan and who lives in Tel Aviv today, told me about the women from her family. They would not even allow the men

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Private conversation, J.B., Tangier, August 25, 2007. Interview, Raquel Oiknine, Casablanca, May 18, 2012.

20

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into the kitchen, forcing them to stand by the kitchen door even when they wanted a glass of water, claiming that it was their domain and place of power. “En la cocina no deben entrar hombres.”21

4.2. Shabbat and holiday preparation Preparing for Shabbat and holiday celebrations were important moments of women’s gatherings. Not only are the spiritual implications of the food prepared by Jewish women for the family part of women’s ritual power, but each holiday has a codified set of recipes that must be prepared and eaten to guarantee the mazal22 of the family. In the very act of eating the ritual food, they were connecting to their own line of ancestors who had eaten the same dishes during the same dates of the yearly cycle.23 During food preparation for weddings or holidays, women would gather to cook and sing romances and wedding songs. In Alcazarquivir’s medina24 before Passover they would kasher the communal oven from the judería25 and seal it for a night where the women would gather to bake las tortas26 and sing until dawn.27 This was an integral part of the holiday for them. The cooking, preparing and singing were equally as important as the actual act of sitting around the table to celebrate the Seder or go to listen to the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur.

4.3. Family Purity Family Purity is the other very physical aspect of women’s responsibility to their family’s transmission of Jewish values and lineage. Laws of sexual conduct within marriage determining when the couple was allowed to have sexual relations fell under the woman’s responsibility.28 A woman had to know how to structure the dynamics with her husband, so that he would not feel bored and look outside of the marriage for satisfaction. This kind of leadership in their relationship would also benefit their children and all

 21

Private conversation with L.C., Tangier, February 20, 2010. blessing 23 Interview, Alia Cohen Bengualid, Tangier, February 17, 2010. 24 walled city 25 Jewish quarter 26 matzah 27 Interview, Lily Benchabo de Mafota, Alcazarquivir, May 3, 2014. 28 Private conversation, E.A., Tangier, May 8, 2008. 22

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their descendants, by permeating the family with kedushá,29 creating holy children and happiness in the family.30 Not only was sexual conduct within a marriage important, but the lack of women’s sexuality outside of marriage was of crucial concern for the whole community. It was only through women’s exclusive sexuality with her husband that the familial line would have the pure and holy Jewish children that they wanted as their descendants. A young bride’s virginity was fundamental and stories abounded of brides that had been thrown out into the street with no clothes on the morning after their wedding after discovering they were not a virgin.31 A woman’s fidelity to her husband could also become of public communal concern. In the 1960s there was a very well-known case in Tangier of a Jewish husband who was confronted by the rabbis of the community because of the brazenness of his wife’s affair with a shop owner that lived across from their house. The rabbis condemned the husband for accepting her affair and not divorcing her (as Jewish law prescribes) and accused them of bringing curses upon the whole community.32

4.4. Oral traditions in Haketía Oral traditions in Haketía are the spoken and sung ritual utterances33 of this community in the language accessible to all of its members. Proverbs, romances and cantares were primarily women’s domain. Although this chapter addresses only sung oral traditions, proverbs have a similar function. Shoshana Weich Shahak sums up women’s centrality in the transmission of oral traditions:  In the Sephardic world, while men fulfill their role in everything that regards the preservation and transmission of Hebrew liturgy and paraliturgical repertoire, the Sephardic woman is without a doubt the main transmitter of the Romancero and Cancionero. She is its most faithful carrier and repository. When I have recorded a man interpreting a

 29

sanctity Interview, Esther Azancot, Tangier, July 3, 2012. 31 Interview, Donna Elbaz, Tangier, April 6, 2008. 32 E.A., private conversation, April 2008. 33 I am referring to Eric Havelock’s term for fixed language, which serves as a manner to transmit the social mores of an oral society. See below for further discussion of this in relation to Northern Morocco. 30

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romance, he always spontaneously informs me that he learned it from a woman: his mother, aunt or grandmother (2013: 45). 

Not only are women the main transmitters of the Romancero, they are usually the main characters in the narrative, and the one that propels the plot forward. Giuseppe Di Stefano states that in the Romancero  feminine protagonism is well constructed and highly developed. It serves as a powerful parable of feminine power through an imaginary universe gathered from various origins. The Romancero functions as a manner of implementing suggestions and even compensations for behavior (1993: 53). 

Through the female characters in the sung narratives, women provided examples of problematic situations that related to women’s sexual purity. They were able to broach subjects that were not as easily spoken about such as adultery, incest and kidnapping. It was through these narratives that older women taught the younger generation what their role and importance was for the continuity and purity of the community. Interestingly though, the most powerful communal teaching of this sensitive information was within the women’s private sphere and in Haketía.

5. Haketía as a language of the Private sphere Hebrew is, of course, the language that connects Jewish communities throughout the world. It is the basis for liturgy and religious texts. In Northern Morocco, Sephardic Jews spoke various languages with the general surrounding population: Moroccan Arabic, French, and Spanish were common, Italian, Portuguese and English were also part of the linguistic palette. However, within the community, and until today, within families or close circles of friends, Haketía is the language to express jokes, deep emotions and a connection to ancestral ways of life. Haketía is also traditionally women’s only language of Jewish identification. Hebrew is the language of identification to the rest of the Jewish world, whereas Haketía is the particular language that identifies this community as distinctly Judeo-Hispano-Moroccan. Haketía, the language of the private, family realm, is crucial to this community’s particular identity. This is significant because the private sphere is where women exert their power through the social nexus created across extended family units. It is within these family units that Jewish continuity is secured, through marriages and births. The reiterating narratives and conversation about marriage, fertility,

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and faithfulness within the feminine social nexus are a way to secure this continuity. In 1932, Zarita Nahón and Simi Toledano de Nahón, two Jewish women from Tangier, recorded a collection of romances and cantares. Within this collection, there was a dialogue in Haketía that they included at the behest of anthropologist Franz Boas, Zarita Nahón’s professor in New York. The significance of this dialogue, aside from its general importance, is the topic that they chose to focus on: the preparation for a wedding, and the community’s collaboration for the sewing, cooking and celebrating.  The very same conversation could very easily have taken place in 2014. There are only two words 34 that today’s Haketía speakers in Morocco did not understand. Other than that, the topic, the melodic inflection in the voices and the vocabulary are relevant with today’s Jews from Northern Morocco. Here is a transcribed excerpt from the conversation: Simi Nahón de Toledano played the role of Estrella Zarita Nahón played the role of Ferazmal  [Estrella]: Venido bueno y venido claro que venga lo bueno y la alegría. ¿Cómo estás? [Ferazmal]: Buena ¿y tú? S: Con tu deseo. Z: ¿Y los niños? S: Ahí están, te besan las manos. Z: A Preciada la tuya la ví el otro día en la boda de Donna la de Mosé Laredo. Se haga todo como stá, un jial pintado. Qué el Dió la mandé buena suerte y te alegres con ella. S: Gracias, mi alma. Z: ¿Sabes para qué vine Estrella? Para decirte que Perla mi hija se apalabró. El novio es de… el novio es Ya’akov Medina, ya le conoces, qué luzzido y parecido. Es alto como un pilar y bueno como el pan y la boda sera pronto. Así es que stamos aparejando para despues del ‘omer con bien. Casi todo el ashuar está listo. No cusimos poco Perla y yo desde que tenía treze años y nosotras agusheando. Loores al Dio no la falta nada. La armasion de cama ya la acabímos de bordar, el roa pie, las almoharras y todo. S:  ¿Ya lempezates la ropa Berberisca?

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armasion and roa pie

Vanessa Paloma Elbaz Z: S: Z:

S:

[Estrella]: [Ferazmal]: S: Z: S: Z:

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¡¿Ah, y que?! ¿De qué color es? De veludo morado, bordada en oro. Con las mangas de gaza blanca. Las crinches y las sfifas nos las va a hacer Yusef el de Bendrihen. Con ayuda del Dio todo estará listo a tiempo, pero mira Ferazmal que conto contigo, asi no me jartes tu, que tienes que venir a casa tu y toda la familia. Desdel dia de las hams hasta el día del pescado. Con mucho gusto mi alma, ya sabes lo que sos tu para mi. Mesoodi, Preciada y yo iremos y los ayudaremos a hazer la alboronía, letuario, el festiño, las fijuelas, ya sabes que yo me pinto para el estofado y las gallina arellenadas! May your arrival be in goodness and in light, may only goodness and happiness come. How are you? I’m well, and you? Desiring to see you. And the children? They are there,35 they kiss your hands. I saw your Preciada the other day at Donna’s wedding, the Donna of Mose Laredo. May everything be done as it is, she is a painted jewel.36 May God send her good luck and you only have happiness from her. Thank you my dear. Do you know why I came Estrella? To tell you that my daughter Perla got engaged. The groom is from… the groom is Yaakov Medina, you already know him. He is good looking and handsome. He is tall as a pillar and as good as bread, 37 , the wedding will be soon. So we are preparing for after the ‘Omer, 38 wishing only good. The dowry is almost complete. Perla and I haven’t sewed little, 39 since she was thirteen and we were stitching. Praised to God she isn’t missing anything. We already embroidered the full bed set, the bed skirts, the pillows, everything.

 35

all is well beautiful 37 a very nice person. 38 the ‘Omer are the weeks between Passover and Shavuot when wedding celebrations and listening to instrumental music are prohibited. 39 we’ve sewed a lot. 36

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S:

Did you start the Berberisca wedding clothes?40 Of course! What color is it? Purple velvet embroidered in gold. With white gauze sleeves. Yusef de Bendrihen is going to make the silk black thread headpiece and the pearled velvet headdress. With God’s help, everything will be ready in time. But Ferazmal, I count on you, so don’t stand me up. You have to come to our house, you and your whole family. From the very first day of the hand41 until the day of the fish.42 With great pleasure my dear, you know what you mean to me. Mesoodi, Preciada and I will go and we will help you to make the alboronía, 43 letuario, 44 the festiño, 45 the fijuelas46…. and you know that I am great for the estofado47 and stuffed hen!48

Embedded within a collection of songs that were of course from women’s oral tradition, these two women chose to record a dialogue that would be representative of Haketía as they knew it from early 20th century Tangier. The topics that they included in their representation of Haketía were:  1. A formal exchange of blessings and compliments 2. A daughter’s engagement 3. Description of the groom 4. Their work on the dowry 5. The Berberisca dress with its accessories



40 Traditional wedding dress worn by Sephardic Jewish brides in Morocco made in velvet and embroidered with gold thread. 41 the hand of each family member was dipped into paint and stamped next to the front door to guard against the evil eye. 42 the last day of the week after the wedding the bride would cook a fish for the groom and the family to bring the new couple fertility. 43 eggplant dish 44 candied fruits 45 Festiño seems to be the same dish as the “Pestiño” a fried sweet made out of flour, sesame and honey and fried in olive oil. It is related to the Muslim Shebbekiyya, and its first literary reference is in Francisco Delicado’s 1528 La Lozana andaluza where it is mentioned as part of the protagonist’s culinary repertoire. (Thanks to Raquel Berdugo for the explanation and history of this dish) 46 rolled fried honey pastries 47 meat, raisin, almond and potato dish 48 a dish of rolled cooked chicken with parsley and hardboiled egg in the center

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6. The women’s gathering to cook for the party 7. Specific dishes for the celebration 8. Health issue and a problem with one community member - not included in the transcription  They obviously thought that this conversation and the topics discussed would be the most representative example of Haketía: a discourse on the private sphere of women and their importance and influence on the community’s continuity. David Benhamú Jiménez, the son of Melilla’s Jewish midwife, stressed the insider aspect of Haketía saying that when Jewish Melillenses meet each other they speak in a closed Haketía, dense with words from Arabic and expressions not understood by Spanish speakers. However, if there is a group of Jews from Melilla and only one exclusively Spanish speaker, the density of Haketía drops considerably to only be “peppered” with a couple of words here and there. 49 This specific change in the use of language confirms the function of Haketía as an internal identity marker for this community and as a code to bond and cement their group identity during gatherings. Line Amselem, the Paris-based writer whose parents are from Larache and Tetuan, has spoken about her reticence in speaking Haketía outside her family circle. Speaking Haketía outside of her intimate family circle felt like exposing something very private, like walking outside in her pajamas. When speaking Haketía with others who understood it, she felt, as many other community members reiterate, that she could truly let go and fully express her emotions and thoughts. 50 Her whole physical demeanor changed from a more contained manner as she is speaking French, to a more gestured and humorous expression. She also incorporates symbolic and humorous gestures that are intrinsic to her family’s Haketía, while pointing that very shift out to me in conversation. Amselem also repeated that she only fully felt herself when she could let go, speak and gesticulate in Haketía, and be “in her power”so to speak.

 49

Comment made during the 18th conference of Sephardic Studies at the CSIC in Madrid, on July 3, 2014. 50 Lina Amselem, Round table on ‘Le Maroc judéo-espagnol’, Primera Universidad d’enverano de judeo-espagnol, Aki Estamos with Alliance Israélite Universelle, Paris, July 10, 2012.

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Figure 9.3. Jeewish girls goiing to the communal oven too bake Challah on Friday afternoon in M Melilla, Augustt 2012, Photogrraphed by the auuthor.

6. Maasculine an nd Feminin ne vs. Publicc and Priva ate One of the functions off gender segrregation in M Morocco is to o control women’s poower. As Faatema Mernisssi, the Morooccan sociolo ogist, has written, “thee whole systeem is based on o the assum mption that wo omen are powerful aand dangerouus beings. All A sexual innstitutions (polygamy, repudiation, sexual segreegation, etc) can c be conceeived as a strrategy for containing their power”” (2011: 28)). Sephardi M Moroccan’s lives are similarly seggregated; gennder-mixed grroup meetingss outside of th he family unit occur infrequentlyy. They gen nerally happpen during life-cycle celebrationss and communnal holiday celebrations. T The public an nd private realms meett during these celebrations where wom men generally y sing los 5 cantares de las antiguas51 and men peerform the staandard Hebrew w prayers required for the ceremonyy at hand. When women sinng the romancces during life cycle rrituals, they attain semi-ssacred status because they y are an intrinsic parrt of having a complete Seephardi Morooccan ritual. The T ritual usually beggins with the standardized d Hebrew praayers coming g from a written textt and will finnish with a celebration oof singing in Haketía, laughter, and memories about a (mostly female) famiily members singing s in

 51

The songs oof the ancient women w

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previous holidays or celebrations. A recent example of this was when two different families from Tangier, who were celebrating the Berberisca ceremony52 during the summer of 2013 (one in Geneva and the other in Jerusalem), solved the modern-day problem of not having traditional women singers in those distant locations by playing a CD of romances and cantares de novia53 that I prepared for them, in lieu of going to sing at the ceremony. Their concern was that if the wedding celebrations would be devoid of los cantares nuestros,54 there would be something intrinsically missing from a fully traditional wedding ritual. It would be Jewish, but not del Norte de Marruecos. 

Figure 9.4. Women gathering to sing for the bride when she was dressed in Berberisca dress. Larache, 1960s. Collection of Alegria Busbib.

In February of 2013 in Casablanca, there was a brit milá for twin boys that were born to an older couple. The mother of the children is from Alcazarquivir, and her aunts broke out in song during the celebratory Shabbat afternoon luncheon in the synagogue courtyard. It was a

 52

The Berberisca, a typical Sephardi Moroccan ceremony celebrated the night before the huppa, is the evening when the bride dresses in a Jewish ritual wedding dress, velvet embroidered with gold thread. 53 wedding songs 54 our (Northern Moroccan Sephardi) songs

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spontaneous singing and rhythmic tapping on the table; the singers were exclusively female. They sang Rahel Lastimoza, a romance about averted adultery that ends exalting God. For them, the presence of a romance showed that the mother of the children (la parida) remains connected to her specific identity as Judeo-Hispano-Moroccan.55

7. Orality and Transmission As stated earlier, in societies of primary orality, critical information is passed from one to another in community, with a collective voice. Eric Havelock reiterates the various traditional methods to transmit crucial societal information: Tradition has specifics for any given society. An individual has to learn what these are, whatever they happen to be. He does not draw them from an instinctive sensibility of his own, supposedly in tune with a vaguely conceived general consciousness… One method of learning is visual. It consists of watching performance in order to imitate it, and it is very effective in the transmission of trades and crafts…The other method is linguistic: you do what you are told to do, in this case by a voice which is collective, a voice of the community. This requires a body of language “encoded” to carry the necessary instructions. The instructions have to possess stability. They have to be repeated from generation to generation, and the repetition must be guaranteed to be faithful or else the culture loses its coherence and so its historical character as a culture. The language of these instructions must be so framed so as to possess this stability (1986:69). 

The oral traditions in Haketía transmitted primarily by women were the “encoded” voice of the community in which the valuable mores were transmitted faithfully and ritualistically from generation to generation. As Havelock continues, one of the important features of these oral traditions is that the language becomes a “ritualized utterance,” in other words, traditional oral traditions are memorized and repeated in such a manner that the words appear in a fixed, unchanging order. This is the only way to guarantee their survival:  What kind of language can supply this need [of transmission] and still remain oral? The answer would seem to lie in ritualized utterance, a traditional language which somehow becomes formally repeatable like a

 55

S.A., Casablanca, February 2, 2013.

