Ladino

The Jews expelled from Castile and Aragon in 1492 left with the Spanish they had been speaking, and in the cities that received them, above all Salonica, Istanbul, Izmir, Sarajevo and Sofia, that Spanish stopped changing in step with the Spanish of Spain. What resulted is Ibero-Romance in its bones. A Spanish speaker today can follow a good deal of it, but hears forms that Castilian has long since dropped and pronunciations that Castilian moved away from in the sixteenth century.

Around that older core the language accumulated what its speakers lived among. Hebrew and Aramaic supplied the religious and communal vocabulary, as they did for Yiddish. Turkish, Greek and South Slavic supplied the words of the market, the household and the state. Italian entered through Livorno and the Adriatic trade, and French entered late and heavily through the schools of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, which taught a generation to regard their own language as a corrupted dialect.

For most of its history it was written in Hebrew letters, in the semi-cursive type that printers call Rashi script and in the handwriting known as solitreo. Latin and Cyrillic alphabets came in during the twentieth century, and the Latin spellings now used are largely phonetic.

The communities that spoke it were destroyed in the Holocaust, above all at Salonica, and the survivors dispersed. What remains is a heritage language: studied, sung, printed and broadcast, but not acquired by children.

Scholars distinguish two things that everyday usage now calls by one name. Ladino in the narrow sense is a translation register, not a spoken tongue: a word-for-word rendering of Hebrew scripture into Spanish that follows the Hebrew word order and syntax rather than natural Spanish, so that the reader can see the original through it. It is deliberately unidiomatic, in the same way and for the same reason as the Yiddish taytsh. Printed Bibles, prayer books with facing translation and the Passover Haggadah in the vernacular all used it.

The spoken language, which its speakers more often called Djudezmo or simply Espanyol, was ordinary and idiomatic and carried the rest of life: the romances, ballads brought out of Spain and sung for centuries afterward, the coplas composed for festivals, the proverbs, and eventually a nineteenth century press and a body of novels and plays.

The single most influential book written in it belongs to neither register exactly. The Meam Loez, begun in the early eighteenth century and continued by later hands, is a vast running commentary on the Bible in accessible Judeo-Spanish, gathering rabbinic material for readers who could not work through it in Hebrew. It did for the Sephardic world roughly what the Tsene-rene did for the Ashkenazi one, and it was read aloud in homes and synagogues for two hundred years.

None of this displaced Hebrew from the fixed prayers. Ladino explained, taught and sang. The liturgy stayed where it was.