The Force of Language: The Impact of European Languages on the Former Colonial
Territories.
February 9-11, 2005, UC Berkeley.
Panel II: Perspectives on the Former Colonial Powers: (France, Britain, Portugal,
Spain and the Netherlands).
Judeo-Spanish at the Present Time
by Casto Fernández (Cervantes Institute, Spain)
The title of the present conference possibly suffers from a certain semantic
ambiguity which, perhaps, has gone unnoticed by the organizers. The language of
the Empire may remain in dominated territories even when the political structure has
disappeared. It remains in a relationship of double dependence, as much in terms of
the former metropolis, which claims linguistic purity, as of the specific usages of the
region which has achieved independence, as it seeks to reaffirm its differential
features. This is the case of Spanish in Latin America.
However, it may be that it is the language itself which emigrates; a more or
less substantial number of its inhabitants may leave the confines of the Empire and,
once this is dissolved, continue its pilgrimage, dispersing as it goes and in this way
developing a relationship of triple dependence: 1) on the former metropolis, 2) on
the standard of the group and 3) on the place of settlement. This is the case of JudeoSpanish, on which I would like to share with you some reflections.
The language and culture of Sephardim rightly figures in this conference on
Linguistic Communities and Former Empires. “Judeo-Spanish is a Romance
language, whose system has a close relationship with Spanish and a relationship of
reciprocal intelligibility”1; its culture is a fundamental part of the culture of the
Spanish-speaking community. It is not, as is sometimes believed, an old version of
Spanish which has remained intact for five hundred years, but rather a language,
Dora Mantcheva, << “La muerte de una lengua “de mala muerte”: Notes on Death of a
Language, by Tracy Harris>>. Separad, CSIC, Madrid, 2000.
1
1
with its own features and registers, and with a complex, transversal history, related
to the historical reality of other languages and cultures.
Sefarad is the name in Hebrew which the Jews gave to their homeland. The
presence of the Jewish community in the Iberian Peninsula has been documented
since the Third Century of the Roman era. The different historical events, of which
we are all aware, led to 1492, when the Catholic Kings ordered their expulsion.
The expelled Jews migrated to Portugal and Navarre, until forced out again
by new edicts (decrees of expulsion): in 1497, in the case of Portugal, and in 1515,
in Navarre. It is estimated that some twenty four thousand families2, around one
hundred and sixty thousand people, were forced off the Iberian Peninsula. This great
diaspora spread out over the Netherlands, Italy and what were to be the two great
zones of Sephardic linguistic power: the Ottoman Empire and Northern Africa. The
Sephardim, Jews who did not wish to convert, went into exile, taking with them the
features of their identity: their religion and language, as well as their customs,
proverbs, ballads, music and stories. The majority of specialists know and
acknowledge that even in the Sixteenth Century there were few differences between
the Spanish spoken on the peninsula and that of those who had left.
In Amsterdam, the Sephardim settled into prosperous, cultured communities,
with their own system of schooling, and became active in the emerging publishing
market. The Castilian and Portuguese Sephardim who had settled there maintained
contact with the peninsula during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. The
Castilian which they spoke was invigorated with the arrival of the Crypto-Jews, or
converted Jews, from the peninsula, who were accused of practising Judaism in
secret. In Italy, however, the similarity of the language of the area soon caused them
to abandon Judeo-Spanish, although the Sephardim of Rome, Livorno, and other
cities, also achieved a notable influence in the economic and publishing spheres of
their new country.
Gonzalo de Illescas, in his Historia pontificial, relates: “salieron de Castilla passados of veynte and quatro
mil familias”. Barcelona 1606.
2
2
In the vast territory of Sultan Bayezid II in the Ottoman Empire, the
Sephardim were made welcome. There, their language and culture encountered
respect and freedom. In the middle of the Sixteeenth Century, the demographic and
cultural complexity of this Empire had already produced an organizational model in
which the different communities enjoyed broad autonomy. These prosperous
Sephardim communities, which held a monopoly on printing, were to be found in
Turkey (Istanbul, Izmir, Edirne, Gallipoli….) and in cities such as Bucharest, Sofia,
Sarajevo, Belgrade, Skopje, Thessaloniki, Larissa (in present-day Bosnia, Bulgaria,
Romania, Macedonia, Serbia and Greece). In the end, numerous Jews with other
backgrounds (Byzantine, Ashkenazim…) assimilated, even adopting the Sephardim
language and rites.
