Homeless Tongues: Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora

By Monique Balbuena

This book examines a group of multicultural Jewish poets to address the issue of multilingualism within a context of minor languages and literatures, nationalism, and diaspora. It introduces three writers working in minor or threatened languages who challenge the usual consensus of Jewish literature: Algerian Sadia Lévy, Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and Argentine Juan Gelman. Each of them—Lévy in French and Hebrew, Matitiahu in Hebrew and Ladino, and Gelman in Spanish and Ladino—expresses a hybrid or composite Sephardic identity through a strategic choice of competing languages and intertexts. Monique R. Balbuena's close literary readings of their works, which are mostly unknown in the United States, are strongly grounded in their social and historical context. Her focus on contemporary rather than classic Ladino poetry and her argument for the inclusion of Sephardic production in the canon of Jewish literature make Homeless Tongues a timely and unusual intervention.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jul 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9780804797498

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2016 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

This book has been published with the assistance of the University of Oregon’s Oregon Humanities Center, the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan, the Koret Foundation, and the Littauer Foundation.

Living Flame of Love was originally published in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez Copyright © 1964, 1979, 1991 by Washington Province of Discalced Carmelites, ICS Publications, 2131 Lincoln Road, N.E. Washington, DC 20002–1199, U.S.A. www.icspublications.org. Reprinted with permission.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Balbuena, Monique, author.

Homeless tongues : poetry and languages of the Sephardic diaspora / Monique R. Balbuena.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8047-6011-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Jewish poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Ladino poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Hebrew poetry, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 4. Sephardic authors—Language. 5. Multilingualism and literature. I. Title.

PN842.B35 2016

809'.88924—dc23

2015017616

ISBN 978-0-8047-9749-8 (electronic)

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Pro

HOMELESS TONGUES

Poetry and Languages of the Sephardic Diaspora

MONIQUE R. BALBUENA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Para Bernardo e Daniel Aviv

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Minor Literatures and Major Laments: Reading Sadia Lévy

2. At the Crossroads: Greece, Israel, and Spain in Margalit Matitiahu’s Hebrew-Ladino Poetry

3. Archaeology of the Language/Archaeology of the Self: Juan Gelman’s Journey to Ladino

Conclusion: Whither?

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Friends, colleagues, professors, and poets helped me at different stages of this project. In the beginning there were Robert Alter and Chana Kronfeld. Many years later, I am still grateful for their support and criticism throughout the original project.

My thanks also for Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s pointed and helpful suggestions and for the fundamental support she offered at a critical moment in this project—and for helping me recognize that I could read and write about the poems as compelling and valuable in themselves. Margalit Matitiahu was very generous, sending me material on several occasions and discussing her work via e-mail or over coffee in Jerusalem. Catherine Benguy graciously granted me permission to reproduce her grandfather’s poems. Juan Gelman was equally generous with his poems. Guy Dugas, Haïm Vidal Sephiha, and Avner Perez shared documents and ideas and supported me in my project. I appreciate Leonardo Senkman’s friendship and honest and insightful comments. The same can be said of Saúl Sosnowski. Murray Baumgarten, Norman Stillman, Bluma Goldenstein, and Ben-Zion Gold: all were early discussants, whether they realized it or not, and helped me shape my ideas and early drafts into this book. Colleagues in several conferences helped me with their questions and their sharp observations. Thanks to Yael Halevi-Wise, Eloise Brière, Stacy Beckwith, and many others. Karen Grumberg and Adriana Jacobs helped me define or refine some of my translations, and Kate Jenckes read my Gelman chapter; I am grateful to all for their comments. Eliyah Arnon has been there all along for many years, and I cannot thank him enough for his continuous presence and for his professional and personal support.

The original readers at Stanford helped me make this book a better one. Lazar Fleishman’s provocative comments encouraged me to revisit the project, and Haun Saussy’s suggestions challenged me further. Norris Pope backed this book project from the beginning, and I am most grateful to him for his enduring support. And I have to say the same of my editors, Emily-Jane Cohen and Anne Fuzellier Jain, whose patience I know I have tested.