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ritual in which the words remain in a fixed order. Such language has to be memorized. There is no other way of guaranteeing its survival. Ritualization becomes the means of memorization. The memories are personal, belonging to every man, woman and child in the community, yet their content, the language preserved, is communal, something shared by the community as expressing its tradition and its historical identity (1986:70). 

In Sephardic Morocco, los cantares de las antiguas were, and continue to be, the feminine ritualized utterance, which is memorized and passed on from one generation to the next. They carried the encoded moral messages that Jewish matriarchs wished to pass on to their younger generation to ensure their survival as a distinct minority. Their repetitive nature, as well as the fact that they were memorized and sung both during communal celebrations and during daily activities, permitted the characters and plots of these cantares to permeate the collective unconscious. Far from the elitist nature of the Hebrew liturgy, the cantares are understood and heard by all. It is the one literary space where all members of the community participate: children, women, and men have access to these narratives in the vernacular. Some romances include direct translations from verses from Megillat Esther or Psalms, or references to Jewish concepts such as the mekatreg. 56 The intermingling of standard Hispanic romance texts with Jewish concepts further confirms the complete appropriation of these narratives into this society where sacrality permeates all aspects of life. The strict boundaries between the genders regarding leadership and participation in public ritual spaces predetermine the hierarchy between men and women in the liturgy. Just as male presence dominates secular public life, traditional interpretation of Jewish law defining the minyan and those who may lead prayers prevents women from formal participation in the public liturgical space. This follows the division of men being the “owners” of the public space and rituals, while women “own” the private domain. The question being addressed in this chapter is the crucial importance of the private sphere in this community, contrary to an assumed supposed higher hierarchy of the public masculine sphere, which presupposes a binary power structure. The actual discourse of this community demonstrates that the private sphere holds power in some of

 56

accusing angel in heaven who watches the failings of the Jewish people and then accuses them before God, to be punished by suffering, illness or death

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the most important elements that create hierarchy and that wield power: the keys to family integrity, identity, affiliations, and lineage.

References Cited Deshen, Shlomo. The Mellah Society: Jewish Community Life in Sherifian Morocco, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Di Stefano, Giuseppe. Romancero, Madrid: Taurus, 1993. Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power” Critical Inquiry Vol 8 No. 4, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982, 777-795. —."The Subject and Power" In Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. by H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 208-226. Havelock, Eric. The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986. Mernissi, Fatema. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Muslim Society, London: Saqi Press, 1985 and 2011. Pimienta, Gladys and Sidney. 1860-1883 Libro de Actas de la Junta Selecta de la Comunidad Hebrea de Tánger: Nacimiento y desarrollo de una comunidad organizada. Paris: JEM y EREZ editors, 2010.  Weich-Shahak, Shoshana. Moroccan Sephardi Romancero: Anthology of an Oral Tradition. Santa Fe: Gaon Books, 2013.

ATTITUDES TOWARD SEPHARDIC LANGUAGE CHANGE AND MULTILINGUALISM EXPRESSED IN LA AMERIKA IN EARLY TWENTIETHCENTURY NEW YORK HOLLY D. VERNON UNIVERSITY OF HOUSTON-DOWNTOWN

1. Introduction This paper analyzes attitudes towards Sephardic language and culture originating from the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan regions. As primary sources, I utilize the Brandeis University Library archives of the weekly editions of La Amerika, a newspaper published by the Oriental Trading and Publishing Company of New York from 1910 – 1925. Of the 19 documented Sephardic Spanish newspapers published in the U.S. in the early 20th century, La Amerika was the second to launch and one of the most frequently published.1 This newspaper provides an extensive profile of the linguistic challenges, communal institutions, and events of interest to the local, national, and international Sephardic nation of the time. An analysis of the geographic distribution of the La Amerika subscriptions noted in Appendix II offers insight into the extent of JudeoSpanish use at the time. A study of the content of the weekly articles highlights the prevailing pressures operating in the linguistic landscape of early 20th century New York City. The Judeo-Spanish content of each cited sample of text from the La Amerika articles is transliterated using the Aki Yerushalayim2 orthographic style rather than that of standardized Spanish. Also discussed are attitudes toward multilingualism as well as the internalized value judgments characteristic of minority language contact 1

Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America, A Diasporic History, (New York University Press, 2009), 111. 2 Aki Yerushalayim, Moshe Shaul, ed. Jerusalem, Israel. www.akiyerushalayim.co.il

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with prestige majority varieties such as French, Peninsular and Latin American Spanish, English, and Yiddish. In conclusion, an assessment will be made of the position of Sephardic Spanish as an endangered language according to Lewis and Simons' expanded model of Fishman’s Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale.3 A study of the lexicon, morphology, and grammar of the La Amerika articles is not included in the scope of this project.

2. Population Estimates How numerous were local, national, and global groups of Judeo-Spanish speaking Jews? A central question is to ascertain the extent of Sephardic Spanish use and the linguistic environments it occupied during the first half of the 20th century through an analysis of population estimates. A rendering of accurate statistics is challenged by multiple factors including inadequate maintenance of archives by the smaller mutual support or burial aid societies4 and the fact that immigration officials did not consistently record or recognize Sephardic ethnicity.5 Secondly, many Eastern Sephardim were multinational and/or multilingual and as such could identify according to ethnic, linguistic, or national affiliation. As an example, Joseph Gedalecia, president of the Federation of Oriental Jews immigrated to the United States with a French passport.6 Originally from Istanbul, he self-identified as French to immigration officials. Similarly, due to Spanish speech, Spanish surnames, Turkish cultural traits, and Mediterranean physiognomy, Sephardic immigrants were not recognized as Jewish:7 ʤʸʥʨʰʩʾʡʦʩʣ ʩʣʰʠʸʢ ʱʠʮ ʤʬ ʩʠ ʱʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʱʠʬ ʩʣ ʤʦʾʡʠʷʠ ʯʩʩʱʠʥʨʩʱ ʤʸʢʩʰ ʱʥʱ ʯʥʸʠʸʠʬʷʩʣ ʱʥʰʩʦʩʾʡ ʩʣ ʱʩʬʩʮ ʱʥʩʩʴʥʸʴ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʱʥʱ ʩʣ ʩʨʸʠʴ ʩʣ ʱʥʩʣʥʾʢ ʯʥʱ ʩʷ ʱʥʣʩʠʩʸʷ ʯʥʱ ʥʰ ʩʷ ʸʠʨʠʸʨ ʩʣ ʤʱʰʠʩʾʴʰʥʷ ʥʣʰʩʩʰʩʨ ʥʰ ʥʰʥʢʰʩʰ .ʶʨʩʠ ,ʤʠʩʰʠʮʥʸ ,ʤʠʩʱʩʬʠʢ ,ʤʠʩʱʥʸ ʩʣ ʱʥʩʣʥʾʢ ʱʥʢʩʸʢ ʭʩʥʢ ʸʥʴ ʱʩʬʥʣʰʠʸʩʣʩʱʰʥʷ ʱʩʨʰʠʸʥʨʱʩʸ ʩʠ ʱʩʾʴʠʷ ʱʥʱ ʯʩʠ ʸʠʸʨʰʩʠ ʩʰ ʱʥʩʩʬʩʠ ʯʥʷ .ʱʥʰʠʩʩʬʠʨʩʠ ʥʠ 3 M. Paul Lewis and Gary F. Simons, “Assessing Endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS”, 2009. www.sil.org, Accessed 06/11/2014. 4 Jakob Marcus and Abraham Peck, Eds. The American Jewish Archives, “Sephardic Jews in America”, Vol.XXXIX, No. 2, (Cincinnati: Hebrew College, 1987), Nov 1987. 5 Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 33. 6 Ibid, 34. 7 Moise S. Gadol, La Amerika,“El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, (New York: Oriental Trading & Publishing Co.), 29 Dec 1911.

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…deklararon sus negra situasion akavza de las linguas i la mas grande desventura ke no son kreidos ke son djudios de parte de sus munchos propios miles de vezinos djudios de Rusia, Galesia, Romania, ets. Ninguno no teniendo konfiansa de tratar kon eyos ni entrar en sus kafes i ristorantes konsiderandoles por goyim gregos o italianos. …They declared their hardships due to the languages and the greatest misfortune that they are not believed to be Jews by thousands of their Jewish neighbors from Russia, Galicia (Poland), Romania, etc. No one will trust to do business with them or enter their coffee shops or restaurants considering them to be Greek or Italian goyim.

Reliable estimates are further obscured by the concealment of identity. An example of this factor is provided by a letter to the La Amerika editor recounting a visit to Cuba by Stanley Berro of the AHnasat HoraHim uFdibim Chebeim of New York, a charitable organization offering employment assistance to Jewish immigrants. The letter is written by Isaac Funes of Havana.8 The Latin script, orthography, initial capitals, and mixed language conventions are represented here just as in the original: …y nos preuntan (sic) de que parte son Ustedes y nosotros naturalmente niegamos nuestra Raza en diciendole soy Frances o soy Italiano o griego y alfín pensamos que algun dia llegara el caso que saldra nuestras falsias que disde tanto tiempo las venimos acostumbrando […] a esa Isla que todos desenbarkan con Razas y Relijiones cambiadas. (sic)9 …and they ask us, where are you from and naturally we deny our race saying I am French or I am Italian or Greek and ultimately we think that a day will come when these falsehoods to which we have become so accustomed will one day come out […] to this island all disembark with race and religion altered.

The letter is part of an editorial reporting that, according to Berro, more than 500 Sephardim living in Cuba “from Turkey and the East” had not self-identified as Jewish to Cuban immigration agents. Ambiguity is another factor that challenges accurate rendering of statistics. This is reflected in a report published in La Amerika by an unnamed author about a group of nearly 200 Sephardic compatriots in Chicago. According to the report, some are ashamed to demonstrate their Jewishness and consequently never attend synagogue. Others prefer to pass as Catholics or to assimilate with the Ashkenazi majority while some 8 9

Ibid, “Nuestros djudios-espanyoles del oriente en Kuba”, 19 Jan 1912. Copied exactly as it appears as in the original

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few “Portuguese” are unaware that they are Jewish.10 Although most had publically obscured their ethnicity, the majority had incorporated into La Union Izralita Portugeza, adopting a name that evinces a connection or desire to allude to the first Sephardic colony of New York founded in 1654 by 23 Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent.11 Whether or not the account is true, it reflects the author's perception that these were common choices. The combination of these factors contributes to a diminished awareness of the full extent of Sephardic presence, as noted in La Amerika:12 ʯʠʨʱʩʠ ʩʣʰʥʠ ʱʩʸʠʢʥʬ ʱʥʾʡʩʥʰ ʯʩʸʾʡʥʷʱʩʣ ʩʨʰʩʮʬʠʥʰʩʨʰʥʷ ʾʾʤʷʩʸʩʮʠ ʤʬʾʾ ʬʠʰʸʥʾʢ ʬʩʠ .ʱʥʣʩʱʸʠʴʱʩʠ El jurnal “La Amerika” kontinualmente deskuvren nuevos lugares onde estan esparsidos. La Amerika newspaper continually discovers new places where they are dispersed.

Table 10.1 serves as a reference point for ascertaining numbers of local, national, and international Judeo-Spanish speakers. Several referenced sources are cited in Ben-Ur (2009); all La Amerika references were verified in the preparation of this paper.13 Statistics for additional affiliations are provided for comparison. Given the multiple obstacles to arriving at accurate statistics (lack of recognition, duality, concealment), these figures are most likely conservative.

Estimate

Source M. S. Gadol, La Turkey & Amerika,“El importante 2, 500,000 Sephardim Morocco raporto del Buro 10,000,000 Ashkenazim Unspecified Oriental” M. S. Gadol, La Amerika,“El importante 20,000 Sephardim U.S. raporto del Buro Oriental” 10

Affiliation

Location

La Amerika, “Nuestros djudios de Chikago”, 9 Dec 1910 Congregation Shearith Israel, New York, NY. www.shearithisrael.org 12 La Amerika, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 12 Jan 1912. 13 Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 194. 11

Date 29 Dec 1911 12 Jan 1912

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M. D. Angel, La America, the Sephardic Experience in the United States, 13 20,000 Sephardim NYC M. S. Gadol, La 30,000 Sephardim U.S. Amerika, "Basta piedrer 13,000,000 All Global tiempo en vaziar" M. S. Gadol, La 500,000 Zionists U.S. Amerika,“El istoriko 3,000,000 All Unspecified mas-miting” M. D. Angel, La America, the Sephardic 40,000 Sephardim NYC Experience in the United States, 8614 A. Ben-Ur, The American Jewish < 50,000 U.S. Archives. "Sephardic 2,500,000 Sephardim Jews in America" Ashkenazim The Interpreter, 20,000 – "Levantine Jews in NYC 40,000 America," [New York: Levantine U.S. 50,000 – Foreign Language 100,000 Information Services]15 2,344 Sephardim NYC 130,237 Ashkenazim

195

1912 22 Oct 1915 28 Jan 1916 22 Apr 1923

1924

06 Dec 1925

Table 10.1 Population Statistics

3. Linguistic Landscape Judeo-Spanish was the native language of Balkan and Mediterranean Sephardic Jews; they did not know English or Yiddish. Until nationalist movements within the former Ottoman Empire pressured for fluency, they were often only functional in any number of the languages of the region such as Arabic, Bulgarian, French, Greek, Italian, and Turkish, in addition to knowledge of Hebrew. Another linguistic layer was added onto Sephardic Spanish by the Paris-based Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), which left a considerable footprint through the education 14

Citing Sephardic Brotherhood member Simon Nessim at debate at Laurel Garden, Harlem 15 Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 194.

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campaigns conducted in the region, which promoted the French language as a westernized pathway to social mobility. Educated Sephardim, including most Judeo-Spanish editors, were fluent in the French language.16 However, none of these languages were active in the spheres of government, commerce, and education in the United States. This communication barrier accelerated an urgent need for Judeo-Spanish representatives at Ellis Island since the recognition that Sephardic immigrants were Jewish was a primary step toward gaining access to the support available from charitable Jewish organizations. This is highlighted in a report to the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society (later known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, or "HIAS") by the editor of La Amerika:17 ʱʩʬʩʠ ʯʩʠ ʸʩʬʩʡʠʨʱʩʠ ʩʣ ʩʬʾʡʩʱʥʴ ʥʨʱʩʸʴ ʱʠʮ ʥʬ ʣʠʣʩʱʩʱʩʰ ʤʨʥʬʥʱʡʠ ʩʣ ʱʩʠ ʩʠ... ʱʥʬ ʩʣ ʱʠʨʱʩʬ ʱʠʬ ʸʠʷʩʾʴʩʸʩʾʡ ʤʣʩʠʥʴ ʩʷ ʸʥʴ ʩʣʸʴʱ ʬʥʩʩʰʠʴʱʩʠ ʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʯʥʠ ʯʠʬʩʩʠ ʯʥʸʩʠʥʾʴ ʩʷ ʱʥʩʩʸʠʰʥʩʾʦʩʬʩʸʥʷ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʱʥʩʩʬʩʷʠ ʸʥʴ ʩʠ [...] ʱʥʣʠʾʡʩʸʠ ʱʥʸʩʾʦʠʱʠʴ ʥʣʠʱʠʴ ʸʩʾʡʠ ʯʩʱ ,ʩʸʨʰʠʬʩʣʠ ʯʥʸʩʩʨʸʠʴ ʩʷ ʥʠ ʷʸʥʩʩʾʡʩʰ ʩʣ ʣʠʣʾʡʩʱ ʤʬ ʯʩʠ ʱʥʣʠʷʸʠʡʦʩʣ ʯʩʠ ʯʥʸʠʨʠʨʱʰʥʷ ʩʱ ʩʷ ʱʥʨʷʠʾʴ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʱʥʬ ʩʷ ʱʠʮ ʥʨʰʠʨ ʤʨʩʩʱʥʱ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʱʩʾʴʥʠ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʯʩʠ ʤʨʩʩʱʥʱ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʱʥʣʠʢʩʩʴʮʩʠ ʱʥʬ ʩʷ ʩʨʰʩʮʠʸʠʬʷ ʯʠʥʢʩʨʱʩʨʠ ʱʩʦʩʮ ʱʥʮʩʨʬʥʠ ʱʥʬ ʱʥʩʸʠʰʥʩʩʾʢʩʬʩʸʥʷ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʤʠ ʯʩʩʡ ʸʩʱʥʰʥʷ ʤʸʩʰʠʮ ʤʰʥʢʰʩʰ ʯʩʠ ʯʩʣʩʠʥʴ ʥʰ ʣʰʠʬʩʩʠ ʱʩʬʩʠ ʩʨʰʩʮʠʸʩʨʰʩʠ ʯʥʱ ʱʩʸʡʮʥʰ ʱʥʱ ʩʷ ʤʮ ʱʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʱʠʱʸʩʾʡʩʣ ʱʥʱ ʩʣ ʤʦʾʡʠʷʠ ʥʬʥʱ ʥʰ .ʩʦʰʫʱʠ ʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʥʬʾʡʩʠʥʴ ʬʩʠ ʩʣ ʱʩʨʰʩʸʩʾʴʩʣ … i es de absoluta nesesidad lo mas presto posivle de estabeler en Elis Ailan un djudio espanyol sefaradi por ke pueda verifikar las listas de los pasajeros arivados […] i por akeyos nuestros korelijionarios ke fueron dezbarkados en la sivdad de Nivyork i ke partieron adelantre sin aver pasado por el ofis de la Sosieta tanto mas ke los munchos faktos ke se konstataron en los ultimos mezes, atestiguan klaramente ke los empiegados de la Sosieta en Elis Ailan no pueden en ninguna manera konoser bien a nuestros korelijionarios no solo akavza de sus diversas linguas ma ke sus nombres son enteramente diferentes del puevlo djudio ashkenazi. ... and it is of absolute necessity that a Spanish Jew be established at Ellis Island as soon as possible in order to verify the list of arriving passengers […] and for those of our co-religionists that disembarked in the city of New York and that departed thereafter without having passed by the office of the Society as well as the many events evidenced in the past few months which clearly attest that the employees of the Immigration Society in Ellis

16

Sara Abrevaya Stein. Making Jews Modern, The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires, (Indiana University Press, 2004), 66. 17 La Amerika, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 12 Jan 1912.

