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The last Judeo-Spanish speakers in Turkey

2022-09-28T10:54:59.467Z


Ivo Molinas, director of the Sephardic weekly 'Salom', which publishes two pages in Ladino, warns of the danger of extinction of a language that is heard less and less and is of no interest to new generations


The director of the weekly 'Salom', Ivo Molinas, in front of a shelf with copies of the publication. Luis Mazarrasa

“A lo tuerto tuerto, a lo dereço, dereço”

was the quote that appeared for years under the head of the Turkish Sephardic newspaper

Salom

, before becoming a weekly, today with only two pages in Judeo-Spanish.

Although the latest publications in Ladino try to survive in Turkey against all odds, this Spanish language is about to disappear after more than 500 years of presence in the Ottoman country.

"We are the last generation of Sephardic Jews who speak Ladino, even my children barely understand it," warns Ivo Molinas, 60, director of

Salom

and the monthly publication

El Amaneser.

, is entirely in the language that the Sephardic community in Turkey has used since its arrival at the end of the 15th century and that in one of its last numbers announced

“A very Efikache konsierto in the synagogue of Edirne”.

Molinas assures that these publications constitute the only press in the world that is published uninterruptedly in Ladino.

In Israel, where a large part of the 50,000 Jews of Spanish origin who lived in Turkey have emigrated in the last 50 years, "something is published, but very occasionally and, of course, without regularity," he says.

The reasons for the decline of this language to the point of being in real danger of extinction are mainly the decrease in the Turkish Sephardic community, which in recent decades has gone from those 50,000 to 16,000 members - the vast majority based in Istanbul, barely 1,000 individuals in Izmir and two families in Bursa—;

and the lack of interest of the new generations, who speak Turkish, Hebrew, English and who, above all, since Spain granted dual nationality,

More information

The Judeo-Spanish refuses to die

Salom,

founded 75 years ago, was published entirely in Ladino until the 1970s, and in both Istanbul and Izmir there had been several newspapers published in the previous decades in the language of the Jews expelled from the Peninsula in 1492.

"In fact, although 40% of the community understands it, among us we no longer speak Ladino, as our parents did," continues the journalist who, however, believes that the use of the old language will survive in this weekly, which distributes about 3,000 copies and has more readers in its digital edition, because there will always be someone who takes care of those pages, even if it is for romanticism, as, in fact, he does.

The then director of the RAE, Darío Villanueva (standing), Shmuel Refael Vivante and Jacob Bentolila, at the constitution of the Ladino academy in Madrid, in 2018. Jaime Villanueva

Newspapers written entirely in Ladino were very popular in Turkey in the past, and in Izmir, where there was a large Sephardic community, three newspapers with many readers were published at the end of the 19th century:

La Buena Esperanza, El novelista

and

El Meseret.

In

The first years of the 20th century were joined by

El Pregonero, La Boz de Izmir, La Boz del Pueblo and El Comercial

, according to the American writer and professor of Judaic Studies at Binghamton University of New York, Dina Danon, in her book

The Jews of Ottoman Izmir

.

The director of

Salom

points out that Spain does not show much interest in the preservation of Ladino, although he recognizes that the real problem is the disinterest of his own community.

In fact, the Cervantes Institute in Istanbul had to cancel some free courses in this language last year due to lack of students.

Sephardic Jews who come to Cervantes to take a course want to learn Spanish.

Interior of an edition of the Song of Songs with the text in Hebrew and the Ladino translation of the original Hebrew and its Aramaic version (Liorna, 1769). Yael Macías

Gonzalo Manglano, director of the Cervantes in the city of the Golden Horn, assures that Spain does everything possible so that Ladino does not disappear, but the difficulties are many: "Together with the Saramago Foundation of Portugal and the Jewish community of Turkey, the This year Cervantes has requested a tender within the EU Horizon Program for a three million euro project aimed at rescuing languages ​​in danger of extinction”.

If the funds for this project are obtained, the Cervantes will coordinate it and, in addition to the aforementioned organisms, the Casa Sefarad of Madrid, the Turkish Ministry of Culture and representatives of the Sephardic culture in Israel will join.

This initiative plans to rehabilitate the Selaniko synagogue in Istanbul, which will host a cultural center that promotes, with new technologies, the preservation of Ladino, a language that a Spaniard today can understand, as anyone who has ever conversed with a Sephardic will have verified. Turkish, Bulgarian, Greek or Israeli.

The ladino out of Turkey

Apart from the Sephardic community in Turkey, in which the director of

Salom

calculates about 7,000 individuals who understand Judeo-Spanish, "but not all of them speak it", it is difficult to ascertain how many Ladino-speakers remain in the rest of the world, because there has never been a census, not even from the Sephardic diaspora.

Estimates range from 500,000, a figure considered very optimistic by Aldina Quintana, a doctor in Hispanic Philology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who in statements to EL PAÍS in 2019 considered the most realistic number to be around 133,000, most of them in Israel.

The creation in 2020 of the Akademia Nasionala del Ladino (ANL) in Jerusalem, corresponding to the Royal Spanish Academy, is an attempt to preserve this language.

However, in conversations with the journalist Pablo Román, the nonagenarian Israeli Moshe Shaul, vice president of the National Ladino Authority for almost two decades, predicted that "Judeo-Spanish spoken in families will hardly last another decade or two."

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Source: elparis

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