European Judaism

This issue completes the two devoted to the current state of Ladino studies. The Editorial Board is deeply indebted to Hilary Pomeroy for the scholarship, devotion, and, if she will forgive the lapse into another Jewish language, the sitzfleisch needed to complete the task. None of us anticipated quite how complex the editorial task would be, down to ensuring the correct detailed transliteration of so many Ladino texts. Hilary’s editorial follows showing the broader context within which the articles are located. The issue also contains her own important contribution to the range of studies. Together the two issues form a comprehensive overview of the field.

Readers of the autumn 2010 issue of European Judaism, devoted mainly to literature written in Ladino, the most usual term today to denote the vernacular language of Sephardi Jews (Judezmo, Hakitía or the neutral academic term Judeo-Spanish are also used), will be well aware of the perilous position of this once flourishing language, for it is on the verge of extinction. Sadly, many of the articles in this issue reinforce that depiction of Ladino’s precariousness today, for despite the growing interest in Ladino language and literature it is no longer a language of daily communication.

On 17 March 1996 the Knesset (Israeli parliament) passed a law to set up two national authorities, one for Yiddish culture and the other for Ladino culture. Yiddish is a 1,000– year old language based on German with words and idioms from Hebrew, Aramaic and additional European languages. Ladino is approximately 500 years old and is based on Spanish, with words and idioms from Hebrew, Aramaic, Northern African languages, as well as Balkan languages and from other countries once under the domination of the Ottoman Empire.

For more than one hundred years texts of rabbinical prose were the only model of educated style. With the arrival of new literary genres imported from Western Europe towards the middle of the nineteenth century, Sephardi authors and translators promoted a change in their style of writing. This article compares syntactic structures in two texts from the second half of the nineteenth century. They belong to the same literary genre and share the same subject, but are anchored in different discoursive traditions trying to exemplify the different styles of Sephardic prose that coexisted at that time.

Judezmo, the traditional language of the Sephardic Jews of the former Ottoman Empire, is presented as a member of the group of Jewish languages, fusing elements of Ibero-Romance, Greek, Arabic, Ottoman Turkish, French, Italian and other linguistic stocks. In common with speakers of other Jewish languages, Judezmo speakers perceived their language as 'Jewish' and denoted it as such (Djudezmo, Djidyó). They wrote it in the Hebrew or 'Jewish' alphabet; used an archaizing variety of it (Ladino) to translate sacred Hebrew texts literally; and made frequent use in everyday language of words and phrases from Hebrew, and allusions to Hebrew texts, Jewish rituals and other facets of Judaism as a civilization. They preserved words from the pre-languages (Jewish Greek, Jewish Arabic) used by the ancestors of the Judezmo speakers in medieval Iberia, and following the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, incorporated much material from the languages spoken by ethnic groups encountered in the Ottoman Empire. Distinct from both medieval and modern Spanish, Judezmo served as a lingua franca among the Sephardim throughout the ethnically and linguistically diverse regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. A special variety functioned as a secret code among Sephardic merchants. Today, Judezmo is treasured by its speakers as the unique, independent Jewish language of the Mediterranean Sephardim. However, the number of its speakers is constantly decreasing, making Judezmo an endangered language.

The oral transmission of culture became the subject of serious academic study at the end of the nineteenth century, and since then we have come to recognize its pivotal role in any consideration of cultural dynamics. If we take the case of Judeo-Spanish culture, research has shown that the assimilatory forces of the dominant or co-territorial culture in which the Jews settled after the Expulsion, in both the Eastern and the Western Mediterranean, threatened to obliterate their cultural heritage, and in particular their language. Added to this, the displacement of the traditional speech communities during and shortly after the Second World War at both ends of the Mediterranean, as well as contact with the new cultures in which these Jews settled, seemed to augur badly for the survival of Judeo-Spanish culture. Furthermore Judeo Spanish has all but lost its currency as a spoken language, in the home and in the street, because the language is no longer transmitted to succeeding generations in the traditional fashion. Nevertheless an ever-increasing number of people are taking to the pen to write in the language and about its culture. This article also proves that defining features of the language have survived in spite of the impact of Modern Spanish in the areas in which Western Judeo-Spanish (hakitía) held currency traditionally.

This paper examines the current state of Ladino as a spoken everyday language of communication. Research has shown that there are very few competent speakers of the language under the age of sixty throughout the world. Negative language attitudes as well as assimilation into the dominant cultures and choice of the dominant language(s) are contributing factors to this decline. However, this decline in linguistic skills does not reflect the promotional efforts on behalf of Ladino and Sephardic culture which are discussed at length in the paper. The end result is that language loss does not mean the decline of Sephardic ethnicity and culture, which are presently thriving.

