[lg policy] U of Washington builds largest digital library of Sephardic language

Tue Aug 11 19:05:56 UTC 2015

UW builds largest digital library of Sephardic language
Originally published August 9, 2015 at 8:30 pm Updated August 10, 2015 at
4:00 pm
Seattle is home to one of the most vibrant Sephardic Jewish communities in
the country, and UW professor Devin Naar is working to keep its dying
language, Ladino, alive. (Bettina Hansen & Corinne Chin / The Seattle Times)

Fast becoming a Sephardic guru, a University of Washington professor is
building the world’s first digital library of books, letters and other
materials in the centuries-old language of Ladino, with materials donated
from Seattle’s large Sephardic Jewish community.
SECTION SPONSOR
By Nina Shapiro <http://www.seattletimes.com/author/nina-shapiro/>
Seattle Times staff reporter

Devin Naar wasn’t hired at the University of Washington to teach Sephardic
studies. The young scholar, only in his late 20s at the time, actually came
to the university in 2011 to teach modern Jewish history.

Then the local Sephardic community found out that Naar could speak and read
Ladino — the language of the diaspora
<http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-jews-weigh-becoming-spanish-citizens-500-years-after-expulsion/>
resulting
from Spain’s expulsion of the Jews in 1492, a mixture of Spanish, Arabic,
Turkish, Greek and other languages picked up in the lands where they
settled.
[image: Devin Naar’s collection includes hundreds of letters between family
members in Seattle and their kin in the U.S. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle
Times)]
[image: Devin Naar taught himself to decipher Ladino using library books.
(Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)]
[image: Devin Naar’s collection includes hundreds of letters between family
members in Seattle and their kin in the U.S. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle
Times)]
[image: Devin Naar taught himself to decipher Ladino using library books.
(Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)]
1 of 2 Devin Naar’s collection includes hundreds of letters between family
members in Seattle and their kin in the U.S. and abroad. At left is a
letter written in Ladino with Hebrew script; at right is a 9-year-old
girl’s Ladino letter written in the Latin alphabet.... (Bettina Hansen/The
Seattle Times) More

This is an unusual skill. Naar says he doesn’t know of any U.S