Judaeo-Spanish

Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish (autonym Djudeo-Espanyol, Hebrew script: גֿודֿיאו-איספאנייול‎), also known as Ladino or Judezmo or Spaniolit, is a Romance language derived from Castilian Old Spanish.
Originally spoken in Spain, and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the Ottoman Empire (the Balkans, Turkey, West Asia, and North Africa) as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco, and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, and France. In 2017, it was formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy.
The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish, and it has numerous elements from the other old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Asturleonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese, and Andalusi Romance. The language has been further enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic—especially in the domains of religion, law, and spirituality—and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian.
Historically, the Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo have been the main orthographies for writing Judaeo-Spanish. However, today it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, though some other alphabets such as Hebrew and Cyrillic are still in use. Judaeo-Spanish has been known also by other names, such as: Español (Espanyol, Spaniol, Spaniolish, Espanioliko), Judió (Judyo, Djudyo) or Jidió (Jidyo, Djidyo), Judesmo (Judezmo, Djudezmo), Sefaradhí (Sefaradi) or Ḥaketía (in North Africa). In Turkey, and formerly in the Ottoman Empire, it has been traditionally called Yahudice in Turkish, meaning the 'Jewish language.' In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language Ladino, Espanyolit or Spanyolit.
Judaeo-Spanish, once the Jewish lingua franca of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans, and the Middle East, and renowned for its rich literature, especially in Salonika, today is under serious threat of extinction. Most native speakers are elderly, and the language is not transmitted to their children or grandchildren for various reasons; consequently, all Judeo-Spanish-speaking communities are undergoing a language shift. In 2018, four native speakers in Bosnia were identified however, two of them have since died, David Kamhi in 2021 and Moris Albahari in late 2022. In some expatriate communities in Spain, Latin America, and elsewhere, there is a threat of assimilation by modern Spanish. It is experiencing, however, a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music.
The scholar Joseph Nehama, author of the comprehensive Judeo-Spanish–French dictionary, referred to the language as Judeo-Espagnol. The 1903 Hebrew–Judeo-Spanish Haggadah entitled "Seder Haggadah shel pesaḥ ʿim pitron be-lashon sefaradi" (סדר הגדה של פסח עם פתרון בלשון ספרדי), from the Sephardic community of Livorno, Italy, refers to the language used for explanation as the Sefaradi language. The rare Judeo-Spanish-language textbook entitled Nuevo Silibaryo Espanyol, published in Salonica in 1929, referred to the language as Espanyol and lingua Djudeo-Espanyola.
The language is also called Judeo-Espanyol, Judeoespañol, Sefardí, Judío, and Espanyol or Español sefardita; Haketia (from Arabic: حكى, romanized: ḥakà 'tell') refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. Judeo-Spanish has also been referred to as Judesmo (also Judezmo, Djudesmo or Djudezmo). The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called Tetuani after the Moroccan city of Tétouan since many Orani Jews came from there. In Israel, the language is known as Spanyolit or Espanyolit. The names Djidio, Kasteyano Muestro, and Spanyol de mozotros have also been proposed to refer to the language; regional names to refer to the language include kastiyano viejo, sepharadit, ekseris romeka, yahudije, and musevije.
An entry in Ethnologue claims, "The name 'Judesmo' is used by Jewish linguists and Turkish Jews and American Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by laymen, initially in Israel; 'Haketia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by some others." That does not reflect the historical usage. In the Judaeo-Spanish press of the 19th and 20th centuries the native authors referred to the language almost exclusively as Espanyol, which was also the name that its native speakers spontaneously gave to it for as long as it was their primary spoken language. More rarely, the bookish Judeo-Espanyol has also been used since the late 19th century.
