23 The status of Judeo-Spanish in the Ottoman Empire
In this chapter, I analyze the status of Judeo-Spanish in the Ottoman Empire at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, a time of major changes in the Sublime Porte, whose multi-ethnic and multilingual structure had made the survival of Judeo-Spanish possible. These changes would force the Sephardim to adapt to new sociopolitical circumstances and engage in a public discussion of language as both a means of communication and a symbol of identity. The dispute developed into a full-fledged language-ideological debate (Blommaert Reference Blommaert, Blommaert and de Gruyter1999), with Sephardic intellectuals using the press as a privileged forum for the deployment of their arguments. A most significant contribution was the series of opinion pieces published in the Salonica newspaper La Época between 1901 and 1902, whose staunch defense of Judeo-Spanish, under the guidance of its editor-in-chief Sam Lévy, exemplifies one of multiple positions that were taken with regard to Judeo-Spanish and to how it should be seen in the context of changing cultural and political ideologies.
Judeo-Spanish: historical background
Birth and development of Judeo-Spanish
Judeo-Spanish – a modern glottonym whose use is limited to scientific circles – has been given a number of names by its speakers that clue us in to its ethnic-religious origins and its geographical provenance: ĵidió, judesmo, españolit, ladino,1 etc. Some of these names refer us back to Spain, but, although Judeo-Spanish is a Hispanic language variety, it developed and spread outside the Iberian Peninsula under specific historical conditions. It has been spoken and written, in various degrees, by Sephardic communities of the Eastern Mediterranean basin and North Africa (a variety known as Haquetia or Haquitia).
After the mass exodus from the Iberian Peninsula following the edict of expulsion of the Jews from Castile–León in 1492 (Portugal following suit in 1497), the Sephardim headed in various directions: some went to the South of France, others to North Africa and still others to central and northern Europe, setting up flourishing communities in Antwerp, Amsterdam, Hamburg and London. But most Sephardim took the road east, to Italy and, above all, towards the land of the growing Ottoman Empire, where Sultan Bajazet II (1447–1512) welcomed them with open arms as non-Christian Westerners (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 8). The Jews from the Iberian Peninsula settled in major cities: Istanbul, Salonica, Izmir, Edirne, Sofia, Plovdiv, Monastir, Sarajevo and others, some of which became Sephardic centers par excellence. This was the case with Salonica, where the majority of the population was Sephardic. The political and social circumstances of the Ottoman Empire of the time, which included within its vast territories a number of ethnic-religious groups coexisting independently of each other (Veinstein Reference Veinstein and Méchoulan1993: 350), were conducive to the survival of minority languages. Governed according to the principles of dhimma,2 the various nations that lived within the Sublime Porte, being non-Islamic minorities, could maintain their own institutions, religion, customs, identities and, of course, language. The Ottoman Empire was undoubtedly a multilingual and multi-ethnic mosaic.
Cut off from the Iberian Peninsula and in contact with the languages of their new surroundings (first Turkish and then others such as Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian and Greek), the various peninsular dialects carried by the Jews from their regions of origin (Aragon, Castile, Catalonia, etc.) underwent in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a process of koineization in which Castilian turned out to be dominant (Minervini Reference Minervini and Romero2008; Penny Reference Penny1992). By the seventeenth century, the characteristic features, both oral and written, of what we know as Judeo-Spanish (Minervini Reference Minervini and Romero2008: 38) had already taken shape as it became the lingua franca of the Mediterranean Jewish world, used for business, at the synagogue, in education and in general community life (Minervini Reference Minervini and Romero2008: 35). In the eighteenth century, Judeo-Spanish would show the first major signs of literary creativity (Hassán Reference Hassán, Seco and Salvador1995: 121).
On the subject of writing, it should be noted that, before the expulsion, it was usual among the Sephardim, as happened with other Jewish languages and dialects, to write the Romance language of their region in Aljamiado, that is, using characters from the Hebrew alphabet (Hassán Reference Hassán, Seco and Salvador1995: 118). This practice, imposed by the traditional Jewish education system, would remain among the Levantine Jews who spoke Judeo-Spanish.
