On March 31, 1492, the Spain of the three religions followed the example of the other European nations. The Catholic Monarchs, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragon, after the taking of Granada, which marked the end of the Reconquista, decided to expel the Jews who refused conversion.
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By successive stages, close to 200,000 Jews went into exile, some toward the north of Europe, but the majority throughout the Mediterranean basin. Sepharad was the Hebrew name for Spain; Sephardim was their name.
In general they integrated into the existing Jewish communities and adopted their language as early as the second generation.
In the north of Morocco and in the Ottoman Empire then in formation, by contrast, they maintained their Spanish language and imposed it on the communities predating their arrival, and even on non-Jews, who made of it an indispensable vehicular language in commercial relations.
But their culture and their language were to follow a new path. Evolving outside the Iberian peninsula, their archaizing language was soon regarded as specifically Jewish. Hence, later, that qualifier of Judeo-Spanish, adopted here in its ethnic and linguistic senses.
“According to F. Cantera Burgos,1 […] who does not believe that the total number of exiles from the Peninsula exceeded 165,000, the distribution would have been as follows: 3,000 in France, 9,000 in Italy, 21,000 in Holland [plus Hamburg and Great Britain], 1,000 in Greece, Hungary and the Balkans, 93,000 in European Turkey [which included Salonika until 1912] and Asian Turkey, 20,000 in Morocco, 10,000 in Algeria, 2,000 in Egypt and 5,000 in America.”
Thus is sketched the geography of the Hispanophone Jews.
The language, a two-headed eagle.
The linguistic situation of the Spanish Jews in 1492.
There then coexisted in Spain: Hebrew (L1), the learned language of the rabbis and of certain scholars; the Spanish vernaculars (Leonese, Aragonese and above all Castilian, the language of the court, hence of prestige) common to the adherents of the three religions (LV/LT); and the product of the literal translation of Hebrew or Aramaic (L1) by LV/LT — a language at once vernacular and translating which, by submitting to the structures of L1 in a faithful word-for-word rendering, yields ladino or calque Judeo-Spanish (L2), unspoken, and predating 1492.
Thus is defined the problematics of Judeo-Spanish, perfectly figured by the following trinomial:2
L1 ———> LV/LT ———> L2
a trinomial that will apply both to the language and to the literature (in fact two languages and two literatures, or even a third, ladinoid, which will contain numerous Hebraisms by way of ladino).
The situation from 1620 onward.
It is only around 1620 that, from LV/LT, vernacular Judeo-Spanish or djudezmo (in the Levant), haketiya in Morocco, tetauni in the Oran region, was born — and, with it, the Judeo-Spanish ethnic group.
The trinomial above will then comprise: L1 (Hebrew or Aramaic), LV/LT (vernacular Judeo-Spanish, or djudezmo) and L2 (calque Judeo-Spanish or ladino).
L2 is used by all the Sephardim, Hispanophone of course, in the Levant as in Morocco and the Oran region, as in the communities of southwestern France and in Holland, whereas vernacular Judeo-Spanish does not extend to those last two regions, where Peninsular Portuguese or Spanish was or is spoken.
It is to a very great terminological rigor that we invite the reader, for — the political crises aiding — people content themselves with a vagueness characteristic of the acculturation/deculturation of which the Judeo-Spanish have been victims: ladino is not spoken! One cannot speak Spanish with Hebrew syntax.
And it is in the light of the problematics of Judeo-Spanish that the whole of the production must be reviewed.
It will suffice for us to walk this trinomial all along the centuries (time) and across various regions (space) to detect the changes of that two-headed eagle which is our Judeo-Spanish (djudezmo and ladino), but also the variations of mentality that accompany them.
Our Spanish Jews thus brought from their “stepmother” homeland, on the one hand, that ladino or calque Judeo-Spanish, a pedagogical and liturgical, unspoken language constituted by the Spanish rabbis in the teaching and the translation of the Torah to children, who were necessarily Hispanophone; and on the other hand, the varieties of vernacular Spanish that would engender the vernacular Judeo-Spanishes, which by antonomasia I call djudezmo, a term that covers various varieties, in particular those of Salonika, Istanbul, Smyrna, Sofia and Tétouan. That is to say that in Spain, apart from the fixed and sacralized language that was ladino, there existed no specifically Jewish spoken language.