In recent decades in Israel, followed by the United States and Spain, the language has come to be referred to as Ladino (Ladino: לאדינו), literally meaning 'Latin'. This name for the language was promoted by the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino, although speakers of the language in Israel referred to their mother tongue as Espanyolit or Spanyolit. Native speakers of the language consider the name Ladino to be incorrect, having for centuries reserved the term for the "semi-sacred" language used in word-by-word translations from the Bible, which is distinct from the spoken vernacular. According to linguist Paul Wexler, Ladino is a written language that developed in the eighteenth century and is distinct from spoken Judaeo-Spanish. According to the website of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the cultural center of Sephardic Judaism after the expulsion from Spain,
The derivation of the name Ladino is complicated. Before the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the word meant "literary Spanish" as opposed to other dialects, or "Romance" in general as distinct from Arabic. One derivation has Ladino as derived from the verb enladinar, meaning "to translate", from when Jews, Christians and Arabs translated works from Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic into Spanish (during the times of Alfonso X). (The first European language grammar and dictionary, of Spanish referred to it as ladino or ladina. In the Middle Ages, the word Latin was frequently used to mean simply 'language', particularly one understood: a latiner or latimer meant a translator.) Following the Expulsion, Jews spoke of "the Ladino" to mean the word-for-word translation of the Bible into Old Spanish. By extension, it came to mean that style of Spanish generally in the same way that (among Kurdish Jews) Targum has come to mean Judeo-Aramaic and (among Jews of Arabic-speaking background) sharḥ has come to mean Judeo-Arabic.
Judaeo-Spanish Ladino should not be confused with the Ladin language (Italian: ladino), spoken in part of Northeastern Italy. Ladin has nothing to do with Jews or with Spanish beyond being a Romance language, a property that it shares with French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.
At the time of the expulsion from Spain, the day-to-day language of the Jews of different regions of the peninsula was hardly, if at all, different from that of their Christian neighbours, but there may have been some dialect mixing to form a sort of Jewish lingua franca. There was, however, a special style of Spanish used for purposes of study or translation, featuring a more archaic dialect, a large number of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and a tendency to render Hebrew word order literally (ha-laylah ha-zeh, meaning 'this night', was rendered la noche la esta instead of the normal Spanish esta noche). As mentioned above, authorities confine the term Ladino to that style.
Following the Expulsion, the process of dialect mixing continued, but Castilian Spanish remained by far the largest contributor. The daily language was increasingly influenced both by the language of study and by the local non-Jewish vernaculars, such as Greek and Turkish. It came to be known as Judesmo and, in that respect, the development is parallel to that of Yiddish. However, many speakers, especially among the community leaders, also had command of a more formal style, castellano, which was nearer to the Spanish at the time of the Expulsion.
The grammar, the phonology, and about 60% of the vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is essentially Spanish but, in some respects, it resembles the dialects in southern Spain and South America, rather than the dialects of Central Spain. For example, it has yeísmo ("she" is eya/ella [ˈeja] (Judaeo-Spanish), instead of ella) as well as seseo.
In many respects, it reproduces the Spanish of the time of the Expulsion, rather than the modern variety, as it retains some archaic features such as the following:
However, the phonology of both the consonants and part of the lexicon is, in some respects, closer to Portuguese and Catalan than to modern Spanish. That is explained by direct influence but also because Portuguese, Old Spanish and Catalan retained some of the characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance languages that Spanish later lost. There was a mutual influence with the Judaeo-Portuguese of the Portuguese Jews.
Contrast Judaeo-Spanish daínda ('still') with Portuguese ainda (Galician ainda or aínda, Asturian aína or enaína) and Spanish aún or the initial consonants in Judaeo-Spanish fija, favla ('daughter,' 'speech'), Portuguese filha, fala Galician filha or filla, fala, Asturian fía, fala, Aragonese filla, fabla, Catalan filla), Spanish hija, habla. It sometimes varied with dialect, as in Judaeo-Spanish popular songs, both fijo and hijo ('son') are found.