I am also grateful to my dean and colleagues at the Honors College for offering me a collegial setting that allowed me to complete the project. The Honors College staff have my gratitude for their invaluable help in the daily grind. In addition, I would like to recognize the Program of Judaic Studies at the University of Oregon, in particular, Judith Baskin, for her graceful mentorship in times of need.

I received very good feedback at two workshops where I presented my work: Francophone Jewish Writers in the 19th and 20th Centuries, sponsored by Stanford’s Taube Center of Jewish Studies and organized by Aron Rodrigue and Olga Borovaya, gave me the opportunity to test some ideas with a very distinguished group, including Alan Astro, Maurice Samuels, and Scott Lerner; and a workshop sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, further challenged my work with commentary by Brett Kaplan, Bruce Thompson, and Michael Rothenberg. A seminar on Sephardic Literary Studies and Comparative Methodologies in Iberia and the Americas, organized by Sarah Casteel and Dalia Kandiyoti, gave me a very engaging chance to discuss my project with Ronnie Perelis, Laura Leibman, and Tabea Alexa Linhardt, among others.

The Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard, the Oregon Humanities Center at the University of Oregon, and the Frankel Institute at the University of Michigan provided me with much needed time and stimulating intellectual atmospheres. As a Harry Starr Fellow at Harvard in 2003–4, I had the opportunity to work with Ruth Wisse, Avi Matalon, Ken Frieden, Hana Wirth-Nesher, Avraham Norvershtern, Yaakov Elman, Miriam Bodian, Michael Weingrad, and Jeremy Dauber. As a Frankel Fellow at Michigan in 2010–11, my colleagues were Anita Norich, Joshua Miller, Deborah Dash Moore, Yaron Tzur, David Bunis, Marc Caplan, Jonathan Freedman, Elliot Ginsburg, Benjamin Hary, Karen Auerbach, Ruth Tsoffar, Na’ama Rokem, and Hana Wirth-Nesher. I thank them all for their comments, questions, conversations, and critiques of my work in progress, but am solely responsible for any shortcomings.

I could not have completed this work without the financial support of several institutions. I want to thank the University of California, Berkeley, for its Regent’s Fellowship, and also Brazil’s funding agency CAPES (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Nível Superior). I am equally grateful for fellowships from the Newhouse Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, the American Sephardi Federation, and the Maurice Amado Research Fund for Sephardic Studies. At the University of Oregon I would like to recognize the Center for the Study of Women in Society, for its Faculty Research Support; the Office of Research, for its Faculty Research Summer Award; and the Oregon Humanities Center, for its Faculty Research Fellowship. I would like to thank the Koret Foundation for granting me early on a publication grant. I much appreciate the publication grant the Littauer Foundation also offered me.

Finally, I would like to thank my mother, Cleone, for always singing to me in many languages, and my father, Rubén, who, unbeknownst to him, made me appreciate accents and creative interlingual formations, and gave me the love of slicing and dissecting, if not, like him, eyes, then images and poems. I am also very grateful to my son Bernardo for growing up alongside me and filling me with joy and pride—he has been my companion, reminding me all too often that there is much more to life than academic work. My little Daniel Aviv already has to put up with long nights and shorter bedtime stories. I thank him for the light and happiness that he has brought me at this time in my life. My husband, Mathew, accompanied me through a long and challenging trajectory—I thank him for keeping a steady pace by my side.

Parts of this book have previously appeared in Iggud: Selected Essays in Jewish Studies, Romance Studies, and Contemporary Sephardic Identity in the Americas.

INTRODUCTION

In order for the wheel to turn, for life to be lived, impurities are needed, and the impurities of impurities in the soil, too, as is known, if it is to be fertile. Dissension, diversity, the grain of salt and mustard are needed.