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Island cannot in any manner recognize our coreligionists not only due to their diverse languages but their names are entirely different from the Ashkenazim.

The linguistic divide in the United States created obstacles to gainful employment and desperation for immigrants striving to support families in Turkey18 where industry and opportunities were scarce and schools were no longer subsidized:19 ʱʩʠ ʱʩʬʠʨʰʩʩʸʥʠ-ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʱʩʨʰʠʸʢʩʮʩʠ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʩʣ ʤʱʠʬʷ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʩʨʸʠʴ ʩʣʰʠʸʢ ʱʠʮ ʤʬ ʥʾʦʩʩʾʡ ʬʩʠ ʩʷ ʤʦʾʡʠʷʠ ʤʠʩʷʸʥʨ ʯʩʠ ʯʥʩʩʱʷʥʸʨʱʰʩʠ ʩʣ ʱʥʷʰʠʮ ʥʣʰʩʩʱ ʧʨʬʥʷʰʩʠ ʩʾʦʠʷ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʱʠʬʥʷʱʩʠ ʸʩʸʾʡʠ ʸʩʦʠ ʩʣ ʥʢʩʮʠ ʤʸʩʠ ʥʰ ʣʩʮʠʫ ʬʥʣʡʠ ʯʠʨʬʥʱ ʬʩʣ ʭʩʾʦʩʸ .ʥʬʾʡʩʠʥʴ ʬʩʣ ʥʨʰʩʩʮʠʸʠʬʷʠ La mas grande parte de la klasa de nuestros imigrantes djudios orientales es kaji inkulta, siendo mankos de instruksion en Turkia, akavza ke el viejo rejim del Sultan Abdul Hamid no era amigo de azer avrir eskolas por el aklaramiento del puevlo. The greater part of this group of our eastern Judeo-Spanish immigrants is nearly illiterate, lacking instruction because the former regime of Sultan Abdul Hamid was not in favor of opening schools for the education of the people.

Restrictive U.S. immigration policies threatened to exclude illiterate immigrants. In response, Louis Hammerling, President of the American Association of Foreign Language Newspapers protested the proposed policy as unfair to immigrant children in a letter to the Immigration Committee published in La Amerika. Reminding the committee of the diverse immigrant composition of the U.S. population, the letter states that the association includes 663 publications circulating in 29 languages to 18,000,000 subscribers.20 In response to the obstacles to employment in America, some Sephardic Jews moved to linguistically compatible locations in Latin America:21

18

Ibid, “Sus vida”, 25 Nov 1910; “Por la imigrasion de Turkía en Amerika”, 11 Nov 1910. 19 Ibid, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911 and 12 Jan 1912. 20 Ibid, “Protesto kontra el proyekto de la nueva ley de imigrasion”, 06 Mar 1914. 21 Ibid, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 5 Jan 1912.

198

Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and Multilingualism ʩʣ ʱʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʱʠʬ ʯʩʠ ʤʩʩʱʰʩʱʥʰʥʷ ʱʥʱ ʩʣ ʤʱʰʠʷʰʠʮ ʸʥʴ ʱʥʾʢʩʠ ʱʥʬʠʮ ʱʥʱ ʩʣ ʤʦʾʡʠʷʠ ʤʠ ʯʠʱʩʴʮʩʠ ʩʠ ʥʨʰʩʩʮʩʾʡʥʮ ʯʥʠ ʥʱʩʴʮʩʠ ʩʨʰʩʮʠʮʩʨʬʥʠ ʱʩʣʥʩʩ ʩʠ ʦʩʬʢʰʩʠ ʦʩʩʠʴ ʩʨʱʩʠ .ʶʨʩʠ ,ʬʩʦʠʸʡ ,ʤʡʥʷ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʩʷʠ ʩʣ ʸʠʸʢʩʮʩʠ Akavza de sus malos echos por mankansa de sus konosensia en las linguas de este paiz, inglez i yudis, ultimamente empeso un movimiento i empesan a imigrar de aki por el Kuba, Brazil, ets. Due to the problems caused by the lack of knowledge of the languages of this country - English and Yiddish - currently there is a trend and they have begun to emigrate from here to Cuba, Brazil, etc.

4. Community Associations Sephardic communities - kehilot - were composed of multiple groups called Hebrot, which organized the religious observance of mitzva obligations related to worship, marriage, birth, brit milá, burial, and charitable acts such as visiting the sick. In addition, the Hebrot raised funds for the purchase or lease of buildings for use as synagogues and community centers and for the acquisition of cemeteries for members. The following article describes the extent of services offered:22 ʯʩʠ ʩʠ ʤʬʤʷ ʤʬ ʤʠ ʤʱʷʠʮ ʥʩʩʰʠ ʬʠ ʱʩʸʠʬʥʣ 5 ʤʢʠʴ ʤʸʡʤ ʤʬ ʥʣʠʢʩʬʩʣ ʤʣʠʷ ʸʥʴ ʯʩʠ ʩʨʰʩʮʬʠʩʩʸʩʨʠʮ ʱʥʣʠʣʥʩʠ ʯʥʱ ʤʨʰʩʦʩʸʴʩʸ ʩʷ ʤʸʡʤ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʱʥʸʡʮʩʩʮ ʱʥʬ ʤʸʨʰʥʷ ,ʶʨʩʠ ʤʸʥʺ ʣʥʮʬʺ ,ʱʠʸʥʨʠʩʸʷ ʱʠʬ ʩʣ ʯʥʩʩʱʠʷʥʣʩʠ ʤʬ ʸʥʴ ʤʩʩʣʥʷ ,ʤʩʩʸʩʦʩʮ ʩʣ ʱʠʦʾʡʠʷ ʯʥʢʬʠ ʯʩʠ ʤʴʬʥʷ ʯʩʱ ʯʠʩʸʩʩʠʷ ʩʷ ʱʥʩʩʬʩʷʠ ʤʠ ʥʢʦʥʾʢ ʥʠ ʯʥʩʩʦʩʸʴ ʩʣ ʸʠʾʡʬʠʱ ʸʥʴ ʤʩʩʣʥʷ ʸʥʴ ʱʩʾʴʥʠ ʩʩʠ ʩʨʸʠʴʠ .ʶʨʩʠ ʯʩʣʸʠʢʩʬʨʱʩʷ ʩʣ ʱʩʨʰʠʸʢʩʮʩʠ ʸʠʾʡʬʠʱ ʸʥʴ ʤʩʩʣʥʷ ,ʸʩʬʠʮ ...ʱʥʸʥʾʡʠʬ ʸʠʣ Por kada delegado la Hebra paga 5 dolares al anyo maksa a la kehilá i en kontra los miembros de la Hebra ke reprezenta son ayudados materialmente en kavzos de mizeria, kudia por la edukasion de las kriaturas, Talmud Tora, ets., kudia por salvar de prizion o djuzgo a akeyos ke kayerian sin kulpa en algun maler, kudia por salvar emigrantes de Kestlegarden, ets. Aparte ay ofis por dar lavoros... For every delegate, the Hebra pays 5 dollars maximum per year to the kehilá and in return the members are assisted materially by the Hebra that represents them in cases of destitution, education assistance for children, Talmud Torah, etc., legal assistance to avoid incarceration or trial for those innocent of the misfortune that has befallen them, assistance to save

22

Ibid, “La kehilá de Nivyork”, 3 Feb 1911.

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immigrants from Castle Garden, etc. Separately, there is an employment office…

Members seeking assistance from the kehilá were required to present a letter of recommendation from the president or delegate of the Hebra attesting to their membership and merit. In 1911, La Amerika reported 784 Hebrot in New York City in an article describing factors that excluded Sephardim from receiving support:23 ʯʩʠ ʷʸʥʩʩʾʡʩʰ ʩʣ ʤʠʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʣʠʣʩʰʥʮʥʷ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʥʬʥʨʩʨ ʬʩʠ ʱʩʠ ʩʨʱʩʠ " ʷʸʥʩʩʾʡʩʰ ʩʣ ʤʬʤʷ ʠʬ" ʱʥʬ ʥʬʥʱ ,ʩʷʠ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʩʣ ʱʩʨʸʥʱ ʱʥʬ ʱʥʣʥʨ ʩʣ ʺʥʸʡʤ 784 ʱʠʣʠʦʩʬʠʸʨʰʩʱ ʯʥʱ ʤʬʠʥʷ ʤʬ ʥʰ ʥʨʱʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʩʠ ʯʥʩʩʱʥʨʩʨʱʰʩʠ ʤʨʱʩʠ ʤʠ ʱʥʣʠʨʠ ʤʣʰʩʠʠ ʯʠʨʱʩʠ ʥʰ ʤʠʩʷʸʥʨ ʩʣ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ...ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʥʮʥʷ ʱʥʣʩʱʥʰʥʷ ʯʥʱ "La kehilá de Nivyork" - Este es el titulo de la komunidad djudia de Nivyork en la kuala son sentralizadas 784 Hebrot de todos los sortes de djudios aki, solo los djudios de Turkia no estan ainda atados a esta institusion i por esto no son konosidos komo djudios. "The kehilá of New York" - This is the title of the Jewish community of New York in which are centralized 784 community groups of all sorts of Jews, only the Jews from Turkey are not linked to this institution and for this reason they are not known to be Jews.

La Amerika kept pace with local, national, and international Sephardic associations, announced their events, financial status, officer names, country of origin of the members, amount of donations, and the names of benefactors. The newspaper occasionally called for copies of an association’s constitution for review by prospective members,24 as well as for accountability of the officers controlling the financial accounts.25

5. Editor and Extent of Distribution The proprietor and editor of La Amerika was Moise S. Gadol (1874-1941). Before immigrating to New York City in November 1910, he had been a successful merchant in Rustchuk and Sofia, Bulgaria contributing articles to business journals while traveling to Turkey, Austria, Serbia, Romania, 23

Ibid. Ibid, “Letra a la redaksion”, 26 Dec 1913. 25 Ibid, "La havrá Tikva Torá", 9 Dec 1910; "Nuestros djudios de Chikago", 9 Dec 1910; La Sosietá de Unión i Pas", 3 Feb 1911; “Union y organizasion”, 12 Jan 1912; "Los djudios fuyen de Salonik", 4 Feb 14. 24

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Germany, and France. He was educated by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (AIU), spoke 11 languages including Spanish, French, Hebrew, English, and Yiddish, had served in the Bulgarian army and as President of the Zionist Society of Rustchuk.26 In May 1910, Gadol traveled to New York to visit relatives who had immigrated eight years earlier.27 During his visit, he recognized the linguistic dilemma which created obstacles at Ellis Island for Sephardic immigrants. The language barrier diminished their access to gainful employment and isolated them from the Jewish majority. He moved to New York soon thereafter and launched La Amerika to local, national, and international circulation on a weekly basis from November 1910 through July 1925. Of the 19 documented Sephardic Spanish newspapers published in the U.S. in the early 20th century, 17 were published in New York City. La Amerika was the second to launch and one of the longest running.28 The immediately far-reaching geographical distribution of the newspaper likely reflects business networks established prior to Gadol’s arrival in New York.29 The first seven editions of La Amerika were produced in a Russian Jewish newspaper office owned by Chaim Rosenberg located at 131 Henry Street on the Lower East Side.30 Production transferred to 190 Chrystie Street, then to 250 Eldridge Street, and lastly to 5 South Rivington Street. National and international correspondents contributed via telegraph, telephone, and cable.31 Gadol’s motivations for publishing La Amerika were multifold. His stated purpose was to defend, organize and educate the community, and to validate Sephardim to the Ashkenazi press32 by way of a newspaper printed with Hebrew characters that announced Jewish ceremonies such as brit milá and religious items such as mezuzot, while appealing to a target readership with ads for oriental music shops and Turkish tobacco.33 ʯʥʱ ʥʰ ʥʮʥʷ ʯʠʨʰʥʷ ʱʥʮ ʱʥʾʦʥʠ ʱʥʬ ʯʩʠ ʱʠʮʩʸʢʠʬ ʯʥʷ ʱʥʰʩʷʥʨ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʩʣ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʯʥʷ ʩʷ ʱʠʸʩʠʥʾʴʠ ʥʸʥʾʡʠʬ ʸʥʴ ʯʠʨʰʩʦʩʸʴ ʩʱ ʩʣʰʥʠ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʸʥʴ ʭʩʦʰʫʹʠ ʱʥʬ ʩʣ ʱʥʣʩʠʩʸʷ ʩʣ ʱʠʰʥʬʥʷ ʱʠʬ ʯʠʩʸʠʨʱʠʡ ʥʰ ʩʷ ʱʥʨʷʠʾʴ ʩʣ ʱʩʨʸʥʱ ʯʥʷ ʩʠ ʱʥʱʸʥʾʴʱʩʠ ʱʩʣʰʠʸʢ ʩʥʮ .ʯʥʩʩʱʠʥʨʩʱ ʩʨʱʩʸʨ ʤʨʱʩʠ ʩʣ ʩʨʸʠʴ ʤʰʥʠ ʸʠʨʰʥʷʩʸ ʸʥʴ ʬʠʰʸʥʾʦ ʥʸʠʷ ʩʠ ʥʷʩʾʢ ʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ 26

Ibid, “El editor del jurnal”, 23 Feb 1912. Ibid. 28 Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 19. 29 see Index II 30 La Amerika, “El rolo del jurnal La Amerika”, 29 Dec 1911. 31 Ibid, “La valor del jurnal”, 12 May 1911. 32 Ibid, “La presa djudia i nuestro jurnal”, 3 Feb 1911. 33 Ibid, “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910. 27

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ʤʱʩʸʴ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʥʣʠʱʰʥʰʠ ʱʠʩʸʡʩʠ ʱʠʸʨʩʬ ʯʥʷ ʬʠʰʸʥʾʦ ʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʸʠʸʨʱʥʮ ʯʥʷ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ .ʸʩʠʩʸʷ ʯʥʸʩʩʦʩʠ ʩʱ ʺʩʦʰʫʹʠ ʤʠʩʣʥʾʢ Munchos de nuestros turkinos kon lagrimas en los ojos mos kontan komo no son kreidos de los ashkenazim por djudios onde se prezentan por lavoro afueras ke kon mui grandes esforsos i kon sortes de faktos ke no bastarian las kolunas de nuestro chiko i karo jurnal por rekontar una parte de esta triste situasion. Munchos kon mostrar nuestro jurnal kon letras ebreas anunsado de la presa djudia ashkenazit se izieron kreer. Many of our Turkish Jews with tears in their eyes tell us how they are not believed by the Ashkenazim to be Jews wherever they present themselves for work besides which, with much effort and sorts of facts, the columns of our small and precious newspaper would not suffice to recount a fraction of this sad situation. Showing them the announcements in the Ashkenazi press, about our newspaper, which is written with Hebrew letters, made them believe.