The Judaeo-Spanish pronunciation of s as "[ʃ]" before a "k" sound or at the end of certain words (such as seis, pronounced [seʃ], for 'six') is shared with Portuguese (as spoken in Portugal, most of Lusophone Asia and Africa, and in a plurality of Brazilian varieties and registers with either partial or total forms of coda |S| palatalization) but not with Spanish.
Like other Jewish vernaculars, Judaeo-Spanish incorporates many Hebrew and Aramaic words, mostly for religious concepts and institutions. Examples are haham/ḥaḥam ('rabbi', from Hebrew ḥakham) and kal, kahal/cal, cahal ('synagogue', from Hebrew qahal). Some Judeao-Spanish words of Hebrew or Aramaic origins have more poetic connotations than their Spanish origin equivalents. Compare gaava ('pride, arrogance') from Hebrew ga'avá with arrogansya ('arrogance') from Spanish arrogancia.
The majority of Judaeo-Spanish speaking people resided in the Ottoman Empire, although a large minority on the northern Coast of Morocco and Algeria existed. As such, words of Turkish origin were incorporated into the local dialect of the language. Examples include emrenear ('rejoice') from Turkish imrenmek.
Some of these words themselves were inherited into Turkish from Arabic or Persian. Examples include bilbiliko ('nightingale'), from Persian (via Turkish) bülbül and gam ('sorrow, anxiety, grief') from Arabic (via Persian then Turkish) ḡamm.
The Turkish agentive suffix -ci (denoting a profession) was borrowed into Judaeo-Spanish as the suffix -djí. It can be found in words like halvadjí ('candyman'), derived from halva + -djí.
Due to the influence of the Alliance Israélite Universelle in the westernization and modernization of Judeao-Spanish speaking communities, many words of French origin were adopted. Most of these words refer to Western European innovations and introductions. Examples include: abazur ('lampshade'), from French abat-jour, fardate ('apply makeup'), from French se farder, and fusil ('gun') from French fusil. Some French political and cultural elements are present in Judeao-Spanish. For example, ir al Bismark ('to go to the Bismark') was a phrase used in some Judeao-Spanish communities in the late 20th century to mean 'to go to the restroom', referring to the German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck (an unpopular figure in France), as a euphemism for toilet.
Because of the large number of Arabic words in Spanish generally, it is not always clear whether some of these words were introduced before the Expulsion or adopted later; modern Spanish replaced some of these loans with Latinisms after the Reconquista, where Judaeo-Spanish speakers had no motivation to do so. Some Arabic words were borrowed via Turkish or Persian.
Haketia, the variety of Judaeo-Spanish spoken in the Maghreb, has substantial influence from Moroccan and Algerian Arabic, as well as local Amazigh languages. The varieties of Judaeo-Spanish spoken in the Levant and Egypt have some influence from Levantine Arabic and Egyptian Arabic respectively.
Judeao-Spanish speaking communities often incorporated words or phrases from surrounding languages. Greek, South Slavic, Italian, and Romanian borrowings can be found in those respective communities.
A common way of dividing Judaeo-Spanish is by splitting first Haketia, or "Western Judeao-Spanish", from other varieties, collectively referred to as "Eastern Judeao-Spanish". Within Eastern Judeao-Spanish, further division is made based on city of origin.
Aldina Quintana split Eastern Ladino into three groups:
While unsorted, the variety of spoken in Judeo-Spanish in Italy (Venice, Trieste, Ferrera) and Budapest more closely followed the Northwest group. Egyptian Judeo-Spanish (Alexandria, Cairo) followed more the patterns of the Southeast Group. Levantine Judeo-Spanish (Jerusalem, Jaffa, Hebron) and Rhodesli Judeo-Spanish represented intermediate states, more similar to the Northeast group. Although Levantine Judeo-Spanish phonology and syntax, especially its usage of [ħ], [ʕ], [ʔ], and [h] was unique enough to be defined separately.