Primo Levi, Il sistema periodico*

In October 1978, a bilingual book of poems appeared in a run of 300 copies from a small press in France. This event in principle wouldn’t be surprising, but the genre and the languages of the volume were. Although published in France by the author of several French novels, this was a volume presenting poems side by side in vernacular Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, and English. Its title was Lus ojus las manus la boca, or Eyes Hands Mouth, followed on the title page by the informative subtitle "Sephardic poems by CLARISSE NICOÏDSKI with translations by KEVIN POWER." The poems presented images and metaphors not seen before in Judeo-Spanish poetry. Allusions to modern poets, chief among them Federico García Lorca, announced that a new kind of poetry was making its way into Sephardic writing. The publication of this small volume proved to be an important moment in the literary life of the Sephardic language; it announced the presence of Judeo-Spanish in contemporary world literature. Revealing exchanges and connections with literatures in other languages, it showcased the poetic possibilities of the vernacular, and opened the door for a series of writers and composers around the world who would follow suit, writing original texts in Ladino. Despite the small edition, this bilingual volume of poetry can be seen as the founding moment of a literary revitalization of Ladino: it led both speakers and non-speakers to recognize the potential locked in the Sephardic language for a serious and important poetic contribution to the literary world. And the fact that this work appeared in the form of poetry is also telling of the role and relevance of the genre in Sephardic culture.

The Sephardic Franco-Bosnian novelist Clarisse Nicoïdski, née Abinoun (1938–96), was an accomplished writer, the author of more than fifteen novels, two biographies of painters, an opera libretto, and a volume on women painters.¹ All of her novels were written in French, and with the exception of a few poems published in a Spanish journal, the only poetry collection she released during her lifetime was Lus ojus las manus la boca.²

Nicoïdski learned Ladino as a little girl during World War II, while hiding with her family in Lyon during the Nazi occupation under the Vichy government.³ Following the end of the war, she and her family moved to Morocco, where they lived in Casablanca between 1954 and 1959. Nicoïdski’s decision to revert to her childhood sounds and to write in the language of her parents and grandparents, what they called el spaniol muestro (our Spanish) was prompted by the death of her mother.⁴ Nicoïdski took to writing one poem in Ladino for each novel she had written in French. Once she began, the shame she had long associated with the Judeo-Spanish language, for its "lack of noblesse [nobility], grammar, and literature,⁵ was overshadowed, and eventually transformed, by the realization that the language was dying along with her mother, who, in her mind, metonymically stood for its speakers. The language ‘of the family,’ of ‘secrecy,’ of fright and—perhaps—of shame⁶ became the lost language in which Nicoïdski could now offer her mother a literary kaddish.⁷ As she said in an interview published in 1999, I understood that [with my mother] a bit of this language from my childhood was disappearing and that for our generation, the death of our parents meant the death of a language.⁸ Ladino resurfaces here in its feminine trappings, as the mother language and the language of the mother: My mother’s love, our complicity and our laughter were all found in this language."⁹ Ladino irrupts both as the site of memory and as that which can save memory, and as the mother’s language it marks and is marked by affection and pain. Ladino is, in Nicoïdski’s work, a language to recover the past, to claim an ethnic identity, and to reaffirm the links she maintains with the Sephardic Diaspora. And when Ladino forces its way out in Nicoïdski’s creation, it is in the form of a new genre: for the first time, she writes poetry.

In her fiction—especially in the novel Couvre-feux (Curfews)—she had already treated autobiographical elements and developed themes of isolation, memory, and exile. Now, faced with the death of her mother, longing, memory, and displacement become ever more acute. Nicoïdski eventually combines her individual, personal severance and pain with the larger, communal loss and separation experienced by Sephardic exiles who see the marks of their culture gradually disappear. To speak of her mother’s death, she turned to poetry, and in changing genres, she also changed languages: in other words, when her text becomes poetry, her language turns into Ladino. There is no causation or chronology that can readily be identified here, but poetry and Ladino appear simultaneously, as though they were the ideal means with which to speak of death and combat death.