Western influence
Judeo-Spanish would continue to enjoy robust health throughout the nineteenth century and up to the beginnings of the twentieth,3 although it would undergo some fairly important linguistic changes. Such transformations in the structure of Ladino are closely linked to sociopolitical changes that the Ottoman Empire was undergoing at the time and that would affect the literary output as well as the way its own speakers saw it as a vernacular language.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was hit by a major crisis due to a number of factors that included the collapse of its outdated structures and the growth of strong separatist nationalist movements among its minorities. These structural and political problems, in addition to pressure from European powers, led the Sublime Porte to open up to the West and implement modern social and political measures modeled after those prevalent in Western countries. This process, known as the Tanzimat [new order] 4 reforms, took place between 1839 and 1876 (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 68) and involved a new concept of citizenship that legally turned all people residing in the Ottoman Empire – regardless of their ethnic-religious origins – into citizens for all legal purposes. That meant, linguistically, learning Turkish regardless of ethnicity and religion.5 This new concept of citizenship, known as pan-Ottomanism (Weiker Reference Weiker1992: 120) or Ottoman patriotism (Levy Reference Levy1994: 103), was an attempt by the Ottoman Empire to redefine, at least in theory, its political tradition as a pluralistic Muslim state in order to encourage the loyalty of all subjects. It was expected that it would restrain the emergence of nationalistic movements and counter political objections from some European states that seriously threatened its existence (Levy Reference Levy1994: 103–4).
Opening up to the West would also end up facilitating intellectual exchange between the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire and their European counterparts, both Sephardim and Ashkenazim. The ideas of the Haskala, which designates the different Jewish Enlightenment movements, penetrated and caught on among men of letters from the Ottoman Sephardic communities and played a key role in the process of secularization and social renewal – materially, culturally and ideologically. In this regard, we have to mention both the decisive role played by French Jews on a material, educational and cultural level and the movement led by the Wissenschaft des Judenthums in the fields of literature and ideology (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 106–9).
The Alliance Israélite Universelle and French culture
In accordance with the ideology of the Jewish Enlightenment, it was felt that, in order to achieve a change in mentality that allowed for the modernization of Ottoman Jewish society, the first step was educational reform. This belief led to the creation of a series of schools sponsored by European Jewish organizations and philanthropists that followed modern Western models, which caused a cultural revolution in the Sephardic world. Schools subsidized by these entities – such as the Lipmann in Salonica (1856) (Nehama Reference Nehama1978: 663), the Camondos in Istanbul (1858) (Fresco Reference Fresco and Méchoulan1993: 77), the Italian schools like the Dante Alighieri6 schools (1901) (Bunis Reference Bunis and Goldberg1996: 230), those of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (1903),7 and the French schools, sponsored by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (1862)8 – were set up for the Sephardic population, using modern programs in Western languages of culture in order to modernize, westernize and bring progressiveness to the Jewish communities in the East.
Of all the Western-type schools, it is unquestionably those of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an institution set up by French Jews in 1860, that grew the deepest roots and had the most significant effect. In its heyday, the Alliance subsidized 183 schools with a total of 43,700 students across the Ottoman Empire (Levy Reference Levy1994: 113–14), acting as a real hothouse for the Western, especially French, way of life. Not surprisingly, most members of ideologically progressive and modern groups in early twentieth-century Sephardic society were educated in schools belonging to this French Jewish institution (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 85). In the case of Salonica, after several attempts failed because of opposition from conservative rabbis (Nehama Reference Nehama1978: 666–7), the first school of the Alliance was inaugurated in 1873 (Molho Reference Molho1993: 253).9
Thus, through an intricate network of secular schools (including schools for girls), the traditional Sephardic world was opened not only to the culture and literature of France but also to its language, in which most subjects were taught. As a result, the Sephardic elite – the line of intellectuals, editors and publicists in the Eastern Jewish communities – would adopt French as the language of culture par excellence.
Neo-Judeo-Spanish
The presence of Western culture also meant coming into contact with new kinds of text production hitherto unknown in the Empire. New literary genres were introduced – the novel, theater, poetry and styles of journalism – which revolutionized the Sephardic literary conventions in Judeo-Spanish, producing a veritable boom in publishing: translations of French, Italian, Russian and Hebrew novels, poetry, historical works and scientific tracts, and a huge quantity of long- or short-lived periodicals, came out in Ladino from the second half of the nineteenth century in the various Sephardic communities in the East. This massive production of texts and the corresponding expansion of registers and styles went hand in hand with a process of linguistic standardization. They used the resources they had at hand: French was the first reserve for linguistic elaboration, but other languages, such as Italian and modern Spanish, also played a part. Although often overlooked, they also exploited the possibilities of the Judeo-Spanish system itself by producing neologisms by analogy and derivation. Following Romero (Reference Romero1992: 23), this modern Judeo-Spanish, re-Romanized by the influence of languages of culture – particularly French – is normally referred to as neo-Judeo-Spanish. Other scholars, such as Sephiha (Reference Sephiha1973: 26), underlining its strong French influence, have named it Judeo-Fragnol.