For me, it is within the framework of the Ottoman Empire in formation and in the north of Morocco that the Judeo-Spanish ethnic group was formed. This is the major theme of my book L’agonie des Judéo-Espagnols (The Agony of the Judeo-Spanish).3
The Muslim Turks, knowing Spanish only through the majority language of their Jewish minority, ended up designating it by the term yahudice, “Jewish” in Turkish. It was, of course, a misconception, but history is an accumulation of misconceptions. It suffices that one confuse nation and ethnic group, to which a determinate language is attached, and that the particularizing will come into play, for everything to become muddled. One must suppose that if the French settlers of Canada had been Jews, the particularities of Canadian French would have been attributed to their Jewishness, and one would have said, in the extreme, “This is the French of the Jews, or Judeo-French.” Absurd, isn’t it?
Finally this designation as Jewish was adopted by our Judeo-Spanish and translated as djudyo or djidyo (as Edgar Morin calls it), just as the Yiddish speakers called their language yidiche (from the German jüdisch, “Jewish”).
An example:4
Genesis XXVII, 14
French: He said to him: “Go now, see how your brothers are and how the flock is faring” (Bible de la Pléiade).
French (literal translation, or, in my terminology, “calque Judeo-French”): And-said to-him go now see at peace of your brothers and at peace of the sheep.
Ladino (calque Judeo-Spanish): I dicho a el anda agora vee a pas de tus ermanos i a pas de las ovejas. This is the word-for-word translation of the Hebrew, in a sense Hebrew dressed in Spanish.
Djudezmo (vernacular Judeo-Spanish): I le dicho: “anda agora mira komo estan tus ermanos i komo estan las ovejas” (ch and j are pronounced here as in French and in old Spanish).
Modern Castilian (Santa Biblia, 1960): E Israel le dijo: Vé ahora, mira como están tus hermanos y como están las ovejas.
And this time the ch and j of old Spanish have passed to the jota, just as the ch of Don Quichote (then written Don Quixote) passed to Don Quijote with the jota — a sound that did not exist when the French translated Cervantes’s masterpiece, failing which they would have transcribed it as Don Quirote, as some write or pronounce Mireille Gorbachev instead of Mikhail Gorbachev.
This last version, save for a few phonetic differences (the modern pronunciation of Castilian), does not differ so greatly from that of djudezmo, which maintains the old sounds of Spanish, notably the voiced sibilants (kaza, “house,” instead of casa; meza, “table,” instead of mesa, etc.; ijo, “son,” and kacha, “case, box,” instead of hijo and caja with the jota), but also the initial affricates (djente, “people,” instead of gente; djarro, “pot, jug,” instead of jarro; etc.).
A living museum of fifteenth-century Spanish
That is to say that Judeo-Spanish — ladino and djudezmo — is a living museum of the state of the Spanish language before 1492, and that, besides the phonetic archaisms evoked above, it perpetuates others, lexical as well as morphological and syntactic. That is to say, too, that philologists and historians of the Spanish language will find in it abundant elements likely to enrich their science. We cannot here go further into this study; our book Le judéo-espagnol (Judeo-Spanish) will allow the reader to obtain more information.5
Languages and cultures in contact (interferences — symbiosis)
It goes without saying that this language would borrow terms from each of the languages of the host peoples, and quite particularly from the all-powerful Turkish that would indelibly mark the whole of the Balkan languages. Borrowings that would be Hispanicized, as would those made from Arabic by the Judeo-Spanish of Morocco. In addition, Hebrew, Italian, Greek, Bulgarian, etc., would also mark our protoplasmic djudezmo.