Nicoïdski turns to poetry and to Ladino in order to speak of death—a personal, a collective, and a linguistic death—and of the impossibility of speaking. Her speaker’s aphasia finds a parallel in the general loss of language by Ladino speakers. And yet, even as she recognizes the disappearance of Ladino as a vehicle of oral communication and transmission, mourning its present condition as silent writing, Nicoïdski insists on writing. In so doing, she in some way holds off death, for not only does she create—and creation combats death—but by creating in Ladino she consciously claims a Sephardic identity, on the one hand, and gives Judeo-Spanish a renewed élan—an afterlife—on the other. Such a movement defines much of the recent writing in Ladino, which for the most part has appeared in the form of poetry or songs.

I take Nicoïdski’s example as a point of departure because her trajectory as a novelist, then a poet, and as a French and then a Ladino writer, is representative of multilingual Sephardic writers who move from one language to another either to engage with their personal, familial, or people’s past, to question a present sociopolitical condition, or to claim a hybrid identity defined or expressed by language. In this process many of such writers end up calling into question notions of a homogeneous or monolingual national identity.¹⁰

.   .   .

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of minor literatures, which became so pervasive in cultural and literary theory, privileges the minor, treating it, not only as a positive value, but as an achievement. There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor,¹¹ they claim in their study Kafka (1975, trans. 1986). The two main characteristics Deleuze and Guattari assign to minor literature are that in it language is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization,¹² and writers employ a collective assemblage of enunciation. Deterritorialized writing in their view corresponds, perhaps exclusively, to oppositional writing in a major language. [A] minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language, they assert.¹³

In Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation, multilingualism figures only as a metaphor, for multiple languages are never taken into full account, and the definition of the minor revolves around only one language, one’s own language. Chana Kronfeld has already pointed out that Deleuze and Guattari’s monolingual construction of the minor-within-the-major has a significant exclusionary effect, since it does not acknowledge the possibility of any oppositional literature written in non-major languages.¹⁴ It excludes, from the position of minor, literatures in languages that are not at the center of the Western world or the now mainstream modern canon, effectively defending an Imperial monolingualism.¹⁵

With this discussion in the background, having informed my initial thoughts on the poets I discuss here, I offer two counterarguments to Deleuze and Guattari’s position: first, I argue that minor literatures can emerge from multilingual contexts and social conditions, and second, that minor languages have the capacity to challenge and reinscribe dominant languages. My readings are guided by my own recognition of the role of minor languages in the makeup of major languages, and of the power that minor languages have in revitalizing major languages. The poets I read here—the Algerian Sadia Lévy, the Israeli Margalit Matitiahu, and the Argentine Juan Gelman—are significant on their own, and much more compelling as creators than as an answer to any theory. Indeed, together, Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman challenge the usual canons of Jewish literature and the general consensus on Jewish languages. But, in addition, they constitute counterexamples that effectively undermine Deleuze and Guattari’s formulation of the minor, each a multicultural and multilingual poet who writes from an oppositional or marginal position, and uses a threatened and minor language.

.   .   .

This book is the first to offer a sustained literary analysis of contemporary Sephardic poetry. Although poetry has had a long life in Jewish writing, it has not received adequate attention from scholars of Jewish or cultural studies, who have mostly favored narrative to investigate nationalism and processes of identity formation. In studies of Jewish poetry and Jewish languages in general, little attention has been paid to the Sephardic contribution; when it has, it typically looks at the past, as if Sephardic literature (and general culture) were only a relic. Against this trend, I decided to focus on Sephardic literature. But my focus is not on the traditional Sephardic genres that were developed in Ladino, such as the midrashim in the Me’am Lo’ez, the coplas, the romances, proverbs, and tales. Instead, I would like to run à rebours, a contra-pelo, against the grain, and turn my attention to Sephardic poetry—contemporary, multilingual, transnational Sephardic poetry. Unlike other scholars of Sephardic literature—linguists and philologists who provide descriptions, lists, and encyclopedic catalogs, or historians, for whom literary (or cultural) texts are only interesting to the extent that they serve as historical sources, I am actually concerned with the aesthetic and literary value of the works. It was this literary concern, this interest in the degree of aesthetic information of a text, that guided both the definition of my corpus and my approach to it. In Homeless Tongues I thus