Differences between varieties usually include phonology and lexicon. The dialect spoken in the Macedonian city of Bitola (traditionally referred to as Monastir) has relatively many lexical differences as compared with other varieties of Judeao-Spanish. An example of this can be seen is the word for 'carriage'. In many dialects, such as those that were spoken in Istanbul and Thessaloniki, araba is used, a loanword from Arabic via Turkish, while the Monastir dialect uses karrose, possibly from Italian.
The number of phonemes in Judaeo-Spanish varies by dialect. Its phonemic inventory consists of 24-26 consonants and 5 vowels.
Notes:
Notes:
As exemplified in the Sources section above, much of the phonology of Judaeo-Spanish is similar to that of standard modern Spanish. Here are some exceptions:
Judaeo-Spanish is distinguished from other Spanish dialects by the presence of the following features:
Regular conjugation for the present tense:
Regular conjugation in the preterite:
Regular conjugation in the imperfect:
Judaeo-Spanish follows Spanish for most of its syntax. (That is not true of the written calque language involving word-for-word translations from Hebrew, which scholars refer to as "Ladino", as described above.) Like Spanish, it generally follows a subject–verb–object word order, has a nominative-accusative alignment, and is considered a fusional or inflected language.
Two Israeli organizations, the Akademia Nasionala del Ladino and the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino, jointly regulate Judæo-Spanish orthography. The organizations allow speakers to choose between the Hebrew script, which was historically the most prevalent writing system for the language, and the Latin script, which gained prominence after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
Printed works in Judæo-Spanish use the Rashi script, whereas the handwritten language uses a cursive form of the Hebrew alphabet called Solitreo. In the Hebrew script, a silent ⟨א‎⟩ must precede word-initial vowels. Moreover, it is necessary to separate adjacent vowels with ⟨א‎⟩ or ⟨י‎⟩. Whereas ⟨א‎⟩ can separate any pair of vowels, ⟨י‎⟩ can only separate front vowels (/i/ and /e/, both represented by ⟨י‎⟩) from adjacent vowels. Furthermore, ⟨י‎⟩ cannot separate diphthongs that include a non-syllabic /u/ ([w]).
Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and morphemes (except those that were borrowed indirectly through other languages) are spelled according to Hebrew orthography. The rest of the language's lexicon is spelled as illustrated in the following table:
Notes:
This orthography uses an interpunct ⟨·⟩ to distinguish the sequence /s+x/ (written ⟨s·h⟩) from the /ʃ/ phoneme (written ⟨sh⟩). It also uses acute accents to mark irregular stress. The regular stress pattern is as follows:
Prior to the adoption of the official orthographies, the following systems of writing Judaeo-Spanish had been used or proposed.
In the medieval Iberian peninsula, now Spain and Portugal, Jews spoke a variety of Romance dialects. Jews in the Middle Ages were instrumental in the development of Spanish into a prestige language. Erudite Jews translated Arabic and Hebrew works, often translated earlier from Greek, into Spanish. Christians translated them again into Latin for transmission to Europe.
Following the 1490s expulsion from Spain and Portugal, most of the Iberian Jews resettled in the Ottoman Empire. Jews in the Ottoman Balkans, Western Asia (especially Turkey), and North Africa (especially Morocco) developed their own Romance dialects, with some influence from Hebrew and other languages, which became what is now known as Judaeo-Spanish. Until recent times, the language was widely spoken throughout the Balkans, Turkey/Western Asia and North Africa, as Judaeo-Spanish had been brought there by the Jewish refugees. Later on, many Portuguese Jews also escaped to France, Italy, the Netherlands and England, establishing small groups in those nations as well, but these spoke Early Modern Spanish or Portuguese rather than Judaeo-Spanish. The contact among Jews of different regions and languages, including Catalan, Leonese and Portuguese developed a unified dialect, differing in some aspects from the Spanish norm that was forming simultaneously in Spain, but some of the mixing may have already occurred in exile rather than in the Iberian Peninsula.