The galloping Gallomania of Judeo-Spanish
But if there is one major influence, though a relatively late one, it is that of French — that of the schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, founded in Paris in 1860 — which would invade both Turkish (5,600 borrowings from French counted in Turkish around 1970) and Judeo-Spanish, to the point of forming a new state of the language that I call judéo-fragnol.6
Such is traced, in broad brushstrokes, the history (birth, evolution and, unfortunately, the agony accelerated by Nazism) of Judeo-Spanish and of its two modalities, ladino and djudezmo.
The grandeur and decadence of the Judeo-Spanish
The fate of the Judeo-Spanish was parallel to that of the Ottoman Empire and of the north of Morocco, whose ups and downs they followed — expansion, then contraction within the present borders of Turkey and Morocco, whose nationalism they had to assimilate, or else expatriate.
These emigrations began as early as the start of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, whose various nations and provinces generally mistreated the Jewish communities as they acquired autonomy or independence. That is to say that these communities had to give ground and lose part of the autonomy that all minorities enjoyed in that sort of “Republic of Nations” that the Ottoman Empire was. It was also the progressive abandonment of their mode of life for the adoption of the ideas and customs of the West, which since the beginning of the nineteenth century had coveted the riches of the Porte and of Morocco, where it frequently intervened economically and militarily. It was thus that in 1860 the Judeo-Spanish of Morocco “made the acquaintance” of the descendants of those who had expelled them in 1492. A joyful reunion, certainly, but a progressive loss of their identity.
The destruction of the Judeo-Spanish by the Shoah.
Exacerbating nationalisms, the rise of fascism would favor the marginalization of the Jews — essentially Sephardim — of the Balkans, whose destruction the occupation and the Shoah would accelerate:
Greece: in 1940: 79,950; in 1947: 10,371. More than 50,000 had perished.
Yugoslavia: in 1940: 71,000; in 1944: 14,000 survivors, of whom 8,000 were authorized to emigrate to Israel; 55,000 Yugoslav Jews had therefore perished.
Romania: at least 15,000 Judeo-Spanish had perished.
Bulgaria: in 1940: 40,000; in 1945: 50,000.
No Jew was deported from it, thanks to the action of the Bulgarian people, who fiercely opposed the extermination of their Jewish compatriots. In 1949 they would number no more than 9,700, the others having used their right to emigrate to Israel.
To the whole of these victims must be added the Judeo-Spanish émigrés in Europe whom the occupation took by surprise. 60,000 had perished, including the majority of those of Turkish nationality, the Turkish authorities having done little to protect their own, often even having refused them their protection despite the many approaches made to that end.
Such was the dark fate of the Judeo-Spanish during the Shoah.
It must be added that, although Turkey remained outside the conflict, pro-Nazi sympathies were openly expressed in the Turkish press of the time.
The policy of eliminating minorities was thereby encouraged, and, in 1942, during an exceptional levy on property (varlık vergisi), the Turkish government acted with its face uncovered: the M (Muslims) had to pay 5%, the D (Dönmeh, descendants of the followers of Sabbatay-Zvi converted to Islam) 10%, but the G (non-Muslims) and still more the Jews (one thus finds again the hierarchy established by the Nazi theoreticians) had to pay sums bearing no relation to their means. In order to be able to pay the exorbitant sums demanded of them, many merchants ruined themselves by selling all they possessed. The petty wage-earners who could not pay were sent to forced labor. One trembles at the thought of what would have come about had the course of events not turned to the advantage of the Allies. It is precisely this that the political leaders of the time sensed in time; at the end of ’43 and the beginning of ’44, they freed their deportees, abolished the tax in question and muted the cries of “Turks in name only! Enemies of the people!” of the pro-Nazi press.
The vise loosened a little, and the Democratic Party promised to indemnify the victims. One is still waiting! This lack of gratitude toward citizens who had honestly played a fool’s game and renounced, in 1924, their consular protections, drove the Judeo-Spanish to emigrate en masse after 1945. Like their brethren of Bulgaria, they had had a narrow escape.
Judeo-Spanish literature.
It is essentially of two types, liturgical (above all in ladino) and secular.