• Focus on contemporary poetry

• Emphasize multilingual creative production, also acknowledging the role of other vernacular languages in addition to Ladino

• Privilege critical tools of literary analysis above the philological, historical, and ethnographic discourse that dominates the current understanding of Sephardic literature

I read Jewish multilingual poets who are themselves positioned amid different languages—each language with a particular political and social status—and who engage in a more or less conscious process of construction of identity through the negotiation of languages and texts. I am not working within the domain of national literatures, but rather in a transnational context that integrates several of the so-called national literatures, and that crosses linguistic boundaries and textual practices. One could say that this is traditionally the context of Jewish literature. But I am also looking specifically at Sephardic literature, or rather, at textual constructions of different expressions of a Sephardic identity. The result is to integrate the study of Sephardic poetry into general discussions of poetics, minority languages, minor literatures, Diaspora and nationalism, in attempt to help bridge the gap that still exists between the current critical and theoretical discourse on these issues and the field of Jewish Studies.

Homeless Tongues focuses on three little-known multilingual and multicultural Jewish poets who write from an oppositional or marginal position, using minor or threatened languages—Lévy, Matitiahu, and Gelman. Here and in my reading of Gelman I also introduce Nicoïdski. Each of these poets writes in more than one language, and uses at least a second language in opposition to her or his territorial or dominant language. In Lévy’s case, the dominant language is a colonial one, since he writes in French and Hebrew in Algeria. For the others, it is a national language: Matitiahu writes in Hebrew and Ladino in Israel, and Gelman writes in Spanish and Ladino in his exile from Argentina (Nicoïdski writes in French and Ladino). We come to see that it is through these very strategic choices of languages and intertexts that each poet expresses a Sephardic hybrid identity. In the process, their work challenges established notions of ethnic, literary, and linguistic identity.

Each of the poets treated here is engaged in his or her own unique circumstances, and as such is exemplary. Each writes from a specific place, historical condition, and cultural tradition, shaped by the specific literary and extraliterary norms of the system of languages he or she uses. In order to respect the poets’ individual differences and better approach my object of study, I draw upon several theoretical grids, among them neoformalist readings, Benjamin Harshav’s concept of frames of reference, Joshua Fishman’s ethnolinguistics and his work on threatened languages, contemporary theories of translation and intertextuality, and accounts of nationalism and Diaspora. Since a cross-cultural perspective is essential for understanding these artists, I combine stylistic analysis and cultural theory; I believe that a stylistic analysis that is sociologically and historically informed is the best approach to a body of text that is not only multilingual, but also thematizes the problem of language choice.

These poets are examples of writers who present an underlying, unifying Jewish intertextuality, represented by the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries, combined with the diverse literary traditions that inform the linguistic systems within which they write: French literature, modern lyric poetry, Spanish literature. As they reveal cultural and literary affiliations when they manipulate languages and intertexts, these poets construct their identity as Jews in complex or ambivalent positions, where multiple identities overlap and forces of influence follow several directions. Their work and the identities they negotiate are the result of the interaction with Jewish and broader non-Jewish cultural systems. Ultimately, their voices emerge in multiple accents, accents that I want to hear and cherish.