In the 16th century, the development Judeo-Spanish was significantly influenced by the extensive mobility of Sephardic Jews. By the end of the century, Spanish had become the dominant language of commerce for Sephardic communities across Italy and the eastern Mediterranean. This standardization was further supported by practices such as hiring tutors to teach Castilian in Hebrew script, as noted in a 1600 deposition from Pisa. Additionally, itinerant rabbis who preached in the vernacular contributed to the spread and standardization of Judeo-Spanish among diverse Sephardic congregations, including those in Greek- and Arabic-speaking regions.
The closeness and mutual comprehensibility between Judaeo-Spanish and Spanish favoured trade among Sephardim, often relatives, from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands and the conversos of the Iberian Peninsula.
Over time, a corpus of literature, both liturgical and secular, developed. Early literature was limited to translations from Hebrew. At the end of the 17th century, Hebrew was disappearing as the vehicle for rabbinic instruction. Thus, a literature appeared in the 18th century, such as Me'am Lo'ez and poetry collections. By the end of the 19th century, the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire studied in schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. French became the language for foreign relations, as it did for Maronites, and Judaeo-Spanish drew from French for neologisms. New secular genres appeared, with more than 300 journals, history, theatre, and biographies.
Given the relative isolation of many communities, a number of regional dialects of Judaeo-Spanish appeared, many with only limited mutual comprehensibility, largely because of the adoption of large numbers of loanwords from the surrounding populations, including, depending on the location of the community, from Greek, Turkish, Arabic and, in the Balkans, Slavic languages, especially Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian. The borrowing in many Judaeo-Spanish dialects is so heavy that up to 30% of their vocabulary is of non-Spanish origin. Some words also passed from Judaeo-Spanish into neighbouring languages. For example, the word palavra 'word' (Vulgar Latin parabola; Greek parabole), passed into Turkish, Greek and Romanian with the meaning 'bunk, hokum, humbug, bullshit' in Turkish and Romanian and 'big talk, boastful talk' in Greek (compare the English word palaver).
The language was known as Yahudice (Jewish language) in the Ottoman Empire. In the late 18th century, Ottoman poet Enderunlu Fazıl (Fazyl bin Tahir Enderuni) wrote in his Zenanname: "Castilians speak the Jewish language but they are not Jews."
Judaeo-Spanish was the common language of Salonica during the Ottoman period. The city became part of Greece in 1912 and was subsequently renamed Thessaloniki. Despite the Great Fire of Thessaloniki and mass settlement of Christian refugees, the language remained widely spoken in Salonica until the deportation of 50,000 Salonican Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War. According to the 1928 census, the language had 62,999 native speakers in Greece. The figure drops down to 53,094 native speakers in 1940, but 21,094 citizens "usually" spoke the language. The language was so prominent in Salonica that the most prestigious monument of the city was known by its Judeo-Spanish name, Las Incantadas (meaning "the enchanted women").
Judaeo-Spanish was also a language used in Donmeh rites (Dönme being a Turkish word for 'convert' to refer to adepts of Sabbatai Tsevi converting to Islam in the Ottoman Empire). An example is Sabbatai Tsevi esperamos a ti. Today, the religious practices and the ritual use of Judaeo-Spanish seems confined to elderly generations.
The Castilian colonisation of Northern Africa favoured the role of polyglot Sephards, who bridged between Spanish colonizers and Arab and Berber speakers.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Judaeo-Spanish was the predominant Jewish language in the Holy Land, but its dialect was different in some respects from the one in Greece and Turkey. Some families have lived in Jerusalem for centuries and preserve Judaeo-Spanish for cultural and folklore purposes although they now use Hebrew in everyday life.
An often-told Sephardic anecdote from Bosnia-Herzegovina has it that as a Spanish consulate was opened in Sarajevo in the interwar period, two Sephardic women passed by. Upon hearing a Catholic priest who was speaking Spanish, they thought that his language meant that he was Jewish.