Despite the crises, printing in Hebrew and in Judeo-Spanish remained active all through the centuries.
For the whole of the Judeo-Spanish production, Michal Molho7 gives the figure of 5,000 to 6,000 works, figures largely exceeded by the research and discoveries of these last four decades.
To it must be added the oral literature (romances, tales and proverbs) as well as a once-flourishing press. Close to 300 titles were counted. (Cf. op. cit., notes 3 and 4.)
The rebirth of Judeo-Spanish.
For nearly thirty years Judeo-Spanish literature has been reborn. Prose and poetry flourish. Witness: E. Saporta y Beja, I. Ben-Rubi, Clarisse Nicoïdski, Avner, Marcel Cohen, Henriette Asseo, Lina Albukrek, Sara Golub, Rita Gabbaï, Salamon Bidjerano, etc. To this list one would have to add all the collectors of tales, proverbs and romances, as well as the numerous authors who take up their Judeo-Spanish thematics in the language of their country.
Judeo-Spanish at the University.
Today we are precisely at the point of recovering the vestiges of this culture. The University in turn takes hold of them, and chairs of Judeo-Spanish (language, culture and civilization) are multiplying throughout the world. The first was created in Paris — at the École des Langues et Civilisations Orientales Vivantes — in 1967; the Sorbonne (Institut d’Études Hispaniques) and the École Pratique des Hautes Études followed. The same occurred from 1972 onward at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Institut Martin Buber). In these establishments where H.-V. Séphiha teaches, more than 400 works (master’s theses and doctoral dissertations) have been directed on this discipline that the author calls Judeo-Hispanology. In addition, Judeo-Spanish is studied in dialectology in all the linguistics courses of the Hispanic or Iberian sections of the French universities.
The same holds in the universities of Spain, where the Arias Montano Institute of Madrid, since 1941, publishes the review Sefarad, which is to Spanish Judaism what the review Al-Andalus is to Spanish Islam.
In Germany and in other European countries it is the Romance Languages section of the universities that inscribes Judeo-Spanish in its programs. Such is notably the case of the Institut für romanische Philologie of the Freie Universität of Berlin. Interest is shown also in the universities of Tübingen, Munich, Trier, Aachen and Frankfurt, and even of Innsbruck in Austria; of Fribourg, Neuchâtel and Geneva in Switzerland; and, in Italy, in the Spanish sections of Venice and Padua. Other universities take an interest in it too, either within the framework of Iberian Studies or within that of Hebrew Studies.
In England the Hispanic sections likewise take an interest in Judeo-Spanish.
Very recently, in July 1997, Queen Mary and Westfield College (Department of Hispanic Studies) organized the Tenth British Conference on Judeo-Spanish, in which researchers from all over the world took part, notably from Israel and the United States where, be it said in passing, Judeo-Spanish is the object of multiple courses and university research. Numerous university correspondents from the countries cited above, as well as from Greece, Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the former USSR, Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia, Denmark, Holland, Sweden and Norway, announce the formation of teaching and research centers in the domain of our discipline. That is to say the importance accorded to it.
Besides the language, Judeo-Spanish literature, and in particular the Judeo-Spanish romancero, solicits the attention of specialists in Spanish literature, in the French universities as in foreign ones. Witness the very recent Anthologie bilingue de la poésie espagnole (Bilingual Anthology of Spanish Poetry) of the Pléiade and the production of innumerable records of Judeo-Spanish songs over the last three decades.
Community teaching and associative life
But there also exists a community-based teaching:
In France, the creation in 1979 of the association Vidas Largas8 “for the defense and promotion of the Judeo-Spanish language and culture” made it possible to introduce teaching into the communities of Paris, Marseille and Lyon. Likewise in Belgium within the framework of the association Los Muestros, and just about everywhere in the world.
We are witnessing a veritable rebirth of interest in Judeo-Hispanology. Witness the reviews and bulletins that are springing up everywhere.