The highpoint of Judeo-Spanish corresponds to the Eighteenth Century, when
there were hundreds of thousands of speakers, and monolingual at that. The great
Sephardic biblical commentary, the Me’am Lo’ez, was especially important for the
shaping of literary Judeo-Spanish. It was also the century in which Judeo-Spanish
was consolidated and, indeed, saw its highest point as a language of poetry3.
Sephardic
communities
maintained
their
principal
cultural
features
throughout the Nineteenth Century until the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire.
The Reform of the Young Turks under Ataturk put an end to the tolerance and
autonomy enjoyed by the Sephardim up until then. Nationalistic pressures in all
areas, including language, saw them integrate into the educational system, being
educated in the language of the country, and into the social life of the Turkish
population. A similar process occurred in the new Balkan states (Bulgaria, Greece,
Romania and Yugoslavia). To this should be added the migrationary current towards
European and American countries in which a rupture with the previous written
tradition was produced. As a consecuence the old texts became incomprehensible. It
was not long before they began to hold a negative vision of their own language,
3
See E. Romero, La creación literaria en lengua sefardí (Madrid 1992)
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justified by the lack of a common orthographic standard, which accentuated
dialectical differences4.
For its part, Jaquetia or the Judeo-Spanish language of Morocco, without a
doubt important in terms of number of speakers, was limited by the Hebrew already
established and is the subject of little testimony until the Nineteenth Century. In the
last century it practically disappeared, “because of the extension of Spanish
influence in Morocco after the second half of the Nineteenth Century, and the
concomitant influx of Spanish bureacrats and people to this country”5.
We can understand that the Spanish exiled from Spain in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries became more and more influenced by Hebrew, receiving
influences from the languages spoken in the settlement territories. The varied
original background of the speakers, the absence of a stable orthographic standard,
and the greater or lesser permeability of the language were, however, no obstacle to
its consolidation, becoming a koiné in the Sephardic communities of the East which,
in the end, endured despite the different kinds of onslaughts it suffered.
Judeo-Spanish is built on this Spanish base with decisive influence from the
Hebrew language in terms of vocabulary, morphology, syntaxis and semantics,
thanks to translation of the sacred Hebrew texts into Sephardic in Alyamiah. After
the diaspora, the different languages of each people of welcome worked upon this
base, rooted in Romance and modulated by the action of the Hebrew language. But
above all, it was after the division of the Ottoman Empire that dialectical differences
appeared, through contact with other languages. Different specialists have studied
the characteristics of the different expressions of Judeo-Spanish and have even
collected medieval oral texts, such as ballads.
In the Twentieth Century, during the Second World War, Jewish
communities of all origins suffered the genocide known to all of us. In the case of
the Sephardim, the figures concerning the numbers of victims are particularly
4
Coloma Lleal, “El judeoespañol” (Historia de la Lengua Española, Coord. Rafael Cano).
5
I.M. Hassán (1968)
4
horrifying: 80% of the settled communities in Greece, over 70 % in Yugoslavia,
around 50% in Romania and approximately 14 % in Bulgaria.
Genocide brought about new migrations by the survivors to the United States
of America, Israel and Latin America. In the Spanish-speaking countries of America
the Sephardim rehispanicized, adopting the Spanish standard system, with the result
that Judeo-Spanish all but disappeared as a language in these countries. In the
United States and Israel, the first generation continued to speak Judesmo6 (another
of the denominations of the language), but the need to integrate quickly in the new
homeland relegated it to the family sphere and, in the case of mixed marriages, it
quite simply died out.
If the Judeo-Spanish community, linguistically speaking, had stopped, for all
practical purposes, looking to Spain, the foundation of the State of Israel provided a
common political reference point for the first time in over four centuries. It is natural
that this has had a very important impact on the possibility of a linguistic standard,
above all in the wake of the creation of the Ladino National Authority, today
presided over by Isaac Navon.