In addition to gaining co-religionist recognition for fellow Sephardim, Gadol used La Amerika as a platform to advocate for Zionism and equal rights.34 Some Sephardim in New York, Turkey, and the Balkans opposed Jewish nationalism as a perceived threat to the interests of the former Ottoman Empire and thereby a danger to compatriots in Turkey and Palestine.35 Gadol was also concerned with the neglect of religious observances related to care of the sick and proper interment of the deceased:36 .ʶʨʩʠ ,ʤʣʸʩʷʩʨ,ʥʬʸʥʾʢ ʩʣ ʱʥʩʩʸʠʰʥʩʩʾʦʩʬʩʸʥʷ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʩʣ ʤʨʩʨʰʠʥʷ ʤʦʥʸʩʮʥʰ ʤʰʥʠ ʥʰ ʤʣʰʩʠʠ ʱʥʩʩʬʩʠ !ʯʥʩʩʱʠʦʩʰʠʢʸʥʠ ʩʠ ʤʨʩʩʱʥʱ ʤʰʥʢʰʩʰ ʯʩʱ ʣʠʣʩʸʥʷʱʩʠ ʤʬ ʯʩʠ ʯʠʰʩʮʠʷ ʩʷ ʱʥʣʠʮʸʥʾʴʰʩʠ ʱʥʮʠʨʱʩʠ !ʸʩʸʥʮ ʩʠ ʸʩʾʡʩʡ ʩʩʠ ʤʷʩʸʩʮʠ ʯʩʠ ʩʷʠ ʩʷ ʸʩʾʡʠʱ ʯʩʸʩʷ ʣʥʣ ʾʱ .ʱʥʣʠʸʩʨʰʩʠ ʯʥʱ ʩʣʰʥʠ ʩʾʡʠʱ ʥʰʥʢʰʩʰ ʩʠ ʯʥʸʩʩʸʥʮ ʱʥʰʩʷʸʥʨ ʱʥʨʱʩʠ ʩʣ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʱʩʬʠʨʩʴʱʩʠ ʱʥʬ ʤʠ ʱʥʩʩʬʩʠ ʩʣ ʱʥʰʩʦʠʧ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʤʠ ʤʾʡʩʩ ʬʩʠ ʥʮʥʷ ʤʨʰʥʷ ʱʥʰ ʤʨʸʥʴʱʠʱ ʩʨʰʩʮʬʠʥʨʷʠ .ʱʥʰʠʮʸʩʠ ʱʥʱ ʩʣ ʯʩʩʡ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʥʴʮʩʩʨ ʥʱ ʤʩʩʰʠʣʠʴʱʩʠ ʥʰ ,ʤʢʠʴ ʤʰʥʢʰʩʰ ʯʩʱ ʩʾʡʷʠʬʡ ,ʬʠʨʩʴʱʩʠ ʬʥʤ ʩʨʩʱ ʬʩʠ ʯʩʠ ʯʥʾʴʬʠʧ ʩʺʡʹ :ʱʩʬʠʣʸʩʷʩʨ ʱʥʬ ʱʥʰʩʦʠʧ ʯʠʴʥʨ ʩʱ ʩʣ ʯʥʸʩʩʬʠʱ ʱʠʰʩʴʠ ʱʥʸʨʥʠ .ʱʩʠʠʷ 26 ʱʠʬ ʩʣ ʬʠʨʩʴʱʩʠ ʬʩʠ ʯʩʠ ʯʠʸʨʩʡ ʬʠʥʰʮʲ ,ʯʠʬʩʩʠ !ʱʥʱʩʠʥʢ ʱʥʱ ʯʠʸʠʣʩʷ ʩʣʰʥʠ ʸʥʴ ʸʩʾʡʠʱ ʩʣʩʠʥʴ ʩʱ ʥʰ ,ʯʥʸʩʩʸʥʮ ʱʥʰʥʢʬʠ ,ʱʩʬʠʨʩʴʱʩʠ ʱʥʬ ʥʸʨʱʩʠʥʰ ʤʠ ʬʠʮ ʩʣʰʠʸʢ ʯʥʠ ʤʸʩʠʠʸʨ ,ʤʦʥʷ ʤʨʱʩʠ ʩʸʾʡʥʱ ʤʨʱʩʾʡʩʣ ʸʠʩʩʣʥʷ ʥʰ ʬʩʠ !ʥʬʾʡʩʠʥʴ

34

Ibid, “El istoriko mas-miting”, 28 Jan 1916. Ibid, “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910; “David Fresko i la presa djudiá de Nivyork”, 3 Feb 1911; “Nueva setensia de la Turkía kontra el sionismo”, 29 Dec 1911. 36 Ibid, “Por los djudios de Chorlu, Tekirda, Marmara”, 19 Jan 1912. 35

202

Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and Multilingualism Una numeroza kuantita de nuestros korelijionarios de Chorlu, Tekirda, ets. kaminan en la eskuridad sin ninguna sosieta i organizasyon! Eyos ainda no keren saver ke aki en Amerika ay bivir i morir! Estamos informados ke munchos de estos turkinos murieron i ninguno save onde son enterados. Sr. David Sasporta nos konta, komo el yeva a munchos hazinos de eyos a los espitales sin ninguna paga, no espadanya su tiempo por el bien de sus ermanos. Aktualmente se topan hazinos los tekirdalís: Shabati Halfun en el Siti Hal espital, Blakve Island, Emanuel Bitran en el espital de las 26 kayes. Otros apenas salieron de los espitales. Algunos murieron, no se puede saver por onde kedaran sus guesos! El no kudiar devista sovre esta koza, traera un grande mal a nuestro puevlo! A great number of our co-religionists from Çorlu, Tekirda÷, etc. are wandering in the darkness without any association or organization! They don’t want to understand that here in America there is life and death. We are informed that many of these Turkish Jews have died and no one knows where they are buried. Mr. David Sasporta tells us that he takes many of their sick to the hospital without compensation; he isn’t selfish with his time for the sake of his brothers. These ailing persons from Tekirda÷ were found recently: Shabati Halfun in City Hall Hospital, Blackwell’s Island; Emanuel Bitran in the hospital on 26th street. Others were barely able to leave the hospital. Some died, it is unknown where their bones lie! Continued neglect of this will bring misfortune upon our people!

Gadol was additionally motivated to provide assistance to fellow Sephardic immigrants in the form of advice about immigration laws, provision of immigration forms, and assistance with job placement, in particular with employers that observed Shabat.37 He served as an unofficial Sephardic advocate to the Spanish consulate in New York by submitting written requests for passports for Turkish Jews living in Havana.38 Gadol worked to maintain cohesion within the widely dispersed expatriated Sephardic community by publishing the names and countries of origin of the immigrants arriving at Ellis Island, as well as appeals from La Amerika subscribers seeking assistance in locating relatives:39 x P. Pinto of Birmingham looking for A. Matalon who immigrated to Ohio from Constantinople x D. Bardavid of Argentina looking for relative who immigrated from Turkey to France 37

Ibid, “Importante para los lavoradores”, 18 Nov 1910. Ibid, “A los Sefaradís de Havana”, 2 Jan 1920. 39 Ibid, “Se bushka”, 9 Jan 1920, 6 Feb 1920, 26 Mar 1920 and 16 Apr 1920. 38

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x Name unspecified looking for I. Morojon who immigrated from Bulgaria to Panama-Brazil-Chile x Fez of Havana looking for relative who immigrated to Argentina from Cuba x U. Krespi looking for relative who immigrated from Angera, Italy to the U.S. Motivations for publishing La Amerika, which are more in line with Gadol's extensive commercial experience, are reflected in the ads featuring his credentials as a commission agent for the importation, exportation, and distribution of all kinds of clothing within the United States, Europe, and Turkey. The newspaper also frequently solicited print jobs, as the ads state, “in English, Jewish, Spanish and French",40 as well as for materials printed in Ladino, the liturgical variety of Judeo-Spanish employed in religious instruction.

6. External and Internal Attitudes This section compares the attitudes toward Judeo-Spanish and multilingualism expressed in La Amerika with those published in the Judeo-Spanish press in the Ottoman regions. The internalized stigma of these attitudes, stemming from contact with prestige majority languages, will also be discussed. The position that Spanish occupied in the lives of the Sephardim in the Balkan and eastern Mediterranean regions is mentioned here:41 ʯʥʸʩʩʾʡʥʨʡʥʠ ʩʩʥʠ ʯʩʾʴ ʱʥʩʩʰʠ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʱʩʸʨʰʩʩʮ ʤʠʩʷʸʥʨ ʩʣ ʱʥʩʩʸʠʰʩʩʾʢʩʬʩʸʥʷ ʱʥʸʨʱʩʥʰ ʩʠ ʱʩʸʠʴ ʩʣ ʤʬʠʱʸʩʾʡʩʰʥʠ ʤʺʩʬʠʸʱʩ ʤʱʰʠʩʬʠ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʱʠʬʥʷʱʩʠ ʱʠʬ ʯʩʠ ʯʥʩʩʱʷʥʸʨʱʰʩʠ ʤʬ ʸʥʴ ʸʠʣʰʠʢʠʴʥʸʴ ʩʣ ʩʸʴʮʩʩʱ ʥʸʩʮ ,ʤʠʩʣʥʾʢ ʩʷʰʠ ,ʤʦʩʱʰʠʸʾʴ ʯʥʩʩʱʥʨʩʨʱʰʩʠ ʥʮʥʷ ʱʩʨʰʠʸʢʩʮʩʠ ʱʥʬ ʱʥʣʥʨ ʯʥʦʠʸ ʤʨʱʩʠ ʤʠ ʩʠ ʥʠʩʸʡʩʠ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʥʷʥʴ ʩʠ ʤʦʩʱʰʠʸʾʴ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ -ʥʠʩʣʥʾʢ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʤʬ ʤʰʸʩʨʠʮ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʥʮʥʷ ʯʩʱʥʰʥʷ ʦʩʠʠʴ ʩʨʱʩʠ ʩʣ ʯʩʰʩʩʾʡ ʩʷ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʤʢʩʸʢ ,ʤʦʩʱʰʠʸʾʴ ʱʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʱʠʬ : ʤʱʠʬʷ ʤʬ ʤʸʠʴ ʤʣʥʩʩʠ ʩʣ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʥʮʥʷ ʩʠ ʤʬʥʩʩʰʠʴʱʩʠ .ʤʠʩʷʸʥʨ ʯʩʠ ʱʠʬʠʴʩʱʰʩʸʴ ʱʠʥʢʰʩʬ ,ʤʷʸʥʨ ʩʠ Nuestros koreligionarios de Turkía mientres munchos anyos fin oy obtuvieron instruksion en las eskolas de La Aliansa Isralita Universala de Paris i komo institusion franseza, anke djudia, miró siempre de propagandar por la lingua franseza i poko por el ebreo i a esta razon todos los imigrantes djudios ke vienen de este paiz konosen komo lingua materna

40 41

Ibid, advert, 3 Nov 1910. Ibid, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911.

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Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and Multilingualism la lingua djudeo-espanyol i komo linguas de ayuda para la klasa: las linguas franseza, grega i turka, linguas prinsipalas en Turkía. Our co-religionists of Turkey for many years to date were educated in the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle of Paris and as a French institution, although Jewish, it always promoted the French language and very little of Hebrew. And for this reason, all the Jewish immigrants that come from this country know the Judeo-Spanish language as their mother tongue and as languages for social ascent: French, Greek, and Turkish, the principal languages in Turkey.

According to Stein (2004), Spanish was the first language of 90% of all Greek, Bulgarian, and Turkish Jews as late as 1930.42 Beginning late in the 19th century, the Judeo-Spanish press flourished in the area culminating in nearly 400 publications between 1919 and 1939.43 Nevertheless, it was debated whether Sephardic Spanish was a legitimate language.44 Several editorials attacking as well as defending its use demonstrate a prescriptive rather than descriptive approach, which does not correspond with the linguistic reality of the region. For instance, David Fresco, editor of El Tiempo of Istanbul states in 1901 that the Sephardim formerly spoke Spanish "like Cervantes" but that current Turkish Jews no longer perceived it as a language, that it had no grammatical rules, lacked terms for geography, astronomy and modern science, and served no diplomatic, commercial, or intellectual purpose.45 In response to Fresco's criticism, the editor Sa’adi HaLevy of La Epoka of Salonika responded with an editorial entitled “Ladino is conserving the national character of Jews in the Orient”, arguing that although it was not a language in the philological sense, Jewish schools should use Ladino to teach literature and science. He pointed out that many great literary figures such as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy were multilingual, and that many ethnic groups maintain multiple languages.46 Fresco's reference to Cervantes discredits the contemporary form of the language, presumes that in the course of a language's existence there is only one variety, and generally denies that all languages evolve over time and distance. The description of Judeo-Spanish as a non-language is an internalized stigma derived from prescriptive attitudes and is contradictory given the fact that it was in widespread use as a first language and a 42

Stein, Making Jews Modern, 59. Ibid, 6. 44 Ibid, 74-75. 45 Ibid, 74-75. 46 Ibid. 43

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medium of mass communication in the region. That it lacked grammatical rules is not an accurate assessment; all language systems have rules that are unconsciously acquired by native speakers. Due to this unconscious process, most native speakers lack an informed defense when confronted with uneducated assessments such as those promoted by Fresco. They may internalize and propagate the stigma attributed by such assessments. Furthermore, languages develop regional orthographic and phonological differences. The Real Academia Española, the Arabic Language Academy, and L’Académie Française, among many other language regulators, have been established, in short, because you say po҂'teѢto҂ (poe-tay-toe) and I say po҂'tato҂ (poe-tah-toe).47 There are sure to be many more such language regulators, given that the Ethnologue counted 6,909 languages in use in 2009.48 Unlike Fresco, Gadol does not denigrate Judeo-Spanish or refer to it as jargon. Nonetheless, Gadol's editorials associate it with traumatic memories of oppression in an attempt to explain why it was not preserved by the American descendants of the original Sephardic colonists.49 However, La Amerika articles do refer to Yiddish as jargon:50 ʯʠʴʥʨ ʩʱ ʤʬʠʥʷ ʤʬ ʩʣ ʤʸʩʱʩʾʡʠʷ ʤʬ ʤʠ ʩʷʠ ʩʣ "ʩʸʡʲ ʺʡʹ ʩʶʩʴʮ" ʤʨʩʩʱʥʱ ʩʣʰʠʸʢ ʤʬ ʱʠʬ ʱʠʣʥʨ ʩʣ ʤʣʥʩʩʠ ʤʬ ʯʥʷ ʩʠ ʱʩʨʰʠʢʩʾʢ ʱʥʱʩʸʢʥʸʴ ʩʦʠ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʱʩʸʩʰʥʩʩʬʩʮ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʥʨʰʩʩʮʠʬʥʰʠ ʬʩʠ ʸʥʴ ʤʮʸʥʰʩʠ ʤʣʰʠʢʠʴʥʸʴ ʯʩʦʠ ʱʠʨʱʩʰʥʩʶ ʱʠʨʩʩʱʥʱ ʩʠ ʱʩʰʥʩʩʱʠʸʥʴʸʥʷ .ʱʩʨʰʩʩʦʩʾʴʱʩʨʠʱ ʩʥʮ ʱʥʨʠʨʬʥʦʩʸ ʥʣʰʩʩʰʩʨʡʥʠ ʯʠʨʱʩʠ ʩʠ ʤʮʱʩʰ-ʯʥʢʸʠʾʦ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʤʬ ʩʣ La grande sosieta Mefitsi Shabat Evrei de aki a la kavesera de la kuala se topan munchos milyoneres djudios aze progresos djigantes i kon la ayuda de todas las korporasiones i sosietas sionistas azen propaganda enorma por el anulamiento de la lingua jargon-nisma (sic) i estan obteniendo rezultatos (sic) mui satizfizientes. The great local association Mefitsi Shabat Evrei (literally, "Hebrew Language Disseminators") at the head of which are found many Jewish millionaires is making great progress and with the aid of all the Zionist corporations and associations is banning jargonist language and is obtaining very satisfactory results.

47

Ira Gershwin and George Gershwin, “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, Chappell & Co. Inc. 1937. 48 Lewis and Simons, 2009. 49 Ibid, “Por los djudios sefaradis amerikanos”, 25 Nov 1910; “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910; “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911. 50 La America, “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910. “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911.

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It is safe to assume that "jargon" applies to Yiddish in this case since it was the language of the Zionist majority51 and because Gadol refers to it as such in a report to the HIAS52 (Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society). It is also referenced as "jargon" in an article regarding Turkish immigrant factory workers:53 ʯʠʴʥʨ ʩʣʰʥʠ ʱʠʩʸʥʨʷʠʾʴ ʯʩʠ ʸʠʸʥʾʡʠʬ ʱʩʠ ʩʨʰʩʾʢ ʤʨʱʩʠ ʩʣ ʤʱʠʮ ʠʬ ʩʣ ʯʥʩʩʱʠʴʥʷʥʠ ʠʬ ʤʱʮʩʰ-ʯʥʢʸʠʾʦ ʸʥʠ ʤʦʩʬʢʰʩʠ ʤʠʥʢʰʩʬ ʤʬ ʥʣʰʩʩʱʥʰʥʷ ʥʰ ʱʥʾʢʰʥʮ ʱʠʮ ʱʥʬ ʩʠ ,ʯʩʣʩʠʥʴ ʸʥʠ .ʱʩʦʰʫʹʠ ʱʥʩʩʣʥʾʢ ʩʣ ʱʩʰʥʩʩʬʩʮ ʱʥʬ ʸʥʴ ʤʣʠʬʾʡʠ La okupasion de la masa de esta djente es lavorar en faktorias onde topan or (sic) pueden, i los mas munchos no konosiendo la lingua ingleza or (sic) jargon-nisma (sic) avlada por los milyones de djudios ashkenazis. Factory work is the occupation of the majority of these people, wherever they are able to find it; most do not know English or the jargon spoken by millions of Ashkenazis.