The Judeo-Spanish today constitute a minority among the Jews called Sephardim, or even sef9 as they say nowadays. We are thus a minority of a minority that encompasses that other minority of the Ashkenazi Jews, the whole constituting one of the numerous minorities of France.
Judeo-Spanish on the airwaves.
This rebirth of Judeo-Spanish culture manifests itself also on the airwaves: daily broadcasts in Israel and in Madrid, twice-weekly in France, weekly in Belgium. In Israel, after a certain rejection of the languages of the diaspora, people have become aware of the linguistic and cultural riches of Judeo-Spanish. At present this discipline is taught in most of the universities.
The future of Judeo-Spanish.
All that precedes is very encouraging. It is no longer a matter of agony, but of rebirth. Often, while the parents go about their lucrative occupations, it is with the grandparents that the children are initiated into Judeo-Spanish and take an interest in their past.
The current flows, and seems to us irreversible, but one must continue to gather the heritage of the elders. It is to this end that Judeo-Spanish Workshops are being created everywhere. Researchers, ever more numerous, are attaching themselves to it too.
Today, the European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages opens its collection of “European Languages” to Yiddish and to Judeo-Spanish.
The booklet10 was presented by the authors at the European Parliament on July 1, 1998. It is a consecration.
Notes
F. Cantera Burgos, Los Sefardíes, Madrid 1958, p. 7, taken up by R. Renard in his Sepharad, p. 52, Annales Universitaires de Mons, 1966.↩︎
H.-V. Sephiha, a) “Problématique du judéo-espagnol,” in Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, vol. LXIX, fasc. 1, 1974, pp. 159 to 189 — b) LE LADINO (judéo-espagnol calque): Structure et évolution d’une langue liturgique (Ladino (Calque Judeo-Spanish): Structure and Evolution of a Liturgical Language), Thèse d’État defended in Nov. 1979, reduced to two volumes upon its publication by Vidas Largas, in 1982, in Paris: vol. I, Théorie du ladino, 236 pages — vol. II, Textes et Commentaires, 480 pages. — c) with Richard Ayoun, Séfarades d’hier et d’aujourd’hui — 70 portraits (Sephardim of Yesterday and Today — 70 Portraits), Liana Levi, Paris, 1992.↩︎
L’agonie des Judéo-Espagnols (The Agony of the Judeo-Spanish), Entente, “Minorités” series, Paris 1977, 1979 and 1991.↩︎
Le judéo-espagnol (Judeo-Spanish), Entente, “Langues en péril” series directed by H.-V. Sephiha, Paris, 1986, 242 pages, and note 2,b, vol. 1, pp. 048 to 060.↩︎
Le judéo-espagnol (Judeo-Spanish), Entente, “Langues en péril” series directed by H.-V. Sephiha, Paris, 1986, 242 pages, and note 2,b, vol. 1, pp. 048 to 060.↩︎
“Le judéo-fragnol, dernier-né du djudezmo,” summary in Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, vol. LXXI, fasc. 1, Paris, 1976, pp. XXXI to XXXV.↩︎
Michaël Molho, Literatura sefardita de Oriente, Madrid, CSIC, 1960. See also Elena Romero, La creación literaria en lengua sefardí, Mapfre, “1492” series, Madrid, 1992.↩︎
Let us give here the address of the VIDAS LARGAS Association: Association for the Maintenance and Promotion of the Judeo-Spanish Language and Culture, publisher of numerous books, booklets and records — 37, rue Esquirol, 75013 Paris.↩︎
Haïm-Vidal Sephiha, “Diagnostic du judaïsme français: Une sépharadite aiguë,” in Combat pour la Diaspora, Juifs d’Orient et de Méditerranée, No. 3, 2nd quarter, 1980, pp. 55 to 63.↩︎
Nathan Weinstock and Haïm-Vidal Sephiha, Yiddish et Judéo-Espagnol, Un héritage européen (Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish, A European Heritage), No. 6 of the “European Languages” collection, European Bureau for Lesser-Used Languages, Brussels, 1998, 42 pages. Idem, English version.↩︎