Gina Camhy and the Judeo-Spanish Language Policy of French Sephardic Periodicals, Le Judaïsme séphardi and Vidas largas, in the Aftermath of World War II (original) (raw)
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Colloquia Humanistica, 2016
Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish as Determinants of Identity: As Illustrated in the Jewish Press of the First Half of the Twentieth CenturyThe paper shows an image and functions of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish languages among Jewish Diaspora groups – the Balkan Sephardim and the Ashkenazim (the Ostjuden group) – in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. The study is based on the articles from Jewish weeklies, magazines and newspapers from pre-war Bosnia and Hercegovina and from Germany/Poland. It demonstrates a double-sided attitude towards the languages. On the one hand – an image of the languages as determinants of Jewish identity. Touching on this theme, the authors of the paper also try to highlight the images of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and as determinants in a narrower sense – of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi identity in that period. On the other hand, the paper shows a tendency to treat the languages as “corrupted” and “dying” languages, an...
The paper shows an image and functions of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish languages among Jewish Diaspora groups – the Balkan Sephardim and the Ashkenazim (the Ostjuden group) – in the period from the beginning of the twentieth century until the outbreak of World War II. The study is based on the articles from Jewish weeklies, magazines and newspapers from prewar Bosnia and Hercegovina and from Germany/Poland. It demonstrates a double-sided attitude towards the languages. On the one hand – an image of the languages as determinants of Jewish identity. Touching on this theme, the authors of the paper also try to highlight the images of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish and as determinants in a narrower sense – of the Sephardi/Ashkenazi identity in that period. On the other hand, the paper shows a tendency to treat the languages as " corrupted " and " dying " languages, and as factors slowing down the assimilation of Jewish groups and also as an obstacle for Zionist ideologies.
Jewish Journalism and Press in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, 2016
Since the 1990s, the ‘language question’ chapter has probably been one of the most prolific ones in the field of Sephardic Studies. As it is well known, this dispute took place during a specific period of cultural and political changes in the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent emerging nation-states and continued in important and very heterogeneous migratory settlements such as New York. In this contribution we will tackle again this subject but from a more concrete theoretical framework, which is especially productive for the study of the ‘language question’, namely the one of Glottopolitics (cfr. 2). Confronted with Western European ideologies, where “natural links between a unitary mother tongue, a territory, and an ethnonational identity” (Irvine / Gal 2000: 60) were conceived, and coming from a multiethnic and multilingual background as the Ottoman Empire was, Sephardic Jews often saw themselves as people without (a standardized) language — symbol and manifestation par excellence at the linguistic level of a nation-state and one of the main requisites for modernity (cfr. Gal 2010: 39). This situation led to incongruities between the experienced realities and the new ideological models, which penetrated from outside and which eventually led to negative attitudes towards the language. In New York, one of the most important Sephardic settlements in the New World, the communities were confronted with similar preocupations, instabilities and shifts due to, among many factors, their immigrant statuses and the dominant American assimilatory forces. Nevertheless during this period of transitions and insecurities the press, a relatively new genre and engine of communication in these specific cultural contexts, played a significant role in the constitution of a Sephardic imagined community in Andersonian terms (Anderson 2006; Guillon 2013) where Judeo-Spanish, despite all the negative attitudes toward it, was of a considerable weight. Therefore it is of special interest to analyze it from a glottopolitical perspective in its “language - culture - nation ideological nexus” (Heller / Duchaîne 2007: 7). Besides the glottopolitical theoretical approach, this study adopts a contrastive perspective by comparing the linguistic ideologemes about Judeo-Spanish and the other languages with which Sephardic Jews were in contact in the Ottoman Empire and those which were developed in the United States, a completely new sociocultural and political space. Therefore we will analyze articles of different journalistic genres published at the beginning of the 20th century in two Salonikan newspapers, La Época and El Avenir, and articles published during the first half of the 20th century in two New York newspapers, La América and La Vara. At this point we have to point out that both cities, Salonika and New York, constituted two of the most important demographic and cultural centers of the Sephardic diaspora. The article is divided into three parts. After the theoretical framework (cfr. 2), we will compare the glottopolitical situation of the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (cfr. 3.1.) with that of those who emigrated to the United States, more precisely to New York (cfr. 3.2.). In the core part of this contribution (cfr. 4.) we will analyze the recurrent ideologemes found in the Salonikan and New York newspapers. This part will be followed by a discussion of the similarities and differences between the ideologenes in both continents (cfr. 5), as well as a succinct conclusion (cfr. 6) summarizing the fundamental outreaches of this contribution to Sephardic Studies in language ideologies matters.