It is during this dynamic period in the linguistic and literary history of Judeo-Spanish that there appears, particularly in the pages of the press, a controversy surrounding the language, its identifying value and its potential – with regard to both style and medium – as a vehicle of communication in a modern society. It is clear that this is a debate which, as we will see in the coming pages, is closely linked to the various cultural and political projects circulating among the enlightened Sephardim and which, in a wider sense, participates in the political developments and relationships within Sephardic society, as part of first the Ottoman and secondly the Jewish world.
The Judeo-Spanish press
The importance of the Judeo-Spanish press in spreading modern ideas from the final third of the nineteenth century onwards is undeniable.10 The scholars, or Maskilim, in the East, educated in Alliance schools and generally in possession of higher education diplomas from European universities, took it upon themselves to bring the masses towards modernity and progress in its various guises. And they chose to do it by using the language of the majority: Judeo-Spanish.11 The Judeo-Spanish press became therefore the broadest and most appropriate channel through which to disseminate knowledge, culture and European and Hebrew literature (in the form of serialized translations). But it was also a vital platform for the propagation and exchange of the various political ideas and ideological stands that prevailed within Sephardic communities. As Benbassa and Rodrigue put it, in the Judeo-Spanish press “every trend was represented and reflected the politicization of the communities” (1995: 112).
La Época, published in Salonica – which was not only the Jerusalem of the Balkans but the center of publishing in Judeo-Spanish –, was one of the many newspapers that engaged in the language debate and gave voice to a number of linguistic ideologies.12 From the moment of its creation, La Época, Revista comerciala y literaria, founded on November 1, 1875 by Saˈadí Šemuel Haleví, was an avant-garde newspaper. It promoted progress and Westernization, particularly that of a French stamp. Its greatest exponent was the Alliance Israélite Universelle, and it entered into heated debate with the conservative wings of Salonica Judaism (Nehama Reference Nehama1978: 713–14). However, the newspaper was characterized, at the time that concerns us, by its defense of Ottoman Judaism in the face of European Jewish nationalist movements, holding up Judeo-Spanish as the standard and linguistic symbol of Sephardic (rather than Jewish) Ottomanism. It was the anti-Zionist Sam Lévy (Šemuel Saˈadí Haleví), the son of the newspaper's founder and editor-in-chief, who headed and defended this position, through the pages of La Época.
Language and politics identity, modernity and empire
The encounter with Western cultures and languages, the new role played by Turkish as the language of all Ottoman subjects, the return of Hebrew as the absolute Jewish language and the recognition of “vero español” as the language of their ancestors created a heated controversy among Sephardic intellectuals that came to be known as “the language question.” This controversy, which unfolded in hundreds of newspaper articles, lasted – with more intensity in some periods than in others – from the 1870s until just a few years before World War II (de Vidas Reference Vidas1991–6: 156; Romero Reference Romero2010: 436) and, broadly speaking, revolved around two groups of questions. The first directly concerns Judeo-Spanish. What is its status? Should it be preserved, modified, or abandoned in favor of a different language? And if so, which (Bunis Reference Bunis and Goldberg1996: 227)? The second deals with the status of other languages. Which other language(s) is/are able to perform an identifying role and also be effective as an instrument of communication for the Sephardim as citizens of the Ottoman Empire?
Eminent Sephardic intellectuals like anti-Zionist Abraham Danon (Edirne) (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 107), Alexander Ben-Guiat (Izmir) (Bunis Reference Bunis, Molho, Pomeroy and Romero2011: 247) and journalist Sam Lévy (Salonica), whom we shall discuss at length in this chapter, had demanded the protection and promotion of Judeo-Spanish as the mother tongue of the Ottoman Jews.13 Also, Abraham Cappon (Romania and Sarajevo) had defended a similar idea regarding language even before becoming a committed Hispanophile through the influence of Spaniard Ángel Pulido14 (Schmid Reference Schmid, Diaz-Mas and Pérez2010). It should be noted that, even among those who banked on Judeo-Spanish as the language of culture for the Sephardim, the writing system became a topic of discussion: should the Aljamiado be maintained or should the Latin alphabet be adopted?