While Gadol refers to Judeo-Spanish as his language, to eastern Sephardim as his people and his brothers, and to the eastern countries of origin as “our countries,”54 few Turkish words are employed in La Amerika. However, according to Stein (2009), this was also characteristic of Judeo-Spanish periodicals circulating in the Ottoman territories: Nearly all Ottoman Ladino journals with a Westernizing agenda (which constituted the vast majority of Ladino periodicals) were published in a linguistic style rich in international vocabulary and French syntax. Words from Hebrew, Aramaic, Turkish and other Balkan languages were avoided.55

Added to the exclusion of Turkish vocabulary as typical for Judeo-Spanish editors such as Gadol is the linguistic impact of an education by the AIU. This is evidenced by the French-influenced vocabulary pervading the La Amerika articles:

51

Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews, 123. La Amerika, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911. 53 Ibid, title unavailable, 25 Nov 1910. 54 Ibid, “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911; "El rolo del jurnal La Amerika", 29 Dec 1911. 55 Stein, Making Jews Modern, 69, referencing Bunis in Voices From Salonika. 52

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English current attention question ask disadvantage investment capital committee which monthly neglected to oppose voice fortune, luck fifth society, club

French Influence aktuala atansion demanda, n demandar, v dezavantajo kapitala komité kualo, kuala mensuala neglijados opozar organ shansa sinkena sosietá

207

Judeo-Spanish ʤʬʠʥʨʷʠ ʯʥʩʩʱʰʠʨʠ ʤʣʰʠʮʩʣ ʸʠʣʰʠʮʩʣ ʥʾʦʠʨʰʠʾʡʠʦʩʣ ʤʬʠʨʩʴʠʷ ʩʨʩʮʥʷ ʤʬʠʥʷ, ʥʬʠʥʷ ʤʬʠʥʱʰʩʮ ʱʥʣʠʾʦʩʬʢʩʰ ʸʠʦʥʴʥʠ ʯʠʢʸʥʠ ʤʱʰʠʹ ʤʰʩʷʰʩʱ ʤʨʩʩʱʥʱ

Table 10.2 French-influenced Vocabulary

However, Gadol departed from the assimilationist agenda promoted by the AIU by recommending Hebrew as a lingua franca56 and with frequent references to the status of Hebrew language periodicals in circulation in locations such as Sophia, Warsaw, and Jerusalem.57 He described assimilation as damaging58 and believed that although Jewish children would become good citizens with an education in American “government” schools, they would not become good Jews without instruction in Hebrew.59 He lobbied for Hebrew instructors, for Talmud Torah instruction, and highlighted similar efforts underway in other states and countries.60

56

Ibid, “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910. Ibid, “El ubilio de La ha-tzefira (the siren)”, “El nuevo jurnal ha-mishpat (the law)”, “La kreza del komiti sinagogal de Rosjuk” and “El jurnal ha-Herut (independence/freedom) de Yerushalayim apareserá kada dia”, 12 Apr 1912. 58 Ibid, “Order Sons of Zion”, Feb 1911. 59 Ibid, “El important raporto del Buro Oriental”, 05 Jan 1912. 60 Ibid, “Nuestros kriaturas”, 12 Jan 1912; “La federasion djudio-orientala”, 09 Aug 1912; “Por nuestra kolonia de Niu-Brunsvik”, 11 Oct 1915; “Korespondensia de Seatle”, 22 Oct 1915; “Avizo”, 2 Jan 1920; “Jeneral miting for Talmud Torah Downtown”, 9 Jan 1920. 57

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Consistent with his opinion that, second to Hebrew, Jews should learn the language of their country of residence for practical reasons,61 La Amerika featured English language lessons with phonetic renderings in Rashi script to facilitate pronunciation.62 Gadol's language lesson booklets, which featured information about immigration laws, were advertised for distribution via La Amerika subscription agents. In an effort to serve the Mizrahi Jews in the community that did not read Judeo-Spanish, Gadol engaged in an unsuccessful attempt to raise capital to produce an additional version of La Amerika in English as well as to increase production to twice weekly.63

7. Conclusion La Amerika provides an important view into the linguistic pressures operating within a religious (Jewish) and linguistic (Judeo-Spanish) minority in early 20th century New York. While it created public space for validation of Sephardic language and culture in symbolic (written) form, it does not inform us about the spoken varieties and modalities that may have been used by the women, children, or illiterate members of the community. Bearing in mind the important differences between the written and spoken varieties of a language, intergenerational language shift may have occurred at a rapid pace. The rate of language shift may be appreciated using an expanded version of Joshua Fishman's model for the assessment of endangered languages. This model, provided in Appendix I, is called the Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS).64 According to the categorical criteria outlined in the model, Sephardic Spanish became endangered as a spoken language within two generations after peak immigration: Category 5 Safe - The language is used orally by all generations and is effectively used in written form in parts of the community Category 7 Definitely Endangered - The child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it among themselves but none are transmitting it to their children 61

Ibid, “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910. see Appendix IIIa and IIIb 63 Ibid, “El progreso de nuestro jurnal”, 12 Dec 1913. 64 see Appendix I. 62

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We may conclude that unless a language is spoken by sufficient numbers of children on a widespread basis, the linguistic majority will not experience sufficient pressure to accommodate its use in areas such as public education and politics. Causes contributing to language shift began in the countries of origin. These include the reformist agenda of the Paris-based AIU65 and the official language policies emerging with the transition to nation-states in the former Ottoman Empire. Factors in the U.S. include language barriers, the predominance of the Jewish majority, and restrictive immigration laws that reduced the infusion of native speakers.66 Linguistic dissipation in Peninsular and Latin American Spanish-speaking destinations also contributed to language shift. Additional factors include the emphasis on the acquisition of Hebrew with the emergence of Jewish nationalism and the language preferences of Americanized Sephardic children. Although multilingualism was prevalent in the eastern Mediterranean and Balkan Sephardic communities, Judeo-Spanish editors such as Moise Gadol of La Amerika recognized this to be uncharacteristic of language norms in the United States. As noted earlier, Gadol published La Amerika as a means to defend, organize, educate, and validate the Sephardic Jews. However, he was more concerned with the preservation of the Jewish identity of the Sephardim than with Judeo-Spanish, a language he associated with historical oppression. He linked Hebrew with ancestral Jewish origins and promoted its acquisition as the key to preservation of Jewish identity. While associating one language variety with cultural authenticity may be viewed as prescriptive, it highlights the perception that language shapes identity. If this is accurate, multilingualism may offer more options for self-identification and adaptation in response to language shift.

65

Marcus and Peck, The American Jewish Archives, Nov 1987. La Amerika, “El blamaje para la nasion djudia de parte la Turkía”, 9 Dec 1910; “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 12 Jan 1912; “La dezdicha de la Turkía i los djudios”, 15 Nov 1912. 66

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References Angel, Marc D. La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1st ed. 1982. Ben-Ur, Aviva. Sephardic Jews in America, A Diasporic History, New York University Press. 2009. Gadol, Moise S. La Amerika, New York: The Oriental Printing and Publishing Co., 1910-1925. Gershwin, Ira and George Gershwin. “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”, Chappell & Co. Inc. 1937. Lewis, Paul M. and Gary F. Simons. “Assessing Endangerment: Expanding Fishman’s GIDS”, 2009. www.sil.org, http://www01.sil.org/~simonsg/preprint/EGIDS.pdf. Accessed 06/11/2014. Marcus, Jacob R. and Abraham J. Peck, eds. The American Jewish Archives, "Sephardic Jews in America", (Cincinnati - Hebrew College), Vol.XXXIX No. 2, Nov 1987. Shaul, Moshe, ed. Aki Yerushalayim. Pub: SEFARAD, Jerusalem. www.aki-yerushalayim.co.il. Web. Accessed 08/30/14. Stein, Sarah Abrevaya. Making Jews Modern, The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Indiana University Press, 2004.

Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following individuals and organizations for their invaluable support and guidance provided for this project: UHD Arts & Humanities Dean and Assistant Dean’s Office, UHD Interlibrary Loan Department, UHD Dr. Reynaldo Romero, UCLA Dr. Bryan Kirschen, Brandeis University Library, Ladinokomunita.org, Aki Yerushalayim, and The Open Siddur Project.

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Appendix I Lewis and Simons (EGIDS) Expansion of Fishman's Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale67 GIDS SCALE

LABEL

0

International

1

UNESCO RATING

The language is used internationally for a broad range of functions

Safe

National

The language is used in education, work, mass media, government at the nationwide level

Safe

2

Regional

The language is used for local and regional mass media and governmental services

Safe

3

Trade

The language is used for local and regional work by both insiders and outsiders

Safe

4

Educational

Literacy in the language is being transmitted through a system of public education

Safe

Safe

Safe

5

Written

The language is used orally by all generations and is effectively used in written form in parts of the community

6a

Vigorous

The language is used orally by all generations and is being learned by children as their first language

6b

67

DESCRIPTION

Threatened

The language is used orally by all generations but only some of the child-bearing generation are transmitting it to their children

Lewis and Simons, “Assessing Endangerment”, 2009.

Vulnerable

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Attitudes toward Sephardic Language Change and Multilingualism

7

Shifting

The child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it among themselves but none are transmitting it to their children

8a

Moribund

The only remaining active speakers of the language are members of the grandparent generation

Definitely Endangered

Severely Endangered

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Appendix II Distribution and Subscription Agents68

68

La Amerika, January 1916.

213

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Appendix IIIa Open Class Content Morphemes Non-intrusive lexical loans of practical use nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs69

69

La Amerika, 18 Nov 1910; date undetermined for trilingual example.

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Appendix IIIb Closed Class Function Morphemes Incursion into the grammatical structure of L1 pronouns, auxiliary verbs, determiners, prepositions, quantifiers, conjunctions70

70

La Amerika, 15 Mar, 1912 and 12 Aug 1912.

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Appendix IV La Amerika Articles in sequence of citation: “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 29 Dec 1911 “Nuestros djudios-espanyoles del oriente en Kuba”, 19 Jan 1912 “Nuestros djudios de Chicago”, 9 Dec 1910 “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 12 Jan 1912 “Sus vida”, 25 Nov 1910 “Por la imigrasion de Turkía en Amerika”, 11 Nov 1910 “Protesto kontra el proyekto de la nueva ley de imigrasion”, 06 Mar 1914 “El importante raporto del Buro Oriental”, 05 Jan 1912 “La kehilá de Nivyork”, 3 Feb 1911 “Letra a la redaksion”, 26 Dec 1913 “La havrá Tikva Torá”, 9 Dec 1910 “Nuestros djudios de Chikago”, 9 Dec 1910 “La Sosietá de Union i Pas”, 3 Feb 1911 “Union i organizasion”, 12 Jan 1912 “Los djudios fuyen de Salonik”, 4 Feb 1914 “El editor del jurnal”, 23 Feb 1912 “El rolo del jurnal La Amerika”, 29 Dec 1911 “La valor del jurnal”, 12 May 1911 “La presa djudia i nuestro jurnal”, 3 Feb 1911 “Por la lingua”, 9 Dec 1910 “El istoriko mas-miting”, 28 Jan 1916 "David Fresko i la presa djudia de Nivyork", 3 Feb 1911 “Nueva setensia de la Turkía kontra el sionismo”, 29 Dec 1911 “Por los djudios de Chorlu, Tekirda, Marmara”, 19 Jan 1912 “Importante para los lavoradores”, 18 Nov 1910 “A los sefaradis de Havana”, 2 Jan 1920 “Se bushka”, 9 Jan 1920, 6 Feb 1920, 26 Mar 1920 and 16 Apr 1920 title unavailable, 25 Nov 1910 “Por los djudios sefaradis amerikanos”, 25 Nov 1910 “El ubilio de La ha-tzefira (the siren)”, 12 Apr 1912 “El nuevo jurnal ha-mishpat (the law)”, 12 Apr 1912 “La kreza del komiti sinagogal de Rosjuk”, 12 Apr 1912 “El jurnal ha-Herut (independence/freedom) de Yerushalayim apareserá kada dia”; 12 Apr 1912 “La kreza del komiti sinagogal de Rosjuk”, 12 Apr 1912 “Order Sons of Zion”, Feb 1911 “Nuestros kriaturas”, 12 Jan 1912

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“La federasion djudio-orientala”, 09 Aug 1912 “Por nuestra kolonia de Niu-Brunsvik”, 11 Oct 1915 “Avizo”, 2 Jan 1920 “Korespondensia de Seatle”, 22 Oct 1915 “Jeneral miting for Talmud Torah Downtown”, 9 Jan 1920 “El progreso de nuestro djurnal”, 12 Dec 1913 “El blamaje para la nasion djudia de parte la Turkía”, 9 Dec 1910 “La dezdicha de la Turkía i los djudios”, 15 Nov 1912

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Appendix V Masthead

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Appendix VI Samples of pre-transliterated text

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“LOS SEFARDÍES” AND “ORIENTAL JEWS”: LATE NINETEENTH- AND EARLY TWENTIETHCENTURY REPRESENTATIONS OF SEPHARDIC JEWS IN THE ENGLISH- AND SPANISHLANGUAGE NEW YORK CITY PRESS BETHANY BEYER UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

For over two centuries, numerous New York City (NYC) publications have reported the news in a variety of languages, including English, Spanish,1 and Judeo-Spanish, among others. In the 1910s and 1920s, both decades of transformation and immigration, “New York City published newspapers in the greatest number of languages in the world.”2 3 Three of the city’s major English-language papers, The New York Times, the New York Tribune, and The Sun, which each served a large readership, and the Spanish-language paper La Prensa [The Press], which catered to a growing Spanish-speaking population, noted the immigration of thousands

 1

In referring to “Spanish,” I am speaking of what some scholars call “modern Spanish” and others refer to as “Western Spanish,” although neither designation is problem free. In doing so, I draw a distinction between “Spanish” and “JudeoSpanish,” the latter being a commonly utilized name for a Romance language used by many of the Sephardim. The matter becomes even more complicated since numerous Sephardim employ the term “español” to refer to Judeo-Spanish, but for simplicity’s sake I will use Spanish and Judeo-Spanish throughout the article. 2 Ofelia García, “New York’s Multilingualism: World Languages and their Role in a U.S. City,” in The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. 2nd ed., eds. Ofelia García and Joshua A. Fishman (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 27. 3 In the United States, by 1917 the “number of foreign-language newspapers… passed 1,300, the likely peak of such newspaper publication.” Sally M. Miller, “Distinctive Media: The European Press in the United States,” in Print In Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940. Vol. 4, A History of the Book in America, eds. Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 301.



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of Sephardic Jews to NYC during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The incipient Judeo-Spanish press, which began in NYC in 1910 with the publication of La Amerika, also took notice of this rise in population. 4 In recent years, several scholars have explored various aspects of the Judeo-Spanish press in the metropolis, including its focus on aiding recent immigrants, supporting the community, and building bridges with other groups.5 Along with these noteworthy lines of research, it is also important to examine major publications’ attitudes toward and descriptions of the Sephardim since they helped shape readers’ perceptions of Sephardic Jews. Before and after the dawn of the twentieth century, from approximately 1885 to 1930, the English- and Spanish-language press of NYC portrayed the Sephardim, their language, and their habitation in the city in various ways. In general, reporters introduced their reading audience to the Sephardim living in the city, as well as to those dwelling in the Ottoman Empire, the Balkans, and other locales, by emphasizing the group’s “otherness” in terms of language, customs, and ethnicity. In doing so, article writers usually marked the Sephardim as different from the newspapers’ non-Sephardic readers, although a handful of reporters celebrated the former group’s contribution to the city’s multicultural tapestry. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants from many nations changed NYC’s physical, cultural, and journalistic landscape. Diverse customs, languages, and cuisines enlivened particular parts of the city, including the neighborhoods on the East Side where thousands of Sephardic Jews made their home during the period from roughly 1885 to1925. The metropolis’s major newspapers noted their arrival and presence in the city and in doing so used a variety of terms to describe the Sephardim, their tongue, and their customs. Wars, reforms, and other changes occurring in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans at times also merited mention in the papers and elicited discussions about the various groups of people living there, including the Sephardim. The bulk of the news stories focused on the Sephardim’s perceived differences that made them distinct from other

 4

Aviva Ben-Ur, “The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 19101948” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 65. 5 See, for example, Joseph M. Papo’s “The Sephardic Jewish Community of New York,” pages 65-94, in Studies in Sephardic Culture: The David N. Barocas Memorial Volume, edited by Marc D. Angel, New York: Sepher-Hermon Press, 1980.



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inhabitants of the United States. While attitudes toward the Sephardic Jews varied, newspapers used a variety of terms that emphasized the exoticism and otherness of the newly-arrived New Yorkers, the JudeoSpanish language, and the neighborhoods in which the Sephardim lived. It is valuable to examine the city’s demographic makeup from 1885 to 1930. During this period, thousands of Judeo-Spanish speakers made New York City their home. Most hailed from the Ottoman Empire or the Balkans, and they sought greater freedom and economic opportunity in the United States, 6 despite the perception that “since most of the Sephardi immigrants spoke Judeo-Spanish, it was believed that they would more easily adjust in Spanish-speaking countries and that they therefore should be encouraged to settle in Latin America.” 7 The majority came to and settled in the metropolis, and Angel notes that “perhaps as many as 90 per cent of the Sephardim settled in New York, on the Lower East Side and later also in Harlem”; 8 in fact, the number reached 20,000 in NYC’s Lower East Side during the first decades of the twentieth century according to Ben-Ur.9 An examination of figures from the time shows that “some 3,413 Sephardi immigrants from the European and Asian parts of the Ottoman Empire arrived in the United States between 1885 and 1908” 10 followed by a surge in immigration over the next fifteen-plus years: “10,033 [Sephardic immigrants] entered the United States between 1908 and 1914…between 1920 and 1924 another 9,877 came. In 1925 the figure was drastically reduced to 137 persons as a result of new quota restrictions.”11 This obstructive mid-1920s legislation starkly impacted the ability of the Sephardim to travel to and settle in the city, and as a result, reduced the total of newcomers and the number of mentions they would receive in the NYC press.

 6

In his excellent study Naar discusses the factors that contributed to Jewish emigration from the famed city of Salonika. Devin E. Naar, “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World’: Salonikan Jewish Immigration to America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 35, no.1 (2009): 45-89. 7 Marc D. Angel, “The Sephardim of the United States: An Exploratory Study,” American Jewish Year Book, vol. 74 (1973): 90. 8 Angel, “Exploratory Study,” 90. 9 Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, s.v., “Ladino (JudeoSpanish) Theater in the United States” by Aviva Ben-Ur, March 1, 2009, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ ladino-judeo-spanish-theater-in-united-states. 10 Joseph M. Papo, “The Sephardim in North America in the Twentieth Century,” in Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History, eds. Martin A. Cohen and Abraham J. Peck, (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 270. 11 Angel, “Exploratory Study,” 87.