Poetic Detour

Part of my project is recognizing the Sephardic contribution to Jewish culture in general, and to its literary expression in particular. Poetry is perhaps the most important genre of literary expression in the Sephardic tradition. The most recognized genres are oral, such as ballads, songs, proverbs, and stories. The most traditional are poetic—coplas, romansas, cantigas. Many, such as the ballads, are Sephardic expressions of a characteristically Spanish popular genre. Several genres, however, developed in Ladino. The modernization and Westernization of Sephardic communities brought new genres that eventually became part of the Sephardic repertoire. Iacob Hassán calls these adopted genres.¹⁶

Here is a brief historical overview of the Sephardic literary genres: the famous and traditional orally transmitted romancero and cancionero developed from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries; in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Judeo-Spanish was mostly used in translations of the Bible and other Hebrew rabbinical and medieval literatures.¹⁷ The eighteenth century saw a surge in literary creation—much of it in the form of coplas, traditionally described as narrative poems written in stanzas with rhyme and rhythm. Coplas are the most characteristic genre of Sephardic literature, and their authors generally belonged to the intellectual elite. Initially used to preserve religious knowledge, the coplas are typically associated with men, even though, eventually, they were transmitted orally by women. The eighteenth century is also marked by the appearance of the Me’am Lo’ez, an ambitious series of rabbinical commentaries on the Bible in a foreign language, that is, in Ladino, so that the masses could have access to biblical and religious texts. With the Me’am Lo’ez Ladino matured as a language for literary creation and also established itself as no longer foreign, but a recognized Jewish language. What is called poesía de autor (autograph poetry) appeared in late nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the spread of Westernization. In the words of Paloma Díaz-Mas, it is "characterized by greater consciousness of authorship, abandonment of traditional metrical forms, Westernization of the language, and the appearance of new themes unusual in the old coplas."¹⁸ Other genres also appeared as a result of the same modernizing impetus, such as plays, historical essays, narratives (romansos), predominantly adaptations and translations, and journalism. The latter became very important in the Sephardic world. The language of journalism, Díaz-Mas observes, shows the evolution of Judeo-Spanish from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.¹⁹

Poetry still retains its prominent place in this varied literary tradition. In Sephardic poetry, piyut (liturgy), shir (song and poem), and mizmor (chant, or melody) coexist, often breaking traditional dichotomies between lowbrow and highbrow, secular and sacred, oral and written, popular and erudite, mundane and spiritual. It is also via poetry that a resurgence of literature in Ladino can be observed, it being the genre of choice for those who create in Ladino today.²⁰ Continuing this tradition, I have chosen to write about poets, observing their aesthetic value and their significance to the literatures in the languages in which they write, as well as their relevance to Jewish and cultural studies.

Sephardim and Ladino

Ladino plays a significant role in this book, inasmuch as it is a language used by two of the poets discussed in it, Margalit Matitiahu and Juan Gelman. It is still spoken by over 200,000 people in Israel, Greece, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Egypt, and North Africa, and by smaller numbers in the United States and Latin America. Marginal in relation to Yiddish, and even more so to Hebrew, Ladino is not generally well known. Here is a brief introduction.

.   .   .

After the fall of Granada, which marked the end of the Reconquista, Catholic Spain’s seven-century-long struggle to wrest the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim control, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews who refused to convert to Catholicism from Spain. On March 31, 1492, nearly 200,000 Spanish Jews went into exile, leaving for Portugal, northern Europe, and countries around the Mediterranean basin. It was the end of a vibrant multicultural medieval kingdom, home to the Christian, Muslim and Jewish faiths, as evidenced by the trilingual inscription, in Castilian, Arabic, and Hebrew, on Ferdinand III’s tomb in the cathedral of Seville.

The exiles became known as Sepharades or Sephardim, from the Hebrew name Sepharad, meaning Spain. They took with them their fifteenth-century Spanish, which included linguistic varieties such as Leonese, Aragonese and, principally, courtly Castilian. Laura Minervini explains that Judeo-Spanish is a koinē, or common dialect, arising from a sixteenth-century dialectal convergence in which Castilian is the basis. It is seen not as the direct descendant of the language of the 1492 exiles, but as the result of long-term contact accommodations between speakers of different but mutually intelligible regional varieties, she writes.²¹

The year 1492 also saw the publication of Europe’s first scientific grammar of a vernacular language, Antonio de Nebrija’s famous Gramática de la lengua castellana (Grammar of the Castilian Language). This work not only helped to consolidate and standardize Castilian usage, but also provides current-day linguists with a description of the characteristics that Spanish presented then, hence a basis with which to compare the various threads of Judeo-Spanish with fifteenth-century Spanish and thereby identify the changes that occurred following exile.