In the 20th century, the number of speakers declined sharply: entire communities were murdered in the Holocaust, and many of the remaining speakers, many of whom emigrated to Israel, adopted Hebrew. The government of the new nation-state encouraged instruction in Hebrew. Similarly in the US, Sephardic Jews were encouraged to speak English rather than Judaeo-Spanish, therefore, the language was not passed down to younger generations. In Turkey, where there is a large community of Sephardic Jews, Judaeo-Spanish was considered a language of little prestige; additionally, parents refused to teach their children the language, fearing that their children would develop a "Jewish accent" and therefore face discrimination. At the same time, Judaeo-Spanish aroused the interest of philologists, as it conserved language and literature from before the standardisation of Spanish.
Judaeo-Spanish is in serious danger of extinction. As of 2011, the majority of fluent speakers are over the age of 70; the descendants of these speakers exhibit little to no knowledge of the language. Nevertheless, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music. In addition, Sephardic communities in several Latin American countries still use Judaeo-Spanish. There, the language is exposed to the different danger of assimilation to modern Spanish.
Kol Yisrael and Radio Nacional de España hold regular radio broadcasts in Judaeo-Spanish. Law & Order: Criminal Intent showed an episode, titled "A Murderer Among Us", with references to the language. Films partially or totally in Judaeo-Spanish include Mexican film Novia que te vea (directed by Guita Schyfter), The House on Chelouche Street, and Every Time We Say Goodbye.
Efforts have been made to gather and publish modern Judaeo-Spanish fables and folktales. In 2001, the Jewish Publication Society published the first English translation of Judaeo-Spanish folktales, collected by Matilda Koen-Sarano, Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster: The Misadventures of the Guileful Sephardic Prankster. A survivor of Auschwitz, Moshe Ha-Elion, issued his translation into Judeo-Spanish of the ancient Greek epic Odyssey in 2012, in his 87th year, and later completed a translation of the sister epic, the Iliad, into his mother tongue.
The language was initially spoken by the Sephardic Jewish community in India, but was later replaced with Judeo-Malayalam.
The first printed Judaeo-Spanish book was Me-'am lo'ez in 1730. It was a commentary on the Bible in the Judaeo-Spanish language. Most Jews in the Ottoman Empire knew the Hebrew alphabet but did not speak Hebrew. The printing of Me-'am lo'ez marked the emergence of large-scale printing activity in Judaeo-Spanish in the western Ottoman Empire and in Istanbul in particular. The earliest Judaeo-Spanish books were religious in nature, mostly created to maintain religious knowledge for exiles who could not read Hebrew; the first of the known texts is Dinim de shehitah i bedikah [The Rules of Ritual Slaughter and Inspection of Animals]; (Istanbul, 1510). Texts continued to be focussed on philosophical and religious themes, including a large body of rabbinic writings, until the first half of the 19th century. The largest output of secular Judaeo-Spanish literature occurred during the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. The earliest and most abundant form of secular text was the periodical press: between 1845 and 1939, Ottoman Sephardim published around 300 individual periodical titles. The proliferation of periodicals gave rise to serialised novels: many of them were rewrites of existing foreign novels into Judaeo-Spanish. Unlike the previous scholarly literature, they were intended for a broader audience of educated men and less-educated women alike. They covered a wider range of less weighty content, at times censored to be appropriate for family readings. Popular literature expanded to include love stories and adventure stories, both of which had been absent from Judaeo-Spanish literary canon. The literary corpus meanwhile also expanded to include theatrical plays, poems and other minor genres.
Multiple documents made by the Ottoman government were translated into Judaeo-Spanish; usually translators used terms from Ottoman Turkish.
The Jewish communities of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Belgrade, Serbia, still chant part of the Sabbath Prayers (Mizmor David) in Judaeo-Spanish. The Sephardic Synagogue Ezra Bessaroth in Seattle, Washington, United States, was formed by Jews from Turkey and the Greek island of Rhodes, and it uses the language in some portions of its Shabbat services. The Siddur is called Zehut Yosef and was written by Hazzan Isaac Azose.