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At the same time as Sephardic immigrants established themselves in the metropolis, Latin American and Spanish émigrés continued to make NYC their home and to read newspapers from the well-established Spanish-language press. The city has been the home of Spanish-speakers for many years, and the language was heard and noted in the city as early as 1643.12 A document from 1810 refers to the presence of “‘Spaniards or West Indians,’” and an 1845 census shows “‘508 persons from Mexico and South America’” in the city, which was likely a “substantial undercount.”13 In the early 1800s, “New York became a prime destination for South American revolutionaries and politicos,” 14 and over the next decades of the nineteenth century, immigration from the Caribbean, Mexico, and South America increased. 15 An 1890 census shows a population of nearly 6,000 people from Spain and various parts of the Americas,16 a very small but important portion of New York’s burgeoning population. An examination of roughly two dozen NYC newspapers published in English or Spanish between 1885 and 1930 demonstrates the wide range of designations reporters used to describe the Sephardim, especially in English.17 The publications that most frequently mentioned the Sephardic Jews were The New York Times, the New York Tribune, and The Sun— which in the 1890s constituted three of the city’s four “big dailies”18—and

 12

Dionisio Cañas, “New York City: Center and Transit Point for Hispanic Cultural Nomadism,” in Hispanic New York: A Source Book, ed. Claudio Iván Remeseira (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 246. 13 Gabriel Haslip-Viera, “The Evolution of the Latino Community in New York City: Early Nineteenth Century to the 1990s,” in Hispanic New York: A Source Book, ed. Claudio Iván Remeseira (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 33. 14 Claudio Iván Remeseira, “Introduction: New York City and the Emergence of a New Hemispheric Identity,” in Hispanic New York: A Source Book, ed. Claudio Iván Remeseira (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 1. 15 Virginia Sánchez Korrol, “Latinas in the Northeast,” in Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, eds. Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 7. 16 Haslip-Viera, “The Evolution,” 34. 17 Each newspaper had a different publication date range, and the availability of the digitally archived newspapers under examination also varies widely. The publications in question were made accessible through resources including ProQuest Historical Newspapers, the Chronicling America website, and NewsBank’s Hispanic American Newspapers, 1808-1980. 18 John D. Stevens, Sensationalism and the New York Press (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 64.



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La Prensa, New York’s oldest Spanish-language daily. 19 These publications used numerous terms to explain to readers who the Sephardim were, what languages they spoke, and how they lived, signaling that the newcomers did not fit into pre-established categories. English and Spanish phrases employed to describe and introduce the Sephardim in the four newspapers under examination include the following: Oriental Jews, Turkish Jews, Balkan Jews, Salonican Jews, 20 Syrian Jews, Levantine Jews, Jews from Turkey, Jews from the East, Mediterranean Jews, Spanish Jews, Spanish-speaking Jews, Ladino Jews, Sephardim, Sephardin (presumably a typo); hebreos español (sic), hebreos españoles, hebreos de Salónica, hebreos españoles procedentes de Salónica, hebreos de ascendencia española, hispano-hebreos, judío español, sefardita, sefardíes, and safardíes (presumably another typo). The lengthy list indicates that, especially in English, article writers lacked an understanding of who the Sephardim were. Some of the terms used in English, such as “Levantine” and “Oriental,” brought with them pejorative associations.21As Papo explains, although “Levantine” is a geographic term, it proved problematic, since during this time period “‘Levantine,’ in American usage, had come to stand for shiftiness and shyster tactics.”22 The phrase “Oriental Jews,” the most commonly used designation in English, was even more problematic. Within the Jewish community in NYC it frequently marked the difference between the long-established Sephardim and the more recent arrivals, or “New Sephardim.”23 Members of the former group, Papo explains, asked that the less affluent newcomers be referred to as “Oriental” Jews in order to avoid confusing them with those whose ancestors came to the United States during the colonial era.24 At times, news articles also differentiated



19 Ana Celia Zentella, “Spanish in New York,” in Hispanic New York: A Source Book, ed. Claudio Iván Remeseira (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 334. 20 Spelling in English varies between “Salonica” and “Salonika,” and the quotes and text represent this difference. 21 Devin E. Naar, “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World’: Salonikan Jewish Immigration to America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 35, no.1 (2009): 47. 22 Papo, “The Sephardim in North America,” 274. 23 Naar notes that scholars make a distinction between the “Old Sephardim” and the “New Sephardim”: the latter group “arrived from the eastern Mediterranean during the early twentieth century.” Devin E. Naar, “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World,’” 47. 24 Papo, “The Sephardim in North America,” 274. Papo discusses a specific case in which the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society was asked to change the name of the



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between the two groups. For example, a 1916 New York Tribune article on the historic Congregation Shearith Israel, entitled “The Synagogue in New York,” notes that the synagogue is home to both the “Sephardim” and to “Oriental Jews,” clearly making a distinction between congregants. 25 During this period, the term Oriental also served to emphasize supposed racial differences. As Ben-Ur explains, the Sephardim were “often linked in the Anglo-American press, pseudoscientific literature, and immigration classifications with ‘Orientals’ and, therefore, marked as not (completely) white.” 26 This demarcation seemingly augmented the immigrants’ perceived otherness, since Jews were already seen by some as “racially distinct”27 from others in the United States, and those Jews referred to as “Oriental” could be seen as doubly so. Other designations used by the newspapers, such as Balkan, Salonikan, and Turkish Jews, emphasized geographic origin. Although at times articles used adjectives such as “Balkan” or “Salonikan” to refer to Sephardic Jews from a particular geographic area, they also frequently employed more general wording, which shows that authors lacked understanding about who the Sephardim were and how rich and varied their cultures were. The term “Spanish Jews,” for example, gave a nod to the historical events of 1492, but told little about where specific groups of Sephardim were emigrating from, where they had lived for decades or centuries, or what languages they spoke; such a designation could evoke images of a distant, romanticized Iberian past while ignoring the all-tooreal present. Such challenges in nomenclature were only one of the difficulties that would arise as NYC publications sought to describe the Sephardic immigrants, whether in English or in Spanish. Although considerably smaller than the English-language press, the Spanish-language press made its presence felt in the city during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in NYC. El Mensajero Semanal [The Weekly Messenger] and El Mercurio de Nueva York [The New York Mercury], which began publication in 1828, catered to the small but

 Committee on Sephardic Jewish Immigrants to the Committee on Oriental Jewish Immigrants. 25 “The Synagogue in New York,” New York Tribune. November 17, 1916. New York. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/ sn83030214/1916-11-17/ed-1/seq-6/. 26 Aviva Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 157. 27 García, “New York’s Multilingualism,” 27.



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growing population of Spanish-speaking immigrants and exiles. 28 In the early twentieth century other newspapers emerged, including El Gráfico [The Graphic], which seems to mention the Sephardim less frequently. Given the similarities between Spanish and Judeo-Spanish, the daily interactions occurring between speakers of both tongues in NYC, and the historical weight of the 1492 expulsion, it comes as no surprise that the Spanish-language press took note of the Judeo-Spanish population and showed some familiarity with the Sephardim. An examination of several NYC newspapers written in Spanish from 1885-1930 yielded numerous articles, particularly in La Prensa, that referred to the Sephardic population in the metropolis and in other parts of the world. This broad-based publication, founded in 1913, ran an enlightening series of articles in 1925 focused on the Sephardim. Invited author José M. Estrugo, “un hebreo español” [a Spanish Hebrew], as the paper described him, wrote about “las comunidades turco-hebreas” [the Turkish-Hebrew communities] and the language of the Sephardim. 29 As Ben-Ur notes, Estrugo was born in the Ottoman Empire, was raised there and in the United States, and visited Spain for the first time in 1922, three years before the articles appeared.30 The article’s introductory matter shows that La Prensa privileges Estrugo’s inside knowledge and his ties to Spain, which establish him as an authority figure on the unfamiliar subject. Because of the numerous ties to Spain’s history, this choice of topic could be seen as a reflection of the “Spanish craze,” or fascination with all things Spanish, which lasted from roughly 1890 to 1930 and “swept the United States, claiming New York as one of its centers… [it] was not limited to Spain, but instead incorporated other cultural elements influenced by Spain.” 31 One of those related cultural elements, as presented in La Prensa, was Sephardic life and culture. Estrugo’s four-part series in May 1925 covers many topics, from the



28 Nicolás Kanellos, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000), 10. 29 José M. Estrugo, “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 26, 1925. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 30 Ben-Ur, Sephardic Jews in America, 10. Estrugo would go on to write books and other articles about Sephardic topics, including El retorno a Sefarad: un siglo después de la Inquisición (Madrid: Imprenta Europa, 1933), and Los Sefardíes (Havana: Editorial Lex, 1958). 31 Regina Galasso, “The Mission of La Prensa: Informing a Layout of the Literature of Hispanic New York,” Hispania 95, no. 2 (2012): 190.



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first synagogue in the United States 32 to the “mixed” nature of “los sefardíes” and their intermarriage with Spaniards as well as the characteristics of the Judeo-Spanish language, which he discusses at length. Given the fact that these pieces were by one author in one newspaper, it would be unwise to infer too much from the contents, but their presence shows that the publication expressed awareness of the “millares de sefardíes” [thousands of Sephardim] living in NYC and abroad and a desire to know what was happening to “nuestra lengua en Turquía” [our language in Turkey] (and in the United States).33 In his first article, dated May 26, 1925, “España y los hebreos españoles: la lengua española en Turquía” [Spain and the Spanish Hebrews: The Spanish language in Turkey], Estrugo explains to readers that this “Spanish” in Turkey is the “Castellano arcaico, corrompido si quieres, pero muy vivo, comprensible y con todas sus recias raíces” [archaic Castilian, corrupted if you wish, but very much alive, understandable, and with all its hardy roots].34 The idea of Judeo-Spanish as a “corrupted” form of antiquated Spanish, a kind of makeshift, patchwork tongue, appears not only in La Prensa, but also in the English-language papers.35 In the conclusion to the series, published three days later, Estrugo introduces readers to JudeoSpanish language newspapers in Turkey, “todos escritos en buen castellano, pero en caracteres rabínicos” [all written in good Castilian, but



32 Estrugo expresses strong opinions when comparing the Old and New Sephardim. He declares that the recent immigrants, “No constituyen una comunidad tan importante como la que representa la ‘Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.’” José M. Estrugo, “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 29, 1925. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 33 José M. Estrugo, “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 26, 1925 America’s HistoricalNewspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 34 José M. Estrugo, “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 26, 1925. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 35 Not every article portrays Judeo-Spanish in a negative light. In a June 1922 La Prensa article, the author refers to a Jewish man from Amsterdam and describes his language as “un castellano medioeval, muy parecido al de los hebreos de Salónica” (sic). Fabian Vidál, “La Paz y los Diamantes,” La Prensa (New York, NY). June 5, 1922. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://infoweb.newsbank.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/iwsearch/we/HistArchive?p_action=search.



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in rabbinical characters]. 36 Here the “good” (less corrupt?) castellano receives his approval, but he describes the papers’ orthography, likely the Rashi script, as being “rabbinical,” a term which those unfamiliar with Rashi or Judaic orthographic systems would be unlikely to understand and would be likely to misinterpret. The author also mentions that a few “órganos insignificantes,” or unimportant Judeo-Spanish language newspapers, exist in the United States.37 In yet another article several weeks later, Estrugo returns to the subject of language and acknowledges the ties that unite speakers of JudeoSpanish and Spanish in NYC. He points to the need for Judeo-Spanish to be cleansed from the “palabras extranjeras” [foreign words] that have invaded it, implying that, although once “pure,” the language has suffered a kind of linguistic diaspora.38 Since he was writing for a major Spanishlanguage paper that prided itself on its fine Castilian prose, it perhaps comes as no surprise that he emphatically expresses his view of JudeoSpanish as a debased language in need of linguistic overhaul. Estrugo also alludes to the association between the Sephardim of NYC and speakers of Spanish of Latin American and Iberian origin. He states that, “LA PRENSA de Nueva York tiene un gran número de lectores asiduos entre los sefardíes” [The Prensa of New York has a large number of assiduous readers among the Sephardim], implying that language was no barrier for Judeo-Spanish speaking readers.39 This declaration goes against the idea expressed among others by social worker Lois M. Hacker in a 1926 report that the Sephardim in the city were very isolated and knew little about what occurred therein.40 It would be interesting to know how or if any of

 36

José M. Estrugo, “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 29, 1925. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 37 Ibid. 38 José M. Estrugo, “A propósito de una Conferencia del Profesor Wagner: La lengua de los Safardíes,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). August 24, 1925. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). 39 Ibid. 40 Louis M. Hacker, “The Communal Life of the Sephardic Jews in New York City,” The Jewish Social Service Quarterly. Jewish Communal Service Association of North America (JCSA), National Conference of Jewish Social Service. (December 1926): 32-40. http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm? PublicationID=12639. Although many English-language newspapers of the period also seem to portray the recent Sephardic immigrants of NYC as isolated, a 1912 New York Tribune article suggests that some of the émigrés were very in sync with citizens of Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas. The piece, presumably quoting Joseph Gedalecia, then-president of the American Federation of Jews,



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these regular Sephardic readers of La Prensa reacted to the Estrugo articles with their privileging of a Spanish free from the pollution of “palabras extranjeras,” but no letters to the editor seem to have broached the topic. Many other Prensa articles featured stories about or references to “los sefarditas,” for good or for bad. In some cases, murder and mayhem dominated, as in the piece about an alleged killer, Ernest De Rosa. The March 14, 1928 issue includes an interesting headline, which reads: “Dícese que era judío español el que mató a una mujer e hirió a su esposa” [It’s said that it was a Spanish Jew that killed a woman and wounded his wife].41 The title clearly marks the suspected killer not as an immigrant from Thessaloniki, Greece, (the article’s final paragraph briefly mentions his city of origin), but instead as a Jew. The word “Dícese” lends an almost gossipy tone to the piece, as though speculating on the man’s origins while confirming his act of violence. Other stories ranged farther afield and presented very different pictures of the Sephardim. An article from 1929, “El movimiento judaico en Argentina” [The Jewish movement in Argentina], mentions the many Jews who had immigrated to Argentina’s agricultural colonies and cities in recent decades. In referring to the Sephardim, the piece notes that along with speaking the language of Cervantes, Entre los colonos no existe casi el sefardí, éste por su tradición española y erudita se establece en la ciudad. Los hebreos españoles constituyen una cuarta parte de la colonia hebrea en Argentina tendiendo a aumentar pues las nuevas corrientes emigratorias llevan gran número de sefarditas de los Balcanes. Forman una comunidad única hebreo-española con su rabino, que constituye el gran rabinato español con sus sinagogas, sus instituciones, etc.42

 describes the Salonikan Jews as “masters of the [South Americans’] many dialects, and, what is best of all, they know and understand the customs of the people,” which could contribute to increased trade. “Balkan Jews to Flock Here After the War,” New York Tribune. December 13, 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1912-12-13/ed-1/seq-3/. 41 “Dícese que era judío español el que mató a una mujer e hirió a su esposa.” La Prensa (New York, NY). Mar. 14, 1928. 2. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014_2027_04170_275.pdf 42 “Among the settlers there hardly exists the Sephardic Jew, this person, due to his erudite Spanish tradition establishes himself in the city. The Spanish Hebrews make up one fourth of the Hebrew colony in Argentina, tending to increase the



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Although the column clearly focuses on Argentine Jews, it seems somewhat surprising that it does not mention any of the many “hebreos españoles” who had settled in New York or in other U.S. cities. Another item from the same year, a letter to the editor from a Mr. J. Menéndez, discusses the 1492 Spanish expulsion of “los judíos españoles.” The writer defends Spain against defamation by pointing out that many other nations also mistreated and banished Jews and contends that such events should be understood in historical context.43 The letter, a reply to another reader’s opinion about the American press’s attitude toward Spain, is perhaps evidence of the “Spanish craze” mentioned above—here the historical reputation of Spain, rather than the present-day condition of Jews, dominates the conversation. By comparison with the Spanish-language press, over the forty-fiveyear period under examination, 1885-1930, the much larger Englishlanguage NYC press seems to have more frequently mentioned the Sephardim living both inside and outside of the United States. There was naturally more awareness of the growing Sephardic population in the city with the passage of time and with the increase in immigration after the turn of the century. Many of the same ideas and assumptions about the “exotic” Judeo-Spanish language and the Sephardim’s “foreign” customs permeate articles in The New York Times, the New York Tribune, and The Sun, but others views are also expressed. The NYC papers describe the Sephardim, the Judeo-Spanish tongue, and the places the immigrants lived and visited in a variety of ways. Many articles emphasize cultural differences, while others highlight geographic origin or religious observance, among other aspects. One of the earliest mentions, a New York Times book review from 1892 entitled “Jews Who Speak Spanish,” discusses the Biblioteca Española-Portugueza-Judaica, a bibliographic dictionary of Jewish authors, works, and proverbs by M. Kayserling, published in French in 1890. The article relates the history of

 new migratory currents they take a great number of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans. They form a single Hebrew-Spanish community with their rabbi, which constitutes the great Spanish Rabbinate with their synagogues, their institutions, etc.” “El movimiento judaico en Argentina.” La Prensa (New York, NY). Sept. 4, 1929. 4. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw01.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014_1850_56047_688.pdf. 43 “De Nuestros Lectores.” La Prensa (New York, NY). Aug. 7, 1929. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014_1937_58101_146.p df.