There are conflicting theories as to whether there was a specific Jewish language in Spain before the expulsion, and there is an ongoing controversy about the name of the Judeo-Spanish language. What is certain is that Judeo-Spanish has traditionally been written with the Hebrew alphabet, with eastern Sephardim (those who settled in various places in the Ottoman Empire) using a typeface called ketivad raši, or letraz de ezkritura, known in English as Rashi script, for printed material, and a cursive script named solitreo for handwritten texts. Very few people read or write solitreo today, and most of the few Judeo-Spanish publications use the Latin alphabet, which—along with Cyrillic, in the case of Bulgaria—replaced the Hebrew alphabet in the early twentieth century. In Salonika, Jews used Rashi script until World War II, but in Turkey, Mustapha Kemal Pasha, better known as Atatürk, decreed in 1928 that the Latin alphabet should replace all others in his new republic. Difficulties of transliteration persist today, with three dominant spellings vying for an increasingly smaller readership: those of the Israel-based journal Akí Yerushalayim; of Vidas Largas, based in France and Belgium; and of Şalom and its supplement El amaneser, published in Turkey. Akí Yerushalayim’s tends to be the most usual transliteration system nowadays.

The consecutive migrations of Spanish Jews—to Portugal, North Africa, and the Middle East, across the Ottoman Empire and into other Mediterranean regions—definitively shaped the language they carried with them from Spain. If regionalisms and Hispanic Arabicisms had colored Judeo-Spanish before the expulsion from Spain, after 1492 this language grew to incorporate Moroccan Arabicisms, Turkisms, Italianisms, Hellenisms, and Slavisms from the various host countries, reinforcing its character as a language of fusion. Haïm Vidal Sephiha says of modern Judeo-Spanish that 4 per cent of its loan words come from Hebrew, 15 per cent from Turkish, 20 per cent from French, 2 per cent from Ladino, etc., with all of these built on the foundation of the 15th-century Spanish substratum.²² This motley composition takes into particular account the pervasive presence of French, aided by the broad currents of modernization and Westernization under the influence of the press (journalism) and, in particular, the Alliance Israélite Universelle, which filled the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century with schools seeking to civilize the backward Jews of the region. One of the results was a new version of this evolving language, what Sephiha calls Judéo-Fragnol, or Judeo-Franco-Spanish.

There is still much disagreement as to which name should be used when referring to the Jewish Spanish language. Among the many possible names of Judeo-Spanish are: espanyol,²³ muestro espanyol (our Spanish, in opposition to espanyol halis, or true Spanish, from the Turkish), espanyolit (as used by Elias Canetti, a calque of the German Spaniolisch), espanyoliko (a variation of the former, but with the affectionate connotations provided by the diminutive Spanish suffix -iko), djudyo and djidyo (literally Jewish, a translation of the Turkish yahudice, a name given by the Turks to the only Spanish they knew), djudezmo (with a Spanish ending that usually marks nouns), jargon, a derogatory term used by the speakers themselves, haketía (the arabicized Moroccan variant of the language, but now practically recastilianized), and tetuani (the Algerian variety from the city of Oran, where the speakers originally came from Morocco). Finally, there is the option, now favored by academics, of Judeo-Spanish (djudyo-espanyol), which, in its dynamic evolution and contact with other languages has bred not only Sephiha’s Judeo-Fragnol (djudyo-franyol), referring to the Judeo-Spanish–French hybrid, but also his suggestion for the