Jewish diasporic languages

Jewish languages should always be understood in the plural. There isn't just one Jewish language, the Hebrew spoken in Israel, but many languages, of which Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Spanish are the most visible, and are most often spoken by multilingual people for whom they are languages born of Jewish culture in diaspora countries. In this text, our colleagues explain the particularities of these languages.

The formation of diasporic Judeo-languages

The concept of a Jewish entity when it comes to languages, thus a category, a specific object of observation and analysis, involving various disciplines goes back more than 80 years. Indeed, it was as early as the 1930s that Max Weinreich (1937) posited a theory of "Jewish languages", which he would later develop. But it was mainly in the 50s, in the wake of sociolinguistics, that the concept took shape, when Uriel Weinreich chose Yiddish to illustrate his theories on language transfer in the prolegomenal Languages in contact, findings and problems (1967). P. Wexler (1981: 137) bases the notion of Jewish language on sociolinguistic criteria: they derive from coterritorial non-Jewish languages, they follow a comparable evolutionary dynamic from one Jewish language to another, they share reference to Hebrew, they are always spoken by plurilinguals. Comparatists such as Bunis (1981), Alvarez Pereyre (2003) and Sibony (2019) draw on the Hebraic-Aramaic component of Jewish languages, or on the specific cross-linguistic dynamics by which plurilingual Jewish speakers build an identity language from non-identity languages (Varol & Szulmajster, 1994).

Jewish languages, real languages?

The first question concerning Jewish languages is whether they are really languages or rather varieties peculiar to Jews, sociolects or ethnolects. The answer varies according to theoretical choices between a "minus pole", where any variety of a language spoken by Jews and written in Hebrew characters[1] is considered a Jewish language, and a "plus pole", where it is a language only spoken by Jews in a geographical area where no related language exists.

Examples of the former are the Castilian spoken by Jews on the eve of the expulsion from Spain, the Judeo-Piedmontese described by Primo Levi in Le Système périodique (Argon), the Yiddish spoken between 800 and 1250 in the Rhineland region as far as the Upper Danube, and the Judeo-Arabic dialects spoken in the Maghreb and the Middle East (Mansour, 1991; Bar-Moshe, 2019).
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In the second case, we'd like to mention two contemporary languages, Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish[2].
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Yiddish came into being in several stages as Ashkenazi communities moved eastwards, and from the 17th century onwards as a result of mass migrations from Germanic territories to those of the Slavs.
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For Judeo-Spanish, the violent break came in 1492 with the Expulsion from Spain: two branches of Judeo-Spanish emerged, Haketiya or Western Judeo-Spanish spoken in Morocco, and Djudyó or Eastern Judeo-Spanish (often called Ladino) spoken in the Ottoman Empire. For Djudyó, which is more important in terms of the number of speakers, the clearest divergence from Spanish Castilian occurs at the beginning of the 17th century, both because Castilian changes radically at this time and because Judeo-Spanish, cut off from its base language, evolves differently[3]. In Morocco, Haketiya was re-hispanized in the 2nd half of the 19th century (due to the Spanish presence in Morocco) and gradually gave way to Castilian, the language of prestige. Still spoken in Morocco, Oran and Gibraltar in the first half of the 20th century, it is now considered almost extinct (Benoliel, 1977; Bentolila 2003).

After the Holocaust, the number of speakers of Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) declined considerably, with very different situations in the countries where these Jewish languages are spoken and written. The proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the re-establishment of Hebrew as the national language changed the status of Jewish languages.

They occupy a special place in diaspora Jewish communities, having long been "territorial substitutes" (Varol & Szulmajster, 1994). For Judeo-Arabic-speaking, Judeo-Hispanic and Yiddish-speaking communities alike, the lost country is the Land of Israel, and the "true" language is Hebrew, so that the uniqueness of the people beyond the dispersal arises.

Hebrew as a rival to Jewish languages?

Yiddish, Judeo-Spanish and Judeo-Arabic spoken outside the Maghreb have an initially cryptic function. Unlike languages spoken in the territories where communities live, Judeo-language is incomprehensible to others. It is the language of shared secrets, but also of self-assertion and the language of verbal revenge, where one can criticize everything from the authorities of the country of residence to religious and community Jewish authorities.

Hebrew, a sacred language, is reserved for the liturgy and religious texts, while the Jewish language is a lo'ez or la'az, a secular language, in which one can broach all subjects, even the most scabrous. Between Hebrew and the Jewish language, translation calques (khumesh-taytsh, ladino proper, sharh) allow minimal comprehension of the texts for those (and especially those) who are ignorant of Hebrew, while copying the syntax and semantics of Hebrew. These calque translations contribute to the evolution of Jewish languages that share the same referential world.

