[lg policy] A New Dawn: After long decline, Ladino in Turkey enjoys a modest revival

Thu Nov 4 15:16:16 UTC 2010

A New Dawn: After long decline, Ladino in Turkey enjoys a modest revival
By Robin Cembalest | 7:00 am October 8, 2009 Print This Post

 The last thing I need is another shawl. But as I wandered down
Istitklal Cadesi, the main shopping drag of modern Istanbul and I
spotted bright red embroidered swirls dancing across soft black wool,
I found myself lured into the Ipek Silk Shop, where soon enough I was
presented with endless variations of my original object of desire. At
least it is not a rug, I reasoned as the salesman performed the
timeless ritual, shifting the textiles tenderly from one pile to
another. Like all shopkeepers in the tourist centers, he—along with
the brothers and cousins he worked with—spoke fluent English. “These
make very good Christmas presents,” he commented, as I perused a stack
of floral neck warmers. He paused and studied my face. “You don’t
celebrate Christmas, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“Neither do we.”

How fortuitous to meet this genial Sephardic clan on my way to the
headquarters of newspaper in Judeo-Spanish, also known as Ladino, the
language brought to Turkey by the Jews after the Expulsion from Spain,
and I asked the man, could we complete the transaction in it. Well, we
understood it, he said, from hearing it growing up, but the language
his family spoke was the same modern one I had learned living in
Spain.

The encounter was a fairly accurate representation of the general
state of affairs of Ladino among Turkey’s 20,000 Jews, I soon learned.
The average age of native Ladino speakers is at least 70, according to
Karen Gerson Sarhon, coordinator of the city’s Ottoman-Turkish
Sephardic Culture Research Center and editor of El Amaneser (The
Dawn), one of the world’s few remaining Judeo-Spanish periodicals,
when I reached her office. “Ladino is dying,” she told me
matter-of-factly in English, before switching at my request to
Judeo-Spanish. I was surprised how much I understood. “Now more people
are interested in learning the language,” she added, “but it’s too
late. It’s more feasible to learn modern Spanish—and Spanish gives
them access to their heritage.”

In the 1970s, Gerson Sarhon notes, it was a common expectation that
Ladino would be dead in 10 to 15 years. Then, in the 80s, Turkey
abolished restrictions on foreign travel, enabling Turkish Jews to see
how far even a smattering of Ladino went in communicating in
Spanish-speaking countries. At the same time, the impending
quincentenary of the arrival of Jews in the Ottoman Empire brought
scholars of Sephardic culture to Turkey, producing what Gerson Sarhon
describes as a “halo effect” that raised consciousness of a language
that the local community had cast aside.

The opening of the research center, in December 2003, was intended to
capitalize on that interest, but it came at a bittersweet moment for
the country’s Jewish community, just a month after fatal synagogue
bombings. “There is a lot of anti-Semitism powered by outside forces,”
Gerson Sarhon said. “It is not like it used to be.” The center’s
mission is to research, archive, and transmit the language, music, and
history of Turkish Jewry, a task made more difficult by the fact so
little was written down. “It was mostly an oral culture,” she said.
“Whatever we had was not documented.” The change of Ladino
transcription in the 1920s, shortly after Turkish independence, from
the Rashi alphabet, with its Hebrew characters, to Latin ones, makes
preserving the Ladino heritage even more difficult, Gerson Sarhon
said, because very few people today can read the language in the old
alphabet.

Amaneser, founded in 2005, is a last relic of a grand tradition of
Ladino publishing in the Ottoman Empire, which began in 1842 with the
launch of the newspaper La buena esperansa in Izmir. By the interwar
period, as Sarah Abrevaya Stein recounts in her lively history of
Jewish ethnic publishing, Making Jews Modern, more than 300 Ladino
periodicals were published in Turkey and the Balkans. But even though
in the mid-1920s, 85 percent of Turkish Jews identified Ladino as
their mother tongue, the language was already in decline. It was
eclipsed first by French, which became the language of educated
Sephardic Jews anxious to align themselves with Western European
culture, and then, with the founding of the Turkish republic in 1923,
of Turkish.