At Congregation Etz Ahaim of Highland Park, New Jersey, a congregation founded by Sephardic Jews from Salonika, a reader chants the Aramaic prayer B'rikh Shemay in Judaeo-Spanish before he takes out the Torah on Shabbat. That is known as Bendichu su Nombre in Judaeo-Spanish. Additionally, at the end of Shabbat services, the entire congregation sings the well-known Hebrew hymn Ein Keloheinu, which is Non Como Muestro Dio in Judaeo-Spanish.
Non Como Muestro Dio is also included, alongside Ein Keloheinu, in Mishkan T'filah, the 2007 Reform prayerbook.
El Dio Alto (El Dyo Alto) is a Sephardic hymn often sung during the Havdalah service, its currently popular tune arranged by Judy Frankel. Hazzan Isaac Azose, cantor emeritus of Synagogue Ezra Bessaroth and second-generation Turkish immigrant, has performed an alternative Ottoman tune.
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan translated some scholarly religious texts, including Me'am Loez into Hebrew, English or both.
Izmir's grand rabbis Haim Palachi, Abraham Palacci, and Rahamim Nissim Palacci all wrote in the language and in Hebrew.
In 1967, linguist Haïm Vidal Séphiha of the University of Paris became the first professor of Judaeo-Spanish in the world; courses of Judaeo-Spanish have been introduced in universities since then in other European countries, along with research centers dedicated to the study of the language. The National Authority of Ladino, dedicated to the study and promotion of Judaeo-Spanish was established in Jerusalem in 1997.
As with Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish is seeing a minor resurgence in educational interest in colleges across the United States and in Israel. Almost all American Jews are Ashkenazi, with a tradition based on Yiddish, rather than Judaeo-Spanish, and so institutions that offer Yiddish are more common. As of 2011 the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University offered Judaeo-Spanish courses among colleges in the United States; INALCO in Paris, the University of the Basque Country and University of Granada in Spain were offering courses as well. In Israel, Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is leading the way in education (language and literature courses, Community oriented activities) and research (a yearly scientific journal, international congresses and conferences etc.). Hebrew University also offers courses. The Complutense University of Madrid also used to have courses. Prof. David Bunis taught Judaeo-Spanish at the University of Washington, in Seattle during the 2013–14 academic year. Bunis returned to the University of Washington for the Summer 2020 quarter.
In Spain, the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) in 2017 announced plans to create a Judaeo-Spanish branch in Israel in addition to 23 existing academies, in various Spanish-speaking countries, that are associated in the Association of Spanish Language Academies. Its stated purpose is to preserve Judaeo-Spanish. The move was seen as another step to make up for the Expulsion, following the offer of Spanish citizenship to Sephardim who had some connection with Spain.
When French-medium schools operated by Alliance Israelite Universelle opened in the Ottoman Empire in the 1860s, the position of Judaeo-Spanish began to weaken in the Ottoman Empire areas. In time Judaeo-Spanish became perceived as a low status language, and Sephardic people began losing connections to that language. Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, authors of Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th-20th Centuries, wrote that the AIU institutions "gallicized" people who attended. As time progressed, Judaeo-Spanish language and culture declined. Although Mary Altabev in 1994 observed limited use of Ladino at home among educated Turkish Jews, Melis Alphan wrote in Hürriyet in 2017 that the Judaeo-Spanish language in Turkey was heading to extinction.