These languages also have a strong identity function, codifying the representations of Jewish communities, their perception of themselves, of others and of their reciprocal relationships. Highly expressive, they are marked by violence, and express self-mockery, humor and anguish. They develop a specific literature. In this function of identity, they find themselves today at odds with Hebrew, the language of the Jews and the language of the state of Israel.

They are vehicular languages, particularly after the great migrations of the late 19th and 20th centuries: families spread over several continents exchange on social networks in the Jewish language, which is competing with the major vehicular languages, including English.

Marie-Christine Bornes Varol: Professor of Judeo-Spanish at Inalco, researcher on language contacts, the medieval roots of Judeo-Spanish proverbs and their links with rabbinical exempla.

Anne Szulmajster: researcher member of the "histoire de l'art, histoire des représentations et archéologie de l'Europe : sources, documents, méthodes" (EA 4115 INHA-EPHE).

Jonas Sibony: Research lecturer in Hebrew, Arabic, Judeo-Arabic, Semitic languages, linguistics, Arabic dialectology. Coordinator and head of the Hebraic and Jewish Studies Department at the University of Strasbourg - Grand Est.

Illustrations

- Satirical newspaper "El Djugetón" Istanbul 1928.

- Journal Şalom de 1970, "ladino" in Latin characters - Jewish Museum of Turkey in Istanbul.

- "La Boz de Turkiye" newspaper, Istanbul, 1939.

- Revue Aki Estamos - Les Amis de la Lettre Sépharade - Paris.

To discover the current magazine, , click on : https://issuu.com/akiestamos-aals/docs/35_kia-bat_issuu.

- Yiddish and Judeo-Spanish: inalco poster on satire in Jewish languages.

- El luzero: New york newspaper in Judeo-Spanish.

- Cover page (Judeo-Arabic) of Isaac D. Abbou's book, "Histoire des Juifs du Maroc en arabe",

published in Casablanca in 1953, imprimeries Razun, translated from French into Judeo-Arabic by H. Nahmani.

- Yiddish theater posters: __1__ - __2__ .

- Poster for the film Yiddish by Nurit Aviv, in which our colleague Itzhok Niborski speaks at length.

Bibliography

Alvarez-Pereyre F. & Baumgarten J. (dir.) (2003). Linguistics of Jewish languages and general linguistics. Paris, CNRS.

Benoliel, J. (1977) Dialecto judeo-hispano-marroquí o hakitia. Barcelona, Ameller.

Bentolila, Y. (2003). Le processus d'hispanisation de la hakétia à la lumière de quelques sources littéraires. F. Alvarez-Péreyre and J. Baumgarten (dir.), Linguistics of Jewish languages, Paris, CNRS. 247-265.

Bunis, David M. (1981). A Comparative Linguistic Analysis of Judezmo and Yiddish. International Journal of the Sociology of Language. 30. 49-70.

Mansour, Jacob (1991). The Jewish Baghdadi Dialect: Studies and Texts.The Judaeo-Arabic Dialect of Baghdad. The Babylonian Jewry Heritage Centre.

Sibony, Jonas (2019). Hebrew or pseudo-Hebrew lexical elements in the Judeo-Arabic speech of Fez in the 1940s. Contextual uses, semantic derivations, phonological adaptations. Studies on Arabic Dialectology and Sociolinguistics: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference of AIDA [online]

Varol, M.-Ch & Szulmajster-Celnikier, A. (1994). Yidich and Judeo-Spanish: Comparative dynamics of two diasporic languages. Plurilinguismes. 7. Paris, 93- 132.

Varol (Bornes-) M.-Ch. & Szulmajster-Celnikier, A. (2017/2). Emergence and parallel evolution of two Jewish languages: Yidiche and Judeo-Spanish. La Linguistique. 53. 199- 236.[online]

Wagner, Max Leopold (1930). Caracteres generales del judeoespañol de Oriente. Madrid. Hernando.

Weinreich, Max (1937), Yiddish as an object of General linguistics. Paper at the IVth International Congress of Linguistics in Copenhagen, August 27, 1936. Wilno, YIVO

Weinreich, Uriel (1967). Languages in Contact, Findings and Problems. The Hague, Mouton & Co.

Wexler, Paul (1981). Jewish Interlinguistics: Fact and Conceptual Framework. Language, no. 57, 99-149.

Notes

[1] This is the case, for example, of scientific works written in Arabic by the Jews of al-Andalus in the Middle Ages.

[2] For an epistemology of the notion of Jewish language, cf. Alvarez Pereyre & Baumgarten (2003).

[3] For example, Spanish radically changes its phonological system, while Judeo-Spanish retains the system of the Middle Ages, and Judeo-Spanish verbs abandon diphthongation. Spanish rejects and replaces its Arabic borrowings, while Judeo-Spanish retains them and increases their number thanks to Turkish's Arabic borrowings.