Ladino’s Lost Sibling
The majority of people in the Turkish Jewish community knows, or at least is familiar with Ladino (also called Djudeo-Espanyol) to a certain degree even if they can’t speak it. This language which came to be by the Jews who lived in Spain up until 1492 is now endangered after more than 500 years, yet still surviving. Ladino still exists as a spoken language in many countries today, Israel being at the top of the list, including the United States, Turkey, and Greece. Spanish government’s decision to give citizenship to people with sephardic ancestry in 2015 has no doubt increased Jewish population’s interest in the Spanish language. Portugal on the other hand, passed a similar law for the Sephardim two years before its neighbour. Unlike Spain, Portuguese government does not require language knowledge as part of the citizenship application.
But wait a minute, is there a Djudeo-Portuguese language as well? If they too had to leave the Iberian Peninsula — although on different occasions than the Spanish Jews, then the Portuguese immigrants surely spoke Portuguese, didn’t they? Where is this language then, why don’t we hear it from our grandparents as well?
The fate of the Jews in Portugal was a bit different than those in Spain. The Spainish Jews had been converting to Christianity in masses since the 1300’s as a consequence of the pressure and violence they were receiving. Some of these converts, called marranos, secretly kept practicing their old religion. The Spanish Inquisition that started in 1478 mostly targeted the New Christians which included the marranos. During this time and after the Alhambra Decree which ordered all Jews to leave the country, many chose Portugal as their destination. However, Portugal too was going to become inhabitable for Jews only five years later: In 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal decreed the Jews to either convert to Christianity or to leave the country. Nevertheless, the following year conversion was made mandatory and Jews were banned from leaving. Then came the Lisbon Massacre in 1506. 1536 on the other hand marked the beginning of the Portuguese Inquisition. The target of these events, which took place after the forced mass conversion, was again the New Christians. Most Jews, who could not get rid of these suspicions even after converting, looked for ways to escape. The majority emigrated to the Ottoman Empire, some European countries of which Amsterdam was the most important, and other farther lands such as Brazil and the Antilles.
Some of these Portuguese Jewish immigrants, but especially those who had found a more tolerant environment in protestant Holland since the 1600’s, started living openly as Jews once again in their new countries. To name one example, the infamous philosopher Baruch Spinoza came from a former marrano family that had escaped from Portugal, and they were members of Amsterdam’s Portuguese diaspora. In this community, Hebrew was the religious language, while Dutch was the language used in commerce and with Christian Dutch citizens. But their mother tongue was Judeo-Portuguese, which was very close to the Portuguese of the time. Of course, a big portion of the Portuguese Jews also spoke Judeo-Espanyol as frequently and fluently. After all they had lived with the Spanish Jews both in diaspora and in their ancestral land. Many of them were of Spanish origin themselves.
Judeo-Portuguese has been written in both Hebrew and Latin scripts (after the 15th century). This language which also contains words from Judeo-Espanyol and Hebrew, is different from its contemporary Portuguese in that it contains more archaisms. Further, some words like manim (“hands” in plural form) are made of the same Latin root as in Spanish: mano; but they receive a Hebrew suffix, in this case the masculine plural -im. Most words of Hebrew origin in Judeo-Portuguese cover religion-related vocabulary such as: jesiba (yeshiva), queila (kehila), misvá (mitzva). Lastly, some Arabic words in Portuguese that are replaced by new ones or have been subjected to considerable change are intact in Judeo-Portuguese.
The oldest known written example of Judeo-Portuguese is a treatise on the art of manuscript illumination from 1262: ‘‘O livro de como se fazem as cores’’. This language kept being not only spoken but written in the diaspora as well. Although Spanish was the preferred language for liturgical translations from Hebrew, in big Portuguese communities such as that of Amsterdam, important works of philosophy, poetry and literature have been written in Judeo-Portuguese language. Judeo-Portuguese was also the language used in a variety of common occasions like commerce, during religious sermons, and on gravestones.
Now that we answered the first question, we can get to the next one: Yes, Judeo-Portuguese language exists; but why have we not heard, and are we not hearing it at family dinners like Ladino?
The short answer is the fact that it is no longer in use: Judeo-Portuguese is a dead language. It’s estimated that it was still used until the beginning of the 19th century. But towards the middle of the 1800’s it started only being used during certain sermons in certain synagogues, and at homes only during Shabbat. It is said that in some creole languages like Suriname’s Sranan and Saramaccan as well as the Papiamentu language spoken in Curaçao, Aruba and Bonaire, traces of Judeo-Portuguese can be detected due to historical presence of the Sephardim who settled in the colonies with the Dutch.
Surely many of the Turkish Jews have Portuguese ancestry and although we may have never heard of it, it is an interesting feeling to realise that words in Judeo-Portuguese once came out of our ancestors’ mouths. It is especially fascinating to remember that this language was the first language heard and spoken by Baruch Spinoza (Benedito de Espinosa with his Portuguese name) who came up with the ideas that paved the way for the Enlightenment a century earlier than the Enlightenment itself. Even though he learned Latin and wrote his famous work The Ethics in this language after his ex-communication, his ground breaking ideas most likely took their initial form in his mind in Judeo-Portuguese.
This article was originally published in Avlaremoz.com, in Turkish.
Bibliography
- Newberger Goldstein, Rebecca. Betraying Spinoza: The Reneganade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. New York: Schoken, 2006.
- Strolovitch, Devon L. (2005) Old Portuguese in Hebrew Script: Convention, Contact, and Convivência. Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
- https://www.britannica.com
- http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/797
- http://www.jewish-languages.org/judeo-portuguese.html
- https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/spanish-and-portuguese-literature