There was also a powerful group of Sephardic intellectuals educated in Western schools, particularly the Alliance, who denied Judeo-Spanish the status of a language able to meet all the needs of the modern world, and demanded that it be abandoned in favor of other languages of culture. In addition to French, Italian and to a lesser extent German (Bunis Reference Bunis and Goldberg1996: 228–31), two other languages connected to the history of the Sephardim were discussed as possible vehicles of communication: Hebrew and Spanish.
It was because of the Haskala movements that Sephardic intellectuals came into contact with the enlightened Ashkenazim, who spread nationalist Jewish ideas. With them came the introduction of Hebrew as a living language among the enlightened class (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 107). From the final third of the nineteenth century onwards, various associations were set up to spread the Hebrew language and culture, among them Doršei Lešon Ŝion [Friends of the Language of Zion] in Istanbul and the Salonica society Cadima, with nationalist tendencies (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 108–9). However, Hebrew, apart from certain exceptions such as in Bulgaria, never achieved real acceptance among the population (Şaul Reference Şaul and Tütüncü2001: 149).
Also, the Sephardic modernization movement resulted in Spaniards “discovering” the Jews with a peninsular origin, who, in turn, “realized that this country called Spain was a current reality and not merely a historical vestige” (Díaz-Mas Reference Díaz-Mas1997: 209). Because of this new mutual recognition – while the majority rejected the idea (Romero Reference Romero2010: 445;15 Bunis Reference Bunis and Goldberg1996: 229) – some Sephardic intellectuals and publicists of the stature of Yosef Calvo (Vienna), José Estrugo (Izmir) and Eliayahu Torres (Salonica) proposed replacing Judeo-Spanish with modern Spanish (Bunis Reference Bunis and Goldberg1996: 229).
Finally, the fact that the Tanzimat reforms had given Ottoman Jews the status of citizens of the Empire introduced the need to adopt as the language of the Jewish Ottoman community Turkish, a language which, until then, had been poorly learned and not widespread among the Sephardim (Rodrigue Reference Rodrigue, Kotowski, Schoeps and Wallenborn2001: 309). In the period under discussion, the status of Turkish as one of the languages of the Sephardim of the East was not the source of any controversy because – as numerous newspaper campaigns of the time that supported learning Turkish16 show – there seemed to be general agreement on the urgent need to learn the language of the Empire (Romero Reference Romero2010: 450; Lochow-Drüke Reference Lochow-Drüke, Asuero and Şarhon2007: 60–4). The thorny question was whether it should be adopted together with Judeo-Spanish or instead of it.
The following quote by Sam Lévy illustrates the assortment of views around the issue of language, which, as we have already mentioned, circulated among Sephardic intellectuals and were reflected in the newspapers of the time:
Some years ago, a great debate arose in the Jewish press in the East on the subject of Judeo-Spanish. All the newspapers written in this jargon gave their opinions on the matter. The question was not resolved, as is always the case when there is free discussion, and they found themselves necessarily divided in opinion on a number of points: some people believed the corrupted language should be abandoned; others demanded that it be replaced with French or Italian; others suggested keeping it, but writing it in Latin letters. There were even some who suggested replacing it with Turkish.
In what follows, we focus on the defense of Judeo-Spanish as the language par excellence of the Sephardic Ottomans in the newspaper La Época through a series of articles published between 1901 and 1902.
The status of Judeo-Spanish
In a number of opinion articles and, particularly, in a series of lectures he delivered in the Sephardic communities of the Ottoman cities, Sam Lévy categorically defends Judeo-Spanish as the language destined to be the normal vehicle of communication for the Sephardim of the East. In his Istanbul lecture he clearly states La Época's position regarding Ladino and calls not only for its preservation but also for its elaboration into a language functional at all communicative registers: “Unless I am very much mistaken, La Época was for the idea of perfecting Judeo-Spanish, respecting its originality and its writing, teaching it in schools, writing or translating even classic works, and bringing it little by little to the level of a living language” (La Época, May 30, 1901, 4a–1b).
In the same vein, numerous articles in La Época react against the application of the derogatory term “jargon” to Judeo-Spanish. For example, passages from an article by Andi Loev – originally published in the Viennese newspaper Die Welt – explain the reasons why the language of the Sephardim cannot be classified as a simple jargon:
“Jargon” is the language of a people, mauled in the mouth of a foreigner. For example, German in the mouth of a Russian who had spent a short time in Germany; French in the mouth of an Englishman who had dwelt in France for a spell.