Folklorists have been collecting romances and other folk songs, some dating from before the expulsion. Many religious songs in Judeo-Spanish are translations of Hebrew, usually with a different tune. For example, here is Ein Keloheinu in Judeo-Spanish:
Other songs relate to secular themes such as love:
Anachronistically, Abraham—who in the Bible is an Aramean and the very first Hebrew and the ancestor of all who followed, hence his appellation Avinu (Our Father)—is in the Judeo-Spanish song born already in the djudería (modern Spanish: judería), the Jewish quarter. This makes Terach and his wife into Hebrews, as are the parents of other babies killed by Nimrod. In essence, unlike its Biblical model, the song is about a Hebrew community persecuted by a cruel king and witnessing the birth of a miraculous saviour—a subject of obvious interest and attraction to the Jewish people who composed and sang it in medieval Spain.
The song attributes to Abraham elements that are from the story of Moses's birth, the cruel king killing innocent babies, with the midwives ordered to kill them, the 'holy light' in the Jewish area, as well as from the careers of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who emerged unscathed from the fiery furnace, and Jesus of Nazareth. Nimrod is thus made to conflate the role and attributes of three archetypal cruel and persecuting kings: Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh and Herod
Another example is the Coplas de Purim, a folk song about Purim.
Words derived from Arabic:
Words derived from Hebrew:
Words derived from Persian:
Words derived from Portuguese:
Words derived from Turkish:
Words derived from Greek:
Jennifer Charles and Oren Bloedow from the New York-based band Elysian Fields released a CD in 2001 called La Mar Enfortuna, which featured modern versions of traditional Sephardic songs, many sung by Charles in Judeo-Spanish. The American singer Tanja Solnik has released several award-winning albums that feature songs in the languages: From Generation to Generation: A Legacy of Lullabies and Lullabies and Love Songs. There are a number of groups in Turkey that sing in Judeo-Spanish, notably Janet – Jak Esim Ensemble, Sefarad, Los Pasharos Sefaradis and the children's chorus Las Estreyikas d'Estambol. There is a Brazilian-born singer of Sephardic origins, Fortuna, who researches and plays Judeo-Spanish music.
Israeli folk-duo Esther & Abi Ofarim recorded the song "Yo M'enamori d'un Aire" for their 1968 album Up To Date. Esther Ofarim recorded several Judaeo-Spanish songs as a solo artist. These included "Povereta Muchachica", "Noches Noches", "El Rey Nimrod", "Adio Querida" and "Pampaparapam".
The Jewish Bosnian-American musician Flory Jagoda recorded two CDs of music taught to her by her grandmother, a Sephardic folk singer, among a larger discography. Following her death in 2021, gentile musicians in Bosnia have recorded music in Judaeo-Spanish as well.
The cantor Ramón Tasat, who learned Judeo-Spanish at his grandmother's knee in Buenos Aires, has recorded many songs in the language, with three of his CDs focusing primarily on that music.
The Israeli singer Yasmin Levy has also brought a new interpretation to the traditional songs by incorporating more "modern" sounds of Andalusian Flamenco. Her work revitalising Sephardic music has earned Levy the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation Award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between musicians from three cultures: In Yasmin Levy's own words:
Notable music groups performing in Judeo-Spanish include Voice of the Turtle, Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles' La Mar Enfortuna and Vanya Green, who was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for her research and performance of this music. She was recently selected as one of the top ten world music artists by the We are Listening International World of Music Awards for her interpretations of the music.
Robin Greenstein, a New York-based musician, received a federal CETA grant in the 1980s to collect and perform Sephardic Music under the guidance of the American Jewish Congress. Her mentor was Joe Elias, noted Sephardic singer from Brooklyn. She recorded residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged, a nursing home in Coney Island, New York, singing songs from their childhood. The voices recorded included Victoria Hazan, a well known Sephardic singer who recorded many 78's in Judaeo-Spanish and Turkish from the 1930s and 1940s. Two Judaeo-Spanish songs can be found on her Songs of the Season holiday CD, released in 2010 on Windy Records.
German band In Extremo also recorded a version of the above-mentioned song Avram Avinu.
The Israeli-German folk band Baladino has released two albums that have songs with lyrics in Judaeo-Spanish.
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