Minor Perspectives on modernity beyond Europe. An Encounter between Jewish Studies and Postcolonial Thought, ed. by Yael Attia, Jonathan Hirsch, and Kathleen Samson, 2023
What is at the core of modern Sephardi experience? In the past decades, when the topic of Sephardi Jews came to the table, 1 historians continuously empha sized two cultural factors that presumably kept the Sephardi world 2 intact throughout the diasporic experience: religious traditions and language. The scholars of Sephardi religious history, notably Matthias Lehmann and Norman Stillman but also many others, have traced and explained continuities and breaks with ritual and scholarly traditions. 3 This study questions Judeo-Spanish as a key feature of Sephardi modernity. It is well-known that the language of Sephardi Jews in the Eastern Mediter ranean, Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, Judezmo or Espanyol, from the nineteenth century was increasingly under pressure to compete with imperial languages, majority languages in recently established nation-states, and Hebrew. While these contexts formed the terms of the cultural and historical debate on Judeo-Spanish, historians have omitted to look at the Sephardi language in the context of Sephardi political positioning in the twentieth century. Particularly the way in which Judeo-Spanish also asserted itself as one of the key aspects of Sephardi uniqueness within the Jewish nation. Within this changing and
The Language of Sephardic Jews: History and Main Characteristics
The Balkan Jews and the Minority Issue in South-Eastern Europe, ‘Colloquia Balkanica’ book series Vol. 7, ed. Jolanta Sujecka, Warsaw Bellerive-sur-Allier: Faculty of ‘Artes Liberales’ University of Warsaw, Wydawnictwo DiG & Edition La Rama, 2020, s. 181-203, 2020
The paper outlines the history and basic characteristics of Judeo-Spanish (also referred to as Judezmo or Ladino), the native language of Sephardi Jews in the Turkish-Balkan Diaspora. It describes Judeo-Spanish as a fusion language which was formed through the contact of several stock languages, i.e. Spanish, Hebrew-Aramaic, Turkish, Greek, South Slavic languages etc. The paper indicates elements belonging to its main components and derived from them. The study also discusses the language's diff erent names, shows problems related to its classifi cation as a Romance language, or even one of the dialects of Spanish, and as a Jewish language that was one of the determinants of the Jewish identity of its speakers. The text addresses the current situation of the Sephardic vernacular as being at high risk of extinction as well as predictions about the possibility of its survival.
The Status of Judeo-Spanish in Yugoslavia until 1941
THE BALKAN JEWS AND THE MINORITY ISSUE IN SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE, ed. J. Sujecka, Warsaw 2020, 205-218, 2021
In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Sephardic Jews were one of a few ethnic and religious minorities. They were the descendants of the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula who came to the Balkans with their vernacular language based on pre-classic IberianRoman dialects. They had preserved Judeo-Spanish for several ages and enriched it with infl uences of Balkan and other languages. Nevertheless, after its Golden Age in the 16th and 17th centuries, Judeo-Spanish could not avoid a slow decline caused by political, social and cultural changes that took place on the entire Balkan Peninsula and which accelerated in the second half of the 19th century. The chapter deals with the status, role and condition of Judeo-Spanish among Sephardic Jews in three Sephardic centres in Yugoslavia: belgrade, Sarajevo and Bitola, in the period between 1918 and 1941. In Belgrade the representation of Judeo-Spanish was indeed poor: the level of westernization and acculturation of the Jews was so high that since the 19th century they had called themselves “Serbs of the Jewish faith”. In multicultural Sarajevo, Judeo-Spanish remained the only vernacular language of the Sephardim until the 1880s, which resulted from the isolation they lived in under Ottoman rule. Even after they joined the stream of state education introduced under Austro-Hungarian rule, Serbo-Croatian did not supersede Judeo-Spanish and most Sephardic Jews were bilingual at that time. In the Jewish communities of Macedonia, mainly because of their low economic position and low level of acculturation, the usage of Judeo-Spanish remained prevalent even longer — until the outbreak of World War II. Keywords: Yugoslavia, Judeo-Spanish language, Sephardim, Diaspora language, co-territorial languages, sociolinguistics.