But to call a language passed in the East from father to son, which developed and took shape naturally – Judeo-Spanish, for example –, a jargon would be unjust and unreasonable.
These so-called jargons maintained many old expressions which were lost in more modern languages, because of the solidarity of those who spoke it and the state of isolation in which the Jews lived for many centuries.
The Jews in Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia and even Wallachia – all those whose grandparents were exiled from the orchards of Spain – have not yet stopped speaking the language of their forefathers. The language is, in reality, mixed with foreign words, but still maintains the form that was used in Spain.
For this author the label is unfair and unreasonable when applied to Judeo-Spanish, since jargons are defective uses of languages as spoken by foreigners. In contrast, Judeo-Spanish is a naturally developed modern language that has been passed down from generation to generation and still maintains its Spanish essence despite being lexically “mixed” due to its isolation from other Hispanic varieties and long contact with other languages.
In another lecture delivered a year later in Bursa, Lévy, referring to the charge of laziness leveled at the Sephardim for their limited knowledge of Turkish, spoke at length on the historical legitimacy of Judeo-Spanish:
Arriving from Spain, the Jews brought with them a very rich literary baggage: their languages were among the purest; there were among them highly praised writers, orators held in high esteem in their native countries.
However, Turkish literature had not yet undergone the honorable development that we see today. So it was natural that our grandparents would be unwilling to give up their mother tongue, which they knew so perfectly, in order to use an incipient language. To give some idea of the perfect knowledge the Jews from the East had of the Spanish dialects a century after being exiled, some Spanish travelers arriving on the Turkish hills on the Mediterranean were glad to hear the little Jewish children speaking Spanish more purely than the inhabitants of Madrid, Seville or Aragon…The Spanish language, after developing among the children of Israel to reach its highest level, began to get corrupted, particularly at the seaports where there were people of all nationalities.
Lévy not only praised the perfection and literary richness of Spanish compared to the incipient Turkish language of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but also pointed out that it was the mother tongue of the Sephardim of the time, who spoke it as purely as – if not more purely than – the inhabitants of Spain themselves.
Judeo-Spanish: a national language for Sephardic Jews
In La Época, Judeo-Spanish was given the status of the language of the Sephardic people in the East. Loev, in the article already mentioned, refers to its value as long as Hebrew does not spread throughout the community: “But much time has still to pass before the majority of Jews are ready to use the Holy Tongue. Until such time, the popular dialect, Judeo-Spanish, will serve for a significant part of the Jewish nation as a national language” (La Época, August 15, 1902, 9c). It is a clear assertion of the identity of the Sephardic nation, a “people” who share a common historic, cultural, ethnic and linguistic heritage (Gardt Reference Gardt, Ammon, Dittmar, Mattheler and Trudgill2004–2006: 369). And, precisely because language is, from the nineteenth-century nationalist viewpoint (Fishman Reference Fishman1973: 4), an essential element of the identity and solidarity among the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, Loev states: “It is in our nation's interest to defend these dialects from the disdain and hostility of the ignorant. The language question is linked to the question of Jewish solidarity. Voices must be raised against the falsified arguments of the enemy: down with the insulting word ‘jargon’!” (La Época, December 20, 1901, 1c).
In the same line of argument, those Sephardim who do not identify with Judeo-Spanish are represented as ungrateful children because they deny their Jewish nature and their language, in other words, their condition as Sephardim: “It is lack of knowledge and dignity that makes Jews in certain circles look upon the parents’ language with contempt. It is lack of self-esteem that makes Israel hate itself” (La Época, December 20, 1901, 1c). In the same tone, in one of his controversial articles on Judeo-Spanish addressing the editor of Istanbul's El Tiempo, David Fresco, Lévy says: “Open your eyes, Mr. David Fresco, and you will see that Judeo-Spanish is not only not doing us any harm, it is actually contributing to some extent to the preservation of the national character of the Jew in the East” (La Época, June 28, 1901, 4c). In sum, La Época, with Sam Lévy at the helm, defended Judeo-Spanish as a formative element of Ottoman Judaism.