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the Jews in Spain and in the post-1492 diaspora and offers a somewhat negative version of Judeo-Spanish’s development. For example, it explains that “Ladino” was born in Italy, where the “Jew read and spoke a pure Spanish for a century or more, but then his speech became corrupt. The uneducated began to ‘lard’ his Spanish with words taken from the country of his adoption. Then was born a bastard vernacular known as ‘Ladino’ and in the Balkans it was called ‘Judesmo.’”44 The attitude expressed here reflects a rather unfavorable view of Judeo-Spanish. “Larding” a language evokes images of the so-called uneducated resorting to adulteration through gluttony, while referring to Judeo-Spanish as a “bastard vernacular” calls into question its validity, legitimacy, and standing. The author also mentions “Jewish Spanish” newspapers in various cities including Belgrade, Smyrna, Constantinople, and Salonika.45 At the same time, the writer characterizes the newspapers in those cosmopolitan cities as being rather insular, containing news “interesting to Jews, relative to their schools and their charities.” 46 The article predates the sharp rise in immigration of the Sephardim that would occur two decades later in NYC and the subsequent development of the Judeo-Spanish-language press there. Overall, the city’s press does not seem to have been very aware of local newspapers like La Amerika and La Vara [The Rod], although an October 1928 New York Times article mentions foreign-language newspapers, including the “Ladino” press. 47 When such references to Judeo-Spanish cultural elements in the city do occur, they tend to emphasize generalizations that put the Sephardic immigrants into categories emphasizing “foreignness” and ignoring the complexities of language and culture. There are very few articles in the 1890s that mention the Sephardim, but an example from 1899 from The Sun demonstrates how specific terms could be used to hint at cultural origin negatively. The piece, entitled “Socialist Labor Men Fight,” informs readers of the ousting of a “Spanish Jew,” famed socialist leader Daniel De Leon, or, as the author calls him, the “dictator” of the Socialist Labor party.48 The article’s tone toward De

 44

“New Publications.” New York Times (1857-1922), Apr 17, 1892. http://search.proquest.com/docview/94976028?accountid=4488. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 47 “Glimpses of Foreign Lands Obtained Within New York.” New York Times (1923-Current File), October 28, 1928. http://search.proquest.com/docview/104414381?accountid=4488. 48 “Socialist Labor Men Fight.” The Sun. (New York, NY). July 11, 1899. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress.



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Leon is decidedly mocking and negative as it describes his fall from power, and hints at his cowardliness. The pointed use of the designation “Spanish Jew” to describe him raises the question of why this term, above all others, is employed when others would have served equally as well. It brings to mind La Prensa’s article about an alleged murderer identified in an eye-catching headline as a “judío espanol,” and not as an immigrant from Greece. 49 De Leon, a polyglot from a Sephardic family from Curaçao, was, Coleman suggests, reluctant to “admit his Jewish origins” in “response to widespread anti-Semitism from his opponents.”50 The article can be seen as an illustration of such bias: Instead of referencing the Dutch Antilles or the Caribbean as De Leon’s place of origin, the term “Spanish Jew” communicates a thinly veiled anti-Semitic attitude to readers. Many more articles describing the Sephardim appeared in the 1910s and 1920s. These decades saw increasing immigration to the United States as unrest spread throughout the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. A December 1912 piece from The New York Times, “Balkan Jews to Flock Here after the War,” which refers to the First Balkan War, directly addresses how the refugees will fit into the cityscape. The author explains who the “Oriental Jews” are by telling readers that they are a “hitherto almost unknown class of the descendants of Abraham” with a “corrupt form of Spanish corresponding to the old Castilian language of Spain.”51 The words “almost unknown” emphasize the Sephardim’s perceived mysteriousness and otherness, while the idea of a debased, denigrated, timeworn language appears again. The article does state, though, that the future immigrants are “known to be extra thrifty and enterprising,”52 and suggests they will make excellent agents to oversee trade with South American nations due to their linguistic and cultural inside knowledge. The newspapers under examination describe the Judeo-Spanish language using a variety of terms, including Jewish-Spanish, SpanishJewish dialect, Ladino, Sephardic, Judesmo, Spaniolisch, and hebreo español. In doing so, they emphasize its exotic nature. The idea of JudeoSpanish being an insurmountable language barrier, so different from other tongues (including Spanish) as to be unintelligible, appears in a piece from 1913. The New York Tribune article, entitled “She Talked Ladino, Which

 http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/1899-07-11/ed-1/seq-5/. 49 “Dícese que era judío español el que mató a una mujer e hirió a su esposa.” La Prensa. 50 Stephen Coleman, Daniel De Leon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 7. 51 “Balkan Jews to Flock Here After the War,” New York Tribune. 52 Ibid.



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Beat Esperanto,” presents Judeo-Spanish as a tongue even more puzzling than the formulated language Esperanto. It describes a court case in which a Judeo-Spanish speaker’s testimony proved unintelligible to the court until a translator, Mr. Amateau, successfully interpreted it. Amateau, a Sephardic Jew, is quoted as describing Ladino as a “strange jargon,” an “almost extinct jargon,” a “mixture of archaic Spanish and old Arabic.”53 Because of its so-called jargonistic nature and its rareness, the language proves impossible to understand without seeking expert assistance. Although New York was (and remains) a veritable tower of Babel, the New York Tribune presents this particular language, Judeo-Spanish, as being so foreign that it defies customary avenues of communication and translation. Moving from the English-dominated courts of law to the neighborhoods frequented by the Sephardim, newspaper descriptions of such areas prove telling. Papers at times emphasized NYC’s multiculturalism. For example, the October 1928 New York Times piece “Glimpses of Foreign Lands Obtained within New York” depicts the city’s vibrancy and its culturally diverse zones with their foods, customs, and languages. The article also mentions the variety of the “nations whose peoples have made homes in New York [that] may be glimpsed from a list of foreign language newspapers and other periodicals published here…Arabic, Armenian, Carpatho-Russian…Ladino (Spanish Jewish dialect)…” and the list goes on.54 Articles that describe different sectors of the city where the Sephardim settled tended to use the terms Ladino and Spanish-Jewish, such as in the February 1927 article from The New York Times Magazine (a weekly Sunday supplement within the NYT), entitled “Drama of Life Changes on the East Side.” Despite the heading’s rather ominous inference that an “invasion” of sorts is occurring—“New Peoples, New Ideas Invade the Famous Quarter of New York”—overall the article nostalgically describes the East Side and its inhabitants positively, all the while bemoaning the staidness that a lack of immigration brings: “The old east side was made by successive waves of immigration, and there is no more immigration.” 55 It was a “great, pulsing community…there was a ‘Ladino,’ or Spanish Jewish, section, on Rivington Street...But the whole



53 “She Talked Ladino, Which Beats Esperanto,” New York Tribune, November 13, 1913. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1913-11-13/ed-1/seq-4/. 54 “Glimpses of Foreign Lands Obtained within New York.” New York Times. 55 William M. Feigenbaum, “Drama of Life Changes on the East Side.” New York Times (1923-Current File), February 20, 1927. http://search.proquest.com/docview/104063082?accountid=14512.



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east side was in general sufficient unto itself. It had its synagogues, its clubs, its labor movement, its newspapers and its drama.” 56 This sentimental positivity stands in contrast to a lengthy article from fifteen years before, a September 1912 piece in the New York Tribune entitled “In New York Is a City Set Apart Where Live Jews Who Know No Yiddish.” The title of the piece highlights the misperception evident in popular culture in the United States that to be Jewish implied fitting into the “mold of ‘normative’ American Jewry,” i.e. having Eastern European roots. 57 The heading further reveals the writer’s distrust of the newcomers: “They Come Here from Oriental Lands and Speak a Hodgepodge of Spanish, Greek, Turkish and Arabic—They Are in Very Slight Touch Usually with Their New Environment, Retaining the Customs and Modes of Life of Their Birthplaces.”58 The othering of the Sephardim begins with the words “They” and “Oriental,” and continues with the characterization of “Spanish intermixed with Turkish or Arabic or the Greek tongue”59 as a kind of “hodgepodge.” The idea of difference looms large and creates a considerable gap between the subjects and the audience. Complete with photos, the piece describes the Sephardim in some detail. The author acknowledges geographic origin but uses a variety of terms (“Turkish Jews” and “Syrian Jews” along with “Sephardic Jews” and “Oriental Jews”). The writer’s misgivings materialize further as he or she dwells on the people’s supposed isolation and declares the gathering places of these “Jews Who Know No Yiddish” to be suspect. As the piece explains, the Sephardim gather in an “anti-American coffee house.”60 Such a negative characterization reflects nativistic attitudes of the time that viewed such meeting places as dangerous and un-American, since “foreign” ideas, languages, and foods could be shared there. It also, not so subtly, suggests that as long as such cafes and neighborhoods exist, Americanization efforts, which a handful of other articles discuss, would fail miserably. Overall, the NYC newspapers in question gave their readers an incomplete picture of the Sephardic immigrants, to say the least. Although

 56

Ibid. Devin E. Naar, “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World,’” 46. 58 “In New York Is a City Set Apart Where Live Jews Who Know No Yiddish.” New York Tribune. September 22, 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1912-09-22/ed-1/seq-20/ 59 “In New York Is a City Set Apart Where Live Jews Who Know No Yiddish.” New York Tribune. 60 Ibid. 57



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governmental agencies and mutual aid societies may have been keenly aware of the changing East Side, among other areas of the city, the average reader of The New York Times, the New York Tribune, The Sun, or La Prensa did not gain a great deal of pertinent knowledge about the Sephardim from 1885-1930. The emphasis on the foreignness of their language—Spanish, and yet not quite Spanish—and the practice of referring to the newly arrived settlers as “Oriental” contributed to an “othering” that made the Sephardim seem very dissimilar to those who read about them in the papers. Some portrayals did strike a positive note by focusing on either more familiar or seemingly more appealing cultural aspects. Regardless of the language used, the press’s depictions of the Sephardic immigrants lacked finesse; if nothing else, they served to briefly introduce readers to their fellow New Yorkers who had come far in order to settle in the metropolis with its diversity, plurality of languages, and promise of opportunities.

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58101_146.pdf. “Dícese que era judío español el que mató a una mujer e hirió a su esposa.” La Prensa (New York, NY). March 14, 1928. 2. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014_2027_0 4170_275. pdf. “El movimiento judaico en Argentina.” La Prensa (New York, NY). September 4, 1929. 4. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw01.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014 _1850_56047_688.pdf. Estrugo, José M. “A propósito de una Conferencia del Profesor Wagner: La lengua de los Safardíes,” La Prensa. (New York, NY). August 24, 1925. Hispanic American Periodicals Index. http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012062014 _2255_05499_813.pdf. —. “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía.” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 26, 1925. 2. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/ pl_012062014_ 2249_ 36511_797.pdf. —. “España y los hebreos españoles: La Lengua Española En Turquía.” La Prensa. (New York, NY). May 29, 1925. 3. America’s Historical Newspapers, 1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_ 012062014_2252_50958_212. pdf. Feigenbaum, William M. “Drama of Life Changes on the East Side.” New York Times (1923-Current File), February 20, 1927. 9, 23. http://search.proquest.com/docview/104063082?accountid=14512. García, Ofelia. “New York’s Multilingualism: World Languages and their Role in a U.S. City.” The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City. 2nd ed., edited by Ofelia García and Joshua A. Fishman, 3-50. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002. Galasso, Regina. “The Mission of La Prensa: Informing a Layout of the Literature of Hispanic New York,” Hispania 95, no. 2 (2012): 189200. “Glimpses of Foreign Lands Obtained within New York.” New York Times (1923- Current File), October 28, 1928. http://search.proquest.com/docview/104414381?accountid=4488.



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Hacker, Louis M. “The Communal Life of the Sephardic Jews in New York City.” The Jewish Social Service Quarterly. Jewish Communal Service Association of North America (JCSA), National Conference of Jewish Social Service. (December 1926): 32-40. http://www.bjpa.org/ Publications/ details. cfm?PublicationID=12639. Haslip-Viera, Gabriel. “The Evolution of the Latino Community in New York City: Early Nineteenth Century to the 1990s.” Hispanic New York: A Source Book, edited by Claudio Iván Remeseira, 33-56. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. “In New York Is a City Set Apart Where Live Jews Who Know No Yiddish.” New York Tribune. (New York), September 22, 1912. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/191209-22/ed-1/seq-20/ Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia, s.v. “Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Theater in the United States” by Aviva Ben-Ur, March 1, 2009, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/ ladino-judeospanish-theater-in-united-states. Kanellos, Nicolás. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000. Korrol, Virginia Sánchez. “Latinas in the Northeast.” Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz and Virginia Sánchez Korrol, 5- 14. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. Miller, Sally M. “Distinctive Media: The European Press in the United States.” Print In Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880- 1940. Vol. 4, A History of the Book in America, edited by Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway, 299-311. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Naar, Devin E. “Between ‘New Greece’ and the ‘New World’: Salonikan Jewish Immigration to America.” Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 35, no.1 (2009): 45-89. “New Publications.” New York Times (1857-1922), April 17, 1892. http://search.proquest.com/docview/94976028?accountid=4488. Papo, Joseph M. “The Sephardim in North America in the Twentieth Century.” Sephardim in the Americas: Studies in Culture and History, edited by Martin A. Cohen and Abraham J. Peck, 267-308. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1993. Remeseira, Claudio Iván. “Introduction: New York City and the Emergence of a New Hemispheric Identity.” Hispanic New York: A



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Source Book, edited by Claudio Iván Remeseira, 1-30. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. “She Talked Ladino, Which Beats Esperanto, New York Tribune, (New York, NY). November 13, 1913. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1913-11- 13/ed1/seq-4/. “Socialist Labor Men Fight.” The Sun. (New York, NY), July 11, 1899. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030272/189907-11/ed-1/seq-5/. Stevens, John D. Sensationalism and the New York Press. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. “The Synagogue in New York.” New York Tribune. (New York, NY), November 17, 1916. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Library of Congress. http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030214/1916-11-17/ed1/seq-6/. Vidál, Fabian. “La Paz y los Diamantes,” La Prensa (New York, NY). June 5, 1922. America’s Historical Newspapers,1808-1980. World Newspaper Archive (NewsBank). http://phw02.newsbank.com/cache/ean/fullsize/pl_012192014_0256_2 7720_8 85.pdf. Zentella, Ana Celia. “Spanish in New York.” Hispanic New York: A Source Book, edited by Claudio Iván Remeseira, 321-53. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.



SONES SEFARADÍES: LA DIVERSITÁ ECHA LETRA I MUZIKA (SEPHARDIC SOUNDS: DIVERSITY TURNED LYRIC AND MUSIC)

LILIANA TCHUKRAN DE BENVENISTE ESEFARAD

El Ladino, la lingua sefaradí, es una de las bazas de la kultura de orijen djudeo-espanyol, i el repertorio muzikal fue una de las kolumnas mas importantes para sus prezervasion. Ma, ¿komo es? ¿de ande viene? ¿komo sona? Estas demandas simples no tienen una resposta simple. Antes de avlar sovre los sones sefaradíes i su diversita, es menester azer un chiko raporto de algunos faktos sovre la istoria, la muzika i la lingua ke mos sirviran de introduksion. Despues de la Ekspulsion de Espanya en 1492 munchos fueron los destinos ke alkanzaron los djudios en esta Diáspora. Algunos se establesieron prinsipalmente en Portokal, de ande fueron ekspulsados 5 anyos mas tadre. En 1497, otros se asentaron en Olanda (Nederland) i sigieron ligados kon el mundo espanyol asta 1789 (kuando la separasion de Flandes) o tomaron komo destino el Reyno de Navarra, ande los reyes dekretaron sus ekspulsion en 1498. Los ke salieron por la mar se asentaron en los paizes del norte de l’Afrika o mas londje, en las muevas Amerikas. Otros yegaron a sivdades de Italia komo Ferrara, Livorno o Venesia, i tambien arivaron a la sur de la Fransia. Un grupo muy grande fue akojido por el Imperio Otomano i se asentó en las grandes sivdades komo Selanik, Estambol, i Izmir, en las tierras de la Turkya, Gresia, Albanya, Bulgaria, Rumania, eks-Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Kroasia, i Makedonia.1

1 Smid, Katja. “Los problemas del estudio de la lengua sefardí “–– Verba hispánica N° 10 2002, 114

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Figura 12.1 M Mapa: Kaminoss de la emigrasiion sefaradí desspues de la ekspulsion de 1492 2

Los eksppulzados salieeron de Espany ya avlando el kasteyano dee la epoka kon mesklattina de ebreo i por sinko siieklos sus dessendentes man ntuvieron sus erensia propia, tomaando algunos biervos de suus muevos lu ugares de morada; estto es lo ke yaamamos Ladino. Ansí el L Ladino, linguaa djudeoespanyola, kkontuneará suu dezvelopamiiento tomandoo biervos emp prestados de las linguaas kon las ke se metio en kontakto, k espeesialmente dell turko, el grego, el itaaliano, el perssa i mas tadree del fransez, kuando es krreada por Charles Nettter en Fransiaa, en la sigund da metad del sieklo XIX (een 1860), la Aliansa Israelita Univeersal, una red d de eskolas qque se fraguo por kuaji toda la diasppora sefaradí. En Marroko la l entrada de bbiervos i el modo m de la avla del arabbo dio orijen a una lingua djudeo-espannyola partikolaar de este lugar yamadda Haketia. El Ladinno era, i es daynda, d una liingua partajadda i entendidaa, mizmo kon sus differensias de kada k lugar, por p los sefaraadíes en sus munchas jeografias, ttrokandola enn una lingua de d la diversittá. Para el esstudio del teksto de los kantes, es konveniente k de d partir las paalavras en trees grupos: arkaismos, eebraismos, i em mprestados dee otras linguass3. 2

Waves off Sephardi em migration after the expulsionn of 1492. (From ( the m drawn by H H. Bainart.) Encyclopediaa Judaica, basedd in turn on a map 3 Del artikoloo: “El castellanoo del siglo XV vive v aún” – Rifk fka Cook –

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1. Arkaismos El djudeo-espanyol arekoje un grande numero de biervos uzados en la Espanya del sieklo XV. Mizmo kuando desparesieron del kasteyano, kedaron en la avla de los sefaradíes. Muestra de estos arkaismos son: aldikera por ‘bolsillo/pocket,’ muchiguar por ‘multiplicar/ multiply/increase,’ bavajadas por ‘patrañas/humbug/nonsense,’ chapeo por ‘sombrero/hat,’ agora por ‘ahora/now.’ O ekspesiones komo: ‘a lo menos/manko (at least)’, ‘de aki endelantre (from now on)’, ‘este pan del Dió (this bread of God)’ i otros.