Judeo-Spanish is today considered to be an endangered language even though there has been much research into it. The Ladino Database Project, which has been set up and conducted by the Sephardic Center in Istanbul (www.instanbulsephardiccenter.com), aims at documenting the spoken Judeo-Spanish of the last native speakers in Istanbul. The data, which will soon be available on the internet, will be invaluable for all researchers of the language and culture.

This article discusses characteristic aspects of the literary genre of Sephardic coplas in many different aspects: (1) Origins and development (the exact beginning cannot be determined with complete accuracy); (2) Importance and uniqueness of the coplas in the Sephardic poetic repertoire; (3) Corpus; (4) Characteristics (metric systems, authoring); (5) Transmission; (6) Geographical Diffusion; (7) Function; (8) Topics; and (9) Paraliturgical function. It concludes with a very extensive bibliography of the most important studies on the subject.

This article is an overview of the characteristics, history and the diffusion of the different types of Judeo-Spanish songs of mourning and dirges: Sephardic quinot in Judeo-Spanish for Tisha beab festivity, dirges for endechar (that is, to lament the death of a person), ballads used as songs of mourning and satirical dirges that were published in Sephardic newspapers at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Our collaborative project concerning the traditional literature and folklore of the Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews of the Balkans and North Africa began in 1957 and has continued up to the present. During the project's fifty-three years (so far), we have interviewed some 164 Balkan and seventy-five North African Sephardic informants, in the U.S. (Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, New York), in Israel (eight different communities), in Morocco (six communities) and in Spain (Madrid). Our Eastern informants originated in Rhodes, Salonika, Tekirdağ, Izmir, Israel, Monastir, and a number of small Bosphorus communities. Our collection of traditional ballads (a majority of medieval Hispanic origin) totals just under 1,500 texts. We also collected abundant examples of lyric poetry, folktales, proverbs, folk cures, and popular beliefs. Five volumes of our projected sixteen-volume edition of Sephardic narrative ballads and other folk literature have already been published; three more volumes are currently being prepared for publication. Our editions systematically include studies of the songs' texts and their traditional tunes (the latter transcribed and studied by Israel J. Katz). One of our many crucially important aims has been to save, for the benefit of future generations, the precious oral literature and folklore of the Sephardic Jews.

The ballad has played a significant role not only in the literature of Sephardi Jews but also in establishing the distinctive Sephardi culture of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Handed down orally by generation after generation of Sephardi women until the first systemised collecting of ballads took place from the early twentieth century onwards, the Sephardi ballad became part of family and daily life, sung to accompany mundane household tasks; to entertain; to mark out significant stages in life from birth until death; and to celebrate and commemorate the annual religious cycle.

The article is a survey of a number of aspects of the cantigas (Ladino lyric songs) repertoire of the Sephardi communities in the Ottoman Empire at the dawn of the modern era. The genre of cantigas is the dominant genre in the repertoire of the Ladino song, as well as the most dynamic and changing one. Many of the cantigas sung in the twentieth century are new compositions that spread throughout the Sephardi communities and entered the oral tradition in relatively short time. The cantigas reflect the events and changes of the time, in their contents as well as in their music, combining original compositions side by side with borrowings from neighbouring cultures. Commercial recordings and waves of immigration carried songs to new countries and new communities. Newly composed songs entered the oral tradition while their authors were often forgotten. The dawn of the twentieth century was the beginning of decades of poetic and musical creativity that came to an end with the outbreak of the Second World War.

Migration in the Twentieth-Century Sephardic Song Repertoire

The Judeo-Spanish song tradition has experienced many changes in recent years as it enters the 'world music' scene. Change, however, can be seen as a constant feature of the many aspects of Judeo-Spanish song and performance practice. Here, various genres are examined, together with some of the changes they have undergone in repertoire, style and context, and a selection of reactions to changes on the part of Sephardi Jews interviewed over several years. To a large extent, the repertoire has moved from the home to public representation, and is performed more by professional artists with no Sephardi background than by people from Sephardi communities, raising questions of appropriation and representation.

Groundswell

Please Prayer from Below (a Pantoum)

Joseph

Lipton, Diana, Longing for Egypt and Other Unexpected Biblical Tales, Sheffield, Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2008, 285 pp., ISBN 978–1–906055–14–1.

Green, Abigail, Moses Montefiore: Jewish Liberator, Imperial Hero, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010, 540 pp., £24.95, ISBN 978–0–674–04880–5.