The organic evolution of Judeo-Spanish
As we just saw, La Época emphasizes that it was the twin circumstances of isolation and coexistence with other peoples – after the Sephardim's expulsion from the Iberian Peninsula and settlement in Turkish territories – that led to the separation of Judeo-Spanish from modern Spanish. Lévy highlights these facts on a number of occasions in order to explain the differences between standard and Sephardic Spanish. Interestingly, in deploying his arguments, he draws from the authority of comparative and historical grammar, according to which, languages – like all living organisms – change according to laws as well as socio-historical and spatial conditions that are independent of human will:
The difference of opinion among the various writers arose because all of them, taking up their pens, looked inwards at themselves or their immediate surroundings, not at the general public or at the needs of the people. A writer who speaks French or Italian, or who has friends from Latin countries, would find it only natural that the Jews in the East should speak like the Italians or French; another writer who had a relative in the civil service, imagining that all his other relatives could be in the civil service, would suggest adopting Turkish as the mother tongue; still another journalist, wanting to get his readers worked up or in order to show off would not hesitate to demand the suppression of Judeo-Spanish, forgetting that if we expressed ourselves in German, he could no longer produce such resonant phrases.
None of them takes the philological point of view, using the study of languages, which is a simple science that shows us that no language has ever obeyed the will of one man, or of hundreds, or indeed of thousands, but [each language] has always followed the laws of nature and the economic, climatic and material needs of mankind.
Unlike so many others who look at Judeo-Spanish subjectively, without understanding the nature of language, Lévy, who had read arts at the Sorbonne (Lévy Reference Lévy2000: 87–99) and uses his scientific legitimacy to advance his position, sees the changes in Judeo-Spanish as following a natural and irreversible linguistic evolution. And this, as we see it, is one of the touchstones in Lévy's argument. In his Bursa lecture, the Salonica journalist returns to the same question even more explicitly:
using arguments taken from my linguistic studies, I tried to show that although the old dialect we brought from Spain had undergone fairly radical changes, it was not on the verge of disappearing. Quite the opposite, in fact; obeying well-defined philological laws, Judeo-Spanish – like that centuries-old tree that looks so uncared for – far from dying, started to grow new, strong blossoms, because they were taking root in a rich and fruitful linguistic terrain.
As we can see, Lévy anchored his position in linguistic science and suggested that Judeo-Spanish had developed, like all languages, according to the laws of change and the socio-historical conditions in which its speakers happened to live. Furthermore, he felt that, at this stage of its life, it was strong enough to continue being perfected and enriched.
A program for the elaboration of Judeo-Spanish
And what better proof of the language's fertility than the fruits it had begun to bear, made evident by the considerable increase in its literary and journalistic output? The language, according to Lévy, was mature enough for the next stage, institutionalized cultivation:
In the space of a few years we saw, in the main cities of the East, the birth of newspapers written more or less in Judeo-Spanish, a large number of translations and creative works: novels, stories, romances, poetry and so on began to appear. Not long ago people began to talk about the composition of a grammar, vocabulary and of minor classics in Judeo-Spanish.
The development of Judeo-Spanish writing is in no way surprising to Lévy because it is similar to the experience of Jewish dialects derived from other languages. Only a few years earlier, there had also been doubt about the possible literary development of Yiddish, and yet “today libraries house more than 6,000 works in ‘Polish’ [i.e. Polish Yiddish], including books on science, philosophy, history and theatre. The same thing will inevitably happen with Judeo-Spanish” (La Época, June 21, 1901, 4c).
Crucial to the continued health of Judeo-Spanish is the fact that not only are more and better works being produced but also more people are reading them: “Getting back to the people: How many readers did the newspapers have ten or fifteen years ago, and of these, how many understood? The number rose in giant leaps, and quality went up at the same rate” (La Época, May 30, 1901, 1b–1c). What is more, Judeo-Spanish had young, educated speakers, which Lévy was able to see for himself, even outside Ottoman territory:
Today most readers in Judeo-Spanish are young people of good class, among whom there are many who know two or three languages very well, speak Turkish fluently, English like a gentleman and French like a Parisian. I have personally had the opportunity to meet young Jews in European cities from Turkey, Bulgaria and even Hungary, dressed in the latest fashions, with flawless elegance and speaking Judeo-Spanish with real pleasure.
As can be gathered from the passages above, Lévy, while accepting that Judeo-Spanish is a diachronic product of Spanish, does not classify it as a dialect of the latter. Instead, he grants Judeo-Spanish, in its current form, an autonomous status. He suggests taking a number of measures to organize and normalize it, so that it can actually function as the language of the Ottoman Sephardim and once and for all liberate itself from the stigma of being considered a jargon. In his Bursa lecture, Lévy insists “upon the need to organize our language, to give it rules, a vocabulary; to write those small preparatory scholarly works in it, in order to take Judeo-Spanish up to the level of an established language, though not completely like pure Spanish, which would be utopian” (La Época, August 15, 1902, 9a–9b). In fact, he summarizes the points of a linguistic program that he had sketched out on previous occasions:
Achieving this calls for no sacrifice, or hardly even any effort. It would be enough to simply support the work of the newspapers, help the production of literary works, and teach basic notions of Judeo-Spanish to minors in schools so that they do not feel contempt later on for this jargon that some see as so vulgar and dishonorable.