While the government actively promoted the national language with a
policy called “Citizen Speak Turkish,” it made no effort to suppress
Ladino, as it did with Kurdish. However, in a sense this effort came
from the community itself. In contrast to Eastern Europe—where at the
same time, as Stein notes, activists were working to promote Yiddish
literature and education, establishing institutions like YIVO—in
Turkey, Sephardic Jews made no effort to transmit Ladino, which they
viewed as backward, to a new generation. Jews, who were notorious for
speaking Turkish with “horrible accents,” Gerson Sarhon says, “thought
they’d better give up this old language and incorporate Turkish into
their home life. People wanted to assimilate.”

In this century, at a time when Yiddish continues to be used as the
primary language in chasidic households around the globe, Ladino has
“lost its function in the home,” said Gerson Sarhon, who wrote two
master’s theses—in social psychology and applied linguistics—on
Judeo-Spanish. Though many Jews aged 50 to 70 learned Ladino as a
second language from their parents, Jews of younger generations, like
my new friends in the scarf store, may have learned it from their
grandparents—or not at all. Currently, Gerson Sarhon is supervising
the effort to record the vanishing generation of native speakers and
post sound files on the Web as part of a study to analyze distinctions
in vocabulary and accent. She has also devoted her career to
documenting Turkish Jewry’s vanishing musical traditions, recording
secular and liturgical songs as a lead singer in the ensemble Los
Pasharos Sefardis.

Though the center has a small book publishing arm—which just produced
a lavish new volume documenting Turkish synagogues—its main resources
are devoted to the monthly Amaneser and the weekly Salom, which was
printed in Ladino until it switched to Turkish in 1983. Salom , which
publishes a monthly Ladino supplement, counts about 4,000 subscribers,
Gerson Sarhon says; Amaneser, about 250—not only in Turkey but as far
afield as Spain, China, Latin America, and the Philippines. While
Salom publishes hard news—mostly stories from the Diaspora that don’t
necessarily make it into the local papers—Amaneser provides a space
for community news, history lessons, book and film reviews, memoirs,
short stories, and recipes, many of them sent in by readers from all
over the world and edited by the mostly female, mostly volunteer
staff.

Recent issues included an item on the Turkish Jewish poet Yosef Habi
Gerez, a reflection on Baruch Spinoza, discussions of Jewish holidays,
an interpretation of the story of Esther, a recollection of life in
Chile under Allende, an interview with the Turkish Jewish photographer
Alberto Modiano, a profile of the Sephardic singer Sandra Bessis, and
a recipe for Bulemas de Monastir, a rose-shaped pastry with spinach or
eggplant. Each issue also includes a transliteration of the Rashi
alphabet along with that of a Judeo-Turkish proverb, such as “No ay
koza ke trae yoro al mundo kuanto el vino” (“Nothing makes the world
cry more than wine”), from a Ladino commentary on the Torah published
in the 18th century.

One issue last summer featured an interview by Gerson Sarhon with
Paloma Díaz-Mas, a Spanish scholar who specializes in Sephardic
culture. Gerson Sarhon asks Díaz-Mas if she believes that the current
revival of interest in Ladino is enough to preserve the language, or
if in time Judeo-Spanish will meld with modern Spanish. Political
initiatives, Díaz Mas suggests, might help to maintain and cultivate
the language, much as what happened with minority languages that had
been prohibited under the Franco regime. However, she notes, those
languages have since been declared official in their individual
regions, an outcome not possible for Judeo-Spanish.

Still, Díaz Mas comments, the revival highlights the way people use
language to define their cultural and ethnic identity. The new
generation, she says, is looking for a connection to the language
“that identifies them as Sephardim, not only among non-Jews but among
Jews of other origins.”

As a younger generation seeks out Spanish to commune with their past,
meanwhile, there’s a small irony in the fact that the older
generation—people who still speak Ladino as their first language—still
think “anyone who can speak Spanish is Jewish,” Gerson Sarhon told me.
“It’s part of the identity that people have in their minds.”

Robin Cembalest is executive editor of ARTnews.

RELATED: To hear an audio sample of spoken Ladino, listen to Tablet’s
podcast with Marcel Cohen, author of In Search of a Lost Ladino:
Letter to Antonio Saura.

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/17922/a-new-dawn/
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