The term Sephardic refers to the Jews originating from Sepharad, the Hebrew name for the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain and Portugal). The Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews who lived in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion in 1492 by the Catholic Monarchs in Spain, and in 1497 in Portugal. After the expulsion, many Sephardics were dispersed in different regions of the world, especially in the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, and other parts of Europe and Latin America. Today, the term is also used to refer to the descendants of those expelled Jews, regardless of where they live today.
The language spoken by these Hebrew communities is known as Sephardic, Ladino or Judeo-Spanish, and has its roots in the medieval Spanish spoken in the Iberian Peninsula before the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. However, after the dispersion of the Sephardies, the language was adapted to the different regions where they settled, preserving many characteristics of ancient Spanish, although with influences from languages such as Turkish, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic.
History of a Diaspora: origin and heyday of the Sephardic language
As is to be expected, what we know today as Sephardic has not been a monolithic reality throughout its more than five centuries of history, also taking into account the vast territory over which it was extended. Numerous events have contributed to its formation and evolution which, although they have little or nothing to do with the language, have greatly determined its development.
In order to understand the formation and development of Judeo-Spanish from the time of the expulsion in 1492 to the present day, it is worth recalling a number of relevant facts. Firstly, in accordance with the political and administrative system of the Ottoman Empire —the preferred destination for many of the expelled Jews— the Sephardim were able to maintain their customs and culture, including the Romance language brought from the Peninsula, which, far from being abandoned after the expulsion, will end up becoming their hallmark as Jews.
Also, given their dual status as non-Christians and Westerners, they were especially welcomed by the Ottoman authorities, as opposed to other Ottoman Christian minorities such as the Greeks or the Armenians, whose treatment was always more discriminatory. In fact, it was the Sephardim who brought printing to the Ottoman Empire and who maintained their monopoly until the beginning of the 18th century.
This high cultural level was increased in the 16th and 17th centuries with the arrival of Portuguese converts, and determined both these good relations with the Ottoman court, as well as the fact that other Jews living under the protection of the Sultan assimilated in many cases linguistically and culturally to the Sephardics. In this sense, we are witnessing a process of koineization —understood as a process of linguistic assimilation to a vehicular and culturally hegemonic language— of the Hebrew communities of the Ottoman Empire on a purely Castilian basis, which gave rise to Sephardic.
The heyday of classical Judeo-Spanish, into which the rabbis of the first decades of the eighteenth century decided to pour their literary production because it had become inaccessible in Hebrew, lasted for about a century and a half. At this age, the language already has its own characteristics that identify it as an independent language.
Decline of the Sephardi
Since the mid-19th century, we have witnessed a progressive decline of the Sephardic language, a process once again conditioned by events of an extra-linguistic nature.
On the one hand, the modernizing policies of the so-called Tanzimat (1839-1876) in the Ottoman Empire changed the status of the Jews from a protected minority to fully-fledged subjects. Likewise, the progressive dismemberment of the Empire itself and the emergence of the different Balkan states will make it compulsory to study the national language of these states.
On the other hand, the establishment of various networks of modern and Western Jewish schools triggered a profound change of mentality in the traditional Sephardic communities of the Orient. The opening of the Sephardies to the European culture will bring the adoption of new literary genres and will be accompanied by a strong influence of French.
In addition, there was the polemic about which language the Sephardim should learn: Turkish or one of the different national languages of the states where they lived; Hebrew, as the language of the Jewish people, or even modern Spanish itself.
Finally, in the 20th century, both the continuous migratory flow (mainly to the United States or Israel) from the former areas of residence, and the coup de grace of the extermination of thousands of Sephardic people during the Nazi occupation of the Balkans and Greece in World War II, determined a drastic decrease in the number of Sephardic speakers and their consequent decline.
Sephardic: a Hebraic language or a variant of Spanish?
Sephardic is a language with a medieval base, to which a linguistic conglomerate of expressions and words from the cities and dialects of Spain, as well as from the many countries and cities where the Sephardim settled after the expulsion, especially in the Mediterranean basin, have been added.
From a historical perspective, when Judeo-Spanish was a complete language and was not in any situation of subordination with respect to the common language, the Sephardic speakers considered themselves to be speakers of Spanish as a matter of course.
The feeling of linguistic belonging has changed precisely from the moment in which Judeo-Spanish came into contact with standardized Spanish. In the course of the last hundred years, these contacts have multiplied, and Judeo-Spanish has undergone an intensive ‘re-hispanization’. However, despite numerous indications of the loss of linguistic autonomy, Sephardic speakers today prefer the glotto ‘Ladino’, and strive to emphasize the distinct entity of their language.
In this sense, it is striking that at present, precisely those scholars who explicitly defend its inclusion in the field of Hispanic studies tend to speak of Sephardic language, while those who strive to emphasize the proper entity of the Judeo-Spanish language prefer to call it Ladino.
Sephardic linguistic features
Judeo-Spanish is phonologically closer to Medieval Spanish than to Modern Spanish. In fact, to a large extent it retains the sonorous fricatives and sibilants of medieval Spanish, which in the Iberian Peninsula and America underwent an intense restructuring between the mid-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This archaizing character is also extrapolated to the lexical level, with the conservation of many words from Medieval Spanish, and grammatical, since the morphosyntactic structures of Ladino are also governed to a large extent by those of Medieval Spanish.
In terms of orthography, Ladino was traditionally written in Hebrew characters, but nowadays the Latin alphabet is commonly used, especially in Turkey. The use of Turkish characters is in most cases very useful and practical, as it results in precise writing that reads as it is written. This is the case of the spelling ç, which is phonologically identified with the Spanish ch (sound [ʧ]): múnço (in Spanish: ‘mucho’).
Carlos Sánchez Luis