Spain’s leading authority on the Spanish language is to establish a special branch in Israel that will work to preserve Djudeo Espanyol — the language of Jewish communities that once hailed from Spain before the expulsion of the country’s Jews in 1492.
Judeo-Spanish, wrongly called Ladino too, combines old Spanish with elements of Hebrew and other languages, among them Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Aramaic and some of the Balkan languages, depending on where it was spoken in the intervening centuries.
Exiles from Spain, known as Sephardim (the Hebrew word for people of Spain), moved to North Africa, the Middle East, Europe and Latin America after the expulsion.
While Djudeo Espanyol is still spoken by small numbers of people all over the world, most speakers today live in Israel.
Shmuel Refael, director of the Salti Center for Djudeo Espanyol Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, estimated that some 400,000 Israelis have some knowledge of the language.
Spain’s King Juan Carlos, right, speaks with Abraham Haim, chairperson of the governing Sephardic Community of Jerusalem, before their meeting in the Zarzuela Palace in Madrid, Spain, Thursday, March 13, 2014. (AP Photo/Abraham Caro Marin)
The Spanish Royal Academy will add the planned Israeli branch to 23 existing academies for the Spanish language spread across South America and beyond, including in countries such as the Philippines, the Guardian newspaperreported Tuesday.
Darío Villanueva, the academy’s director, said that Judeo-Spanish was “an extraordinarily important cultural and historical phenomenon.”
“The Jews who were expelled in 1492 dispersed around Europe and the Americas, taking with them the Spanish language as it was spoken at the time of their expulsion,” he told the Guardian.
“All of this has been miraculously preserved over the centuries. There’s literature, folklore, translations of the Bible and even modern newspapers written in Djudeo Espanyol.”
Isaac Querub, president of Spain’s Federation of Jewish Communities, described Judeo-Spanish as “the language that mothers have used to rock their babies to sleep with for more than five centuries… that’s been used to pass down recipes and the one that is spoken in the intimacy of home. Even after all these hundreds of years, it’s still being used.”
Two years ago, Spain and Portugal — Jews were expelled from the latter in 1497 — offered nationality to the descendants of expelled Jews in a move aimed at correcting what the Spanish government called a “historical wrong.”
Judeo-Portuguese is no longer spoken.