2. Ebraismos Palavras komo meldar (arogar/read/pray) i meldador (arogador/reader/ prayer); malsin (ke miente/liar), i lashón (lingua/language) mos yegan trokadas del ebreo. Otras se uzan mizmo ke en el orijinal, komo: séhel (intelijencia/intelligence), behor/bohor (el ijo mayor o primero/firstborn), berahá (bendisión/blessing), kehilá (komunitá/community), i mazal (suerte/luck), por dar algunos ekzemplos. En esta parte podemos markar komo algo kuriozo de la lingua, la suma del final ebreo para palavras espanyolas, por ekzemplo: ladronim (thieves)= ladrón, en espanyol; + im, final ebreo para formar el maskolino plural, haraganut (slob)= haragán del espanyol + ut final ebreo de sustantivo plural femenino. Koza semejante akontese kon el turko.

3. Emprestados de otras linguas El Ladino por su dispersion i kontakto kon otros puevlos, fue enfluensyado, komo ya remarkí, por otras linguas komo el turko de ande tomó biervos komo: kolay (fásil/easy), haber (notisia/news), kazal (aldea/village), kebap (karne asada/roast meat), maví (azul/blue), i meaná (bar). Del persa, hazino, (enfermo/ill). De orijen italiano, achitar/achetar (akseptar/accept), adeso (agora/now), fachile (fásil/easy), lavoro (echo/work), i rizko (riesgo/risk). Del grego, piron (tenedor/fork), del eslavo: misirke (pavo/turkey); i del portugezo, palavras komo aínda (todavía/still). Del katalán mos entraron: kale (ay ke/must), assaventar (ambezar/learn), i del gayego, agora (ahora/now), burako (agujero/hole), alfinete (alfiler/pin). Tambien el arabo deshó sintir su enfluensia en la formasión del djudeo-español, ansí se tienen las palavras: amán (por http://www.elcastellano.org/artic/rifka.htm

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favor/please), bakal (tienda/store), kavé (kafé/coffee), i yulaf (avena/oat). Luego del franséz por enfluensa de la Aliansa Israelita Universal, biervos komo bijou (djoya/jewel) o dezvelopar (desarroyar/develop).

4. Influensias en la muzika sefaradí De la kriasion artistika kulta i popular ke enfloresio en las komunitades djudias de Espanya i de sus konbivensia kon kristianos i musulmanes, los djudios yevaron kon si el repertorio muzikal ke konosian, trasmetiendolo de modo oral de jenerasion a jenerasion i engrandesiendolo kon algunas kreasiones.4 Djustamente, komo el repertorio djudeo-espanyol konta kon la tradision oral komo prinsipal modo de koleksion, esto ayudó a kriar una grande diversitá de efektos i trokamientos en los tekstos. Entre las munchas enfluensas en la muzika sefaradí podemos remarkar la de los sefaradíes orientales i la de los sefaradíes mediterraneos oksidentales. Los sefaradíes orientales son los asentados en la Turkia, Gresia, o la antika Yugoslavia, ke tiene, por ekzemplo, por karakteristika el uzo de makam5 i porke no sigen una metriká regolar, ke rezulta munchas vezes ekstranya al oyido oksidental. Los sefaradíes mediterraneos oksidentales son los asentados en el norte del Marroko, Amsterdam, o Livorno, ke asemejaron munchas kualidades de la muzika oksidentala ke sige la metriká regolar, arekojiendo tambien kantes adjustados al djudeo-espanyol de eksitos de Espanya de finales del sieklo XIX, kantes populares de Fransia, del tango ardjentino, de sujetos populares gregos i turkos, asta del fokstrot i del charleston norteamerikanos, entre munchos otros. EKSEMPLO: La Kanariera – Ritmo de abanera arekojido en Izmir. (La abanera es un jenero muzikal orijinado en Kuba en la primera metad del sieklo XIX)6

Otro modo de adaptasion es la kontrafakta, un modo de mezklatina de un teksto tradisional o muevo kon una melodiya konosida. Esto se tornó

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Susana Weich-Shahak - El Repertorio Sefardí en sus Géneros Poético-Musicales. Puvlikado En Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, LVI N.º 122, enero-diciembre (2009), 191-212 5 Makam: Sistema turko-arabo de modos muzikales kon alto grado de entonasión mikrotonal, grande kantidá de ermozeos vokales i ritmos imprevistos. 6 La Kanariera– Kante tradisional de Esmirna / Intérprete: Liliana Benveniste (2005)-(no registrado en CD) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oThbEevPOac

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tambien un uzo muy popular entre los sefaradíes antes i despues de la ekspulsion i daynda se praktika asta la aktualida. EKSEMPLO: Yo la Keria – La muzika orijinala es del tango ardjentino “Donde estas corazón” Muzika: Augusto Berto, teksto: Luis Martínez 7 Serrano (1930) kon la letra trezladada al Ladino.

Entre los djeneros tradisionales del kante sefaradí tenemos el romansero, las koplas i el kansionero. El romansero, tanto del Marroko komo de Oriente, se konta entre los djeneros de la muzika djudeoespanyola mas difuzados. Entre eyos enkontramos grande kantidá de romansas arekojidas de informantes venidos del Marroko, ke mos yevan a la Espanya Medieval en sus muzikas i en sus tekstos, ande se kontan istorias de palasios i aventuras de kavayeros. EKSEMPLO: La Romansa de Diego Leon (versión de Tanjer)–Afamado romanse de amor ke konta la istoria de Diego i Juana, ke tras munchos desenkontros eskapa en boda asigun algunas versiones. Se uza kantar en las bodas en Tanjer i Tetuan, i kon trokamientos de letra en otras sivdades espanyolas de l‘Afrika.8

Otro kavzo es esta romansa de la rejion orientala del Mediterraneo, de Sofia, (Bulgaria), kon melodia bazada en los modos orientales de makam. La influensa turkana se nota no solo en la muzika sino en los biervos trokados del kasteyano al turko: sirma (ilos de plata) i yardán/yerdan (por guerdán, kolgante de garganta o koyar). EKSEMPLO: Landariko/Andarleto o El Rey ke Muncho Madruga – De la koleksion de Shoshana Weich-Shahak 1997: No.50. Un sujeto bazado en krónikas merovinjias, sovre el rey Chilperico, su adúltera espoza Fredegunda i el amante de eya, Landarice, ke en las versiones sefaradíes se yama Andaleto, Angelino, Andurlino, Andalvino o Andarleto. Este sueto es bien konosido en el Marroko, kon el empesijo: "Levantose el rey a cazar" (Weich-Shahak 1997: No.50). Fuentes sefaradíes antikas véanse en Attias (1961: 314-318). La melodía, indikada por su empesijo "Andarleto,

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Yo la Keria - Track 7 del CD Kantikas de amor i vida (2006) - Flory Jagoda i Ramón Tasat Kanta Ramon Tasat 8 Diego Leon del CD Canciones Sefardies – Alex Kirschner y María Teresa Rubiato (1972)

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Sones Sefaradíes: la diversitá echa letra i muzika Andarleto, mi pulido enamorado" (Nos. 32 e, f) sirvió para dos poemas ebreos de Najara. (Incip. 82.).También lo arekojió Katz (1972: 147-154).9

Estos dos ekzemplos, malgrado son romanzas, sonan distintas una de la otra. Las koplas apartienen al torno relijiozo i de famiya. En su mayoritá akompanyan al sieklo anual, reprezentan kreensias i valores djudios i mizmo se kantan en el kal o en las kazas para las fiestas relijiozas, son nombrados kantes paraliturjikos por los sujetos ke tokan, i no amostran trokamientos grandes entre las distintas jeografias. EKSEMPLO: Koplas de Purim – El Prof. Iacob Hassán arekojió 65 edisiones i 18 manuskritos ke tienen koplas de Purim. Esta kopla mos konta la istoria de la Reyna Esther i la salvasion de los djudyos ke dio orijen a la fiesta de Purim.10

Los kantes son los ke mas sufren las enfluensas del ambiente i de las modas de kada epoka. Sus muzika es variada igual ke los sujetos, ke pueden ser amorozos, de umor, de modas, de kritikas sosialas o de boda, entre los mas auzados. En algunos kavzos las kantigas van trokando de akordo al lugar ande se las arekojió i estas versiones son diferentes entre si en vezes en la muzika i otras en los tekstos, i en distintas proporsiones. Aki ay tres ekzemplos de un mizmo kante de boda: a. Ya Salió de la Mar de la Galana- Versión de Salonik Arekojida de Manuel Alvar / S. Weich Shahak11 b. Muchachika está en el banyo/ La Galana i el Mar- Version de Rodas12 c. Mi espozika está en el rio – Otra versión de Salonik arekojida de Moshe Attias13

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Landariko/Andarleto o el Rey ke Muncho Madruga - Intérprete: Kobi Zarko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sm12FrAjZOA 10 Koplas de Purim dijitalizasion del Track 1 kara 2 del LP Recuerdos Sefarditas. Folklore Judeo-Español. Vol. I Intérprete: Esther Roffe y Alfredo Rugeles 11 Ya Salió de la Mar la Galana – Track 2 del CD Enkantes Sefaradíes (2011) – Intérprete: Liliana Benveniste 12 Muchachika Esta en el Banyo - Track 7 del CD Ya salio de la mar (2005) Intérprete: Ofri Eliaz 13 Mi Espozika Esta en el Eio – Track 11 del CD Boda (2010) Intérprete Ensemble Saltiel

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Es enteresante notar la kapachitá kreativa de algunos muzisienes ke tomando poemas en Ladino, en munchos kavzos de kreasion aktuala, adjustan muevas melodias ke engrandesen el repertorio, indemás ansí kontunean a la tradision de adaptasion i dezvelopamiento de la muzika sefaradí. a. Alevantate Nissim! – kante kontemporaneo ande la madre amostra sus entension de kazar a su ijo.14 b. Fiesta de la Tierra (Tu Bishvat) – kante kontemporaneo por la fiesta de Tu Bishvat del kalendario ebreo, ke es el anyo muevo de los arvoles i los frutos. 15

El moderno afekto por las kulturas manko konosidas, azen ke no sea ekstranyo enkontrar ke ay kada vez mas muzisienes dedikados a ekzekutar el repertorio sefaradí, mizmo sin ser djudios. En algunos kavzos, los kreadores i kantadores estan dedikados a ambezar la lingua i la muzika sefaradí (komo los ke oyimos) ma daynda enkontramos oy diya muchos muzisienes ke toman los kantes por mezo de diskos komersiales i espektakolos puvlikos ande estas se adjustaron, kantaron o akompanyaron muzikalmente de modo livre. Sin djuzgar la kualidad muzikal de estas enterpretasiones, la mankura ke se ve en estos kavzos es ke, komo no tienen el konosimiento del Ladino i su kultura, mos topamos kon yerros en la pronunsiasion o trokamientos de biervos porke los kantadores no konosen las palavras o por mor de adjustar los tekstos a los aranjamientos muzikales, ke van mas londje de la kreasion artistika. Otro modo de koza es el uzo de instrumentos muzikales lokales, ke komanda una aksion ke se emprezenta desde aze sieklos, i ke mos permete avlar de una diaspora sefaradí, en modos muzikales, ke daynda kontunea a desveloparse. EKSEMPLO: Yo M’enamori de un Ayre - kante liriko tradisional arekojido de Rodas16 17

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Alevantate Nissim! - Track 12 del CD Enkantes Sefaradíes (2011) Letra: Beatríz Mazliah, Muzika: Liliana Benveniste – Piano: Adrian Mirchuk, Intérprete: Liliana Benveniste. 15 Fiesta de la Tierra (Tu Bishvat) – Del CD Nasi yo en tus brasos (2014) Letra i Muzika: Medi Kohen Malki, Piano i voz: Betty Klein 16 Yo M’enamore de un Ayre– Versión moderna – Track 6 del CD A la una (2003) Intérprete: Sarah Aroeste 17 Yo M’enamore de un Ayre – Versión tradisional – Track 7 del CD Enkantes Sefaradíes (2011) Intérprete: Liliana Benveniste

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5. Konklusiones Komo konklusion de lo ke ya se amostró aki, dizere ke el repertorio muzikal sefaradí arekoje melodias i poezia de distintos orijenes ke fueron yevadas de lugar en lugar por viajeros o por merkadores, akseptadas kon agrado por las komunitades, i guadradas komo un uniko i komun grupo de kantes ke forman una importante parte de su identitá. Kantes komo “Diesiocho anyos tengo” una kantiga sefaradí orijinada en Bulgaria; las kansiones turkas “Avre este abajour” i “Morenika”; “Una tarde de verano” adaptasión del romanse espanyol medieval “Don Bueso i su ermana” (de la kuala ekzisten munchas diferentes versiones); “Adío kerida” un kante de amor moderno; o la rodeslí “Una matika de ruda”, son rekodradas, kantadas i gozadas por los sefaradíes sin distinsión de orijen i morada. Desde ke sus istoria muzikala salio de la Peninsula Iberika por los munchos kaminos del eksilio, la kansion djudeo-espanyola kontunea ambezando de la muzika de su deredor por todos los medios posivles i asigun las eleksiones de los interpretes, ke van trokando avagar avagar los tekstos i las melodias de los kantes, ke, de todo modo, ya fueron trokadas kon el tiempo. Entonses, este repertorio poetiko-muzikal sefaradí, es una valutoza muestra de diversitá i variedá desde sus empesijo asta oy diya. Empesando kon un movimiento en un solo senso, fuyendo de Espanya i tomando forma en la Diaspora, los kantes djudeo-espanyoles se mueven oy por munchos sensos entre paizes i kulturas leshos en sus jeografias. A kavza de esto, se puede definir i katalogar de munchas maneras distintas, ma la muzika djudeo-espanyola kontunea a mantener i afirmar sus identitá sefaradí entre un grande grado de enfluensas.

Referensias Armistead, Samuel; Silverman, Joseph; KATZ, Israel. Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition. Berkeley, University of California: Vol. 1, Vol. 2. 1986, 1993. Cohen, Judith. “Las cantigas judeoespañolas en el siglo XXI”. Revista Maguén- Escudo N° 164 Año 2012. Cohen, Judith. “Panorama de la canción judeo-española”. Revista Maguén- Escudo N° 159 Año 2011. Cook, Rifka. “El castellano del siglo XV vive aún”. 2014. http://www.elcastellano.org/artic/rifka.htm Díaz Más, Paloma. “Cómo hemos llegado a conocer el romancero sefardí.” Acta Poética 26 (1-2) Primavera-Otoño 2005. Instituto de Investigaciones Filológicas, UNAM.

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Estrugo, José M. Los Sefardíes - Ed. Renacimiento, 2002. Haim, Abraham. “El Ladino: Una Lengua Viva y Un Legado Cultural.” Universidad Hebrea de Jerusalem. N° 25, 523 – 535. Hassán, Iacob M. Las coplas de Purim – Publicación póstuma, Madrid, Hebraica Ediciones, 2010. Pedrosa, José Manuel. “El cancionero y el romancero de los sefardíes: identidades y mestizajes”. Universidad de Alcalá - Revista MaguénEscudo. N° 157 Año 2010. Posada, Carlos. “Musica sefardí, la diáspora musical continúa”. Apuntes, Bogotá (Colombia), N° 24: 52- 60, julio-diciembre de 2003. Seroussi, Edwin. “From Spain to the Eastern Mediterranean and Back: A Song as Metaphor of Modern Sephardi Culture.”. Music in the Jewish Experience, Bar-Ilan University Press, 2008. Smid, Katja. “Los problemas del estudio de la lengua sefardí.” Verba hispánica N° 10 2002, 113- 124. Tasat, Ramón. “La música sefardí hoy. Una perspectiva artística”. Semana Sepharad: The Lectures. Studies on Sephardic Jewry (edit. by M. Mitchell Serels) publicado por Jacob E. Safra Institute for Sephardic Studies, Yeshiva University, New York City, 2001. Weich-Shahak, Susana. “El repertorio sefardí en sus géneros poéticomusicales”. Cuadernos de Estudios Gallegos, LVI N.º 122, enerodiciembre 2009, 191-212.