The question is this. Should the language spoken by Judeo-Spanish people
from different places and reunited in Israel, who have managed to reconcile their
differences, be considered a canonical, Ladino language?
Undoubtedly, for
historical reasons, the Spanish of Spain cannot fulfill the role of standard reference,
whether it be considered a peculiar system within the archisystem which is Spanish,
or is accepted as an independent system. Yet, would it be necessary to bend the
forms of writing, spelling and even characters and graphic signs to that of the Jewish
language? Considering the need for unification in step with the history of the
language and the desire to be grouped alongside other expressions of Spanish,
regarding Ladino in this way as one of its dialectical variations, would they advise
adaptation to the common Spanish academic standard, with specific graphic signs
for specific phonological realities? Bearing in mind the difficult road of the
6
For the different denominations of the Sephardic language, see Carmen Hernández González, (University of
Valladolid), Un viaje por Sefarad: la fortuna del judeoespañol. Cervantes Yearbook, 2001.
5
Sephardim, it comes as a surprise to no-one that the main characteristic of JudeoSpanish is polymorphism, along with the people´s special love for their language
and their tenacity in the face of preserving it.
Some hailed the disappearance of Judeo-Spanish as a spoken language more
than a century ago. Should this occur, it would not, however, be the cause of the
disappearance of the Sephardic legacy. To access this, Sephardic Studies have a
broad field for research7. According to specialists, there are many tasks in the study
of the Judeo-Spanish language and its culture which remain incomplete. It still
seems to be an impossible task to arrive at a complete, rigorous description, for the
reason that no systematic study of each of the epochs of the evolution of JudeoSpanish exists and because, even if in lexical and phonetic terms there are more
abundant studies, others on morphosyntax are lacking. Similarly, we lack studies
related to textual sources of all kinds to be able to compose a corpus allowing us to
carry out diachronic and synchronic studies, in which geographical, social and
stylistic issues are examined. Furthermore, it is necessary to tackle study and
publication of texts which have never seen the light. Finally, the need to spread
Judeo-Spanish among Spanish-speakers would make it advisable to write it in a
system close to the Spanish orthographic standard, if possible accepted by all the
experts on the subject, famous for their disagreements.
But, naturally, the discussion supercedes the theoretical clash between
linguists to enter political territory. When all is said and done, the frontier between
dialect and independent language is of a political nature. It is true, furthermore, that
Judeo-Spanish would be a language without a territorial seat, linked to the historical
situations of diaspora which are embedded within it. We should also consider the
viability of, and opportunity for, teaching it. The Instituto Cervantes, which has
7
For present-day sources on the diffusion of Judeo-Spanish language and culture, see the annotated list of
institutions, organizations, associations, academic institutions, reviews and radio braodcasts in Sephardic, the
Judeo-Spanish language, and culture courses, bibliographic collections with Sephardic funding and links on
the Internet in, Un viaje por Sefarad: la fortuna del judeoespañol. Cervantes Yearbook ,2001. Carmen
Hernández González, (University of Valladolid).
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already incorporated Catalan, Galician and Basque into its curriculum, is at present
considering this.
It is true that these other languages have enjoyed an
administrative experience which Ladino lacks and that they are quickly rising to
meet the lexical challenges of the new technologies and new activities, but, if we
recognize Judeo-Spanish as the language of everyday use of certain, specific
communities, there would be nothing particularly strange in planning to teach it.
However, at the present time, there does not appear to be an authority interested in
preserving the language beyond a quaint example of a tragic past and a symbol of
resistance.
In 2006, it will be 20 years since the establishment of relations between Spain
and the State of Israel. Perhaps, with this in mind, it will be possible to reflect
peacefully on the issue solely in linguistic terms, accepting that we are dealing with
a linguistic variety which, decreasingly, will accompany a people in their aspirations
and deeds. Researchers are in agreement about this, worried, as they are, that the
sometimes surreal discussions on, for example, which graphic signs to use, leave
little time for studying the body of Sephardic cultural manifestations.
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