To Lévy, Judeo-Spanish is an obvious case of “language by elaboration” (Kloss Reference Kloss1967: 47). In his program the basic points of all linguistic planning are clearly laid out. Following Haugen (Reference Haugen and Bright1966), these points can be summarized as follows:
a) Linguistically:
formal development: preserve the Hebrew script as a symbol of Judaism.17
functional development: produce a grammar and a dictionary that form a basis for preparation of schoolbooks and increase literary production.
b) Socially:
teach the language in schools not only to create uniformity according to the criteria of a Judeo-Spanish grammar and a dictionary, but also to create a positive attitude among young speakers that values their language and ensures its transmission to coming generations.
Two languages for the Turkish Sephardim
Sam Lévy, unlike other Sephardic intellectuals such as David Fresco, editor of Istanbul's newspaper El Tiempo, supported the idea of maintaining Judeo-Spanish alongside Turkish instead of replacing it with the language of the Empire. He spoke clearly about the two languages in his Bursa lecture:
Five or six years ago, in keeping with its identity as a national and patriotic newspaper, La Época set for itself the task of making our fellow Jews in Turkey appreciate the need for them to learn the language of the country…
For this reason, for the last three years, on all the visits to the districts and surrounding provinces, representatives of La Época have been asking community leaders for permission to give public addresses in favor of spreading the Turkish language among our brothers. Last year, I happened to be doing my part in Izmir, Constantinople and Haidar-Pasha. In this last neighborhood, there were some unintentional misunderstandings, which on this occasion it seems appropriate to discuss, since today's explanations fit perfectly within the scope of this meeting.
Reading the advertisement for the lecture on the usefulness of the Turkish language which I was due to give in Haidar Pasha, certain gentlemen understood that I was going to demand the replacement of Judeo-Spanish – as if simply demanding it would be enough – and pronounce a verdict condemning to death the language that we have spoken for so many centuries. Such was neither my mandate nor my intention…Many of those present at the meeting must have been shocked when I did not insult our mother tongue…
With reference to the Turkish language, I demanded that its study be absolutely compulsory in all our schools; that, in the most advanced colleges, the programs must be based on the language of the country; and that certain areas of secular knowledge be taught in it.
Sam Lévy was indeed a committed Ottomanist, and, in his opinion, only both languages together, Judeo-Spanish and Turkish, could be used to define the symbols of identity of the Ottoman Sephardi.
Conclusion
In this chapter, we have described and situated the defense of Judeo-Spanish made in La Época – led by its editor-in-chief Sam Lévy – in the context of what was known at the time as the language question: a controversy surrounding the status of Judeo-Spanish that arose among Ottoman Sephardim in response to the socio-historical changes undergone by the Sublime Porte in the first half of the nineteenth century. Sam Lévy favored Judeo-Spanish as the Sephardic language par excellence and based his defense on a four-point argument:
(a) it is the offspring of a language – Spanish – with a rich linguistic and literary past, which is, in turn, connected to the cultural origins of the Sephardim;
(b) Ladino, like any living language, evolved as a result of organic changes and socio-historical conditions that affected its speakers in the Ottoman lands;
(c) this independent evolution was beginning to bear fruit and, at the end of the nineteenth century, Judeo-Spanish was at its peak because of the enormous amount of written output and number of speakers, particularly young people;
(d) as a result of this, Judeo-Spanish was ready to take the definitive step towards its establishment, alongside Turkish, as the language of culture for the Ottoman Sephardim: the institutionalized cultivation of its use in schools.
Sam Lévy was not wrong. Paradoxically, the controversy surrounding the status of Judeo-Spanish took place precisely at a time when the language was indeed at its peak. However, under pressure from the strict pan-Ottomanism imposed by the new Turkish State and from nationalist politics in the new States which arose after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and strained by the absence of a standardizing center due to new waves of migration that led the Sephardim to settle outside Ottoman territories, Judeo-Spanish could not reinstate itself among its speakers, who confined it definitively – like a jargon – to domestic usage, where it ended up drifting off to sleep forever.
2 By dhimma one can understand the legal status dhimmi, meaning non-Muslim who lived in the Ottoman Empire. According to this, the non-Muslims were considered second class citizens, subject to a number of taxes, receiving in exchange certain concessions such as the free practice of their communitary life, their religion and traditions and their language (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 2–3).
3 For information on when Judeo-Spanish was at its peak, see Schmid Reference Schmid2008.
4 Under the title of Tanzimat reforms we include the program of reforms begun by the Ottoman Empire after the post-Napoleonic France model. Its aim was the Europeanization and administrative centralization of the Empire, as well as the modernization and secularization of the whole state apparatus (Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 68). The reforms were to culminate in the drawing up of a Constitution, which never saw the light of day.
5 However, the Turkish language could only be officially imposed with the creation of the Turkish State and the introduction of Kemal Attatürk's education reforms in 1928.
6 Italian schools in Salonica opened earlier. The first Italian-language school was established in 1856 thanks to the financial support of Solomon Fernández y Cassuto. It would receive funding from Rome three years later (Nehama Reference Nehama1978: 692).
7 The Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden was a society similar to the Alliance Israélite Universelle, established in Germany in 1901. Its focus was mainly Palestine, where it opened its first kindergarten and established a network of Jewish schools with German as the language of culture (Encyclopaedia Judaica; Bar-Chen Reference Bar-Chen2005: 89). In Salonica the first school of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden was established only in 1910 (Molho Reference Molho1993: 267).
8 The first school of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was established in Tetouan (Morocco).
9 All in all, the Alliance opened nine schools in Salonica between 1873 and 1910 – three for boys, five for girls and one mixed. The first school for women opened in 1874 (Molho Reference Molho1993: 262).
10 For information on the importance of the press in the cultural, literary and linguistic world, see Romero Reference Romero1992: 179–219, Benbassa and Rodrigue Reference Benbassa and Rodrigue1995: 110–15 and Abrevaya Stein Reference Abrevaya Stein2004.
11 It is only from the 20th century onwards that Frenchification also reached the petite bourgeoisie, meaning tradespeople and craftworkers (Schmid Reference Schmid2007: 18).
12 For information on the ideological differences between the most representative and longer-lived newspapers in Salonica, La Época and El Avenir, see Bürki Reference Bürki2010a, Reference Bürki, Díaz-Mas and Pérez2010b.
13 For a detailed analysis of the Sephardi intellectuals and publishers who advocated the propagation of Judeo-Spanish as the language of the Eastern Sephardim in this period see Bunis (Reference Bunis, Molho, Pomeroy and Romero2011).
14 Senator Ángel Pulido was a strong supporter of the Sephardic cause in Spain and the “discoverer” of the Ottoman Sephardim. At the beginning of the 20th century he launched a campaign to help economically those Jews with a peninsular origin and award them Spanish nationality. Pulido, author of the famous book Españoles sin patria y la raza sefardí (1905) is probably the Spanish figure who contributed most to spreading the idea that Judeo-Spanish is a corrupted form of Old Castilian.
15 Strong opposition to the idea of adopting Spanish as the language of the Eastern Sephardim could be found in the article by Iśac Ferrara published in Istanbul's newspaper El Tiempo (August 11, 1904, 974c–975c) brought to light by Romero (2010: 447–9). (In citations of newspaper articles, the letter following a page number indicates the column, from right to left.)
16 As evidence, we can cite the numerous articles La Época and El Avenir published in 1901 and 1902 as part of this pro-Turkish campaign. “La Lingua Turca” [The Turkish language] (El Avenir, July 10, 1901, 321a–322a; El Avenir, July 31, 1901, 357a–358a), “Llamada a nuestros hermanos por la propaganda de la lingua turca” [A call to our brothers to publicize the Turkish language] (El Avenir, August 6, 1902, 1a–1b), “Propaganda por la Lingua Turca” [Publicity for the Turkish language] (El Avenir, September 3, 1902, 8a–8b), the cycle of lectures given by Sam Lévy in Istanbul and Brusa, published in La Época (May 17, 1901, 4a–4c; May 24, 1901, 4a–4c; June 7, 1901, 4a–4c; August 15, 1902, 9a–9c; August 22, 1902, 9a–9c), and León Mošé Saporta's article defending Turkish (La Época, April 18, 1902, 5a).
17 However, Lévy was not always of this opinion. On the contrary, in other articles published in La Época in the previous century, Lévy strongly advocated a change to the Latin alphabet (see Romero Reference Romero2010: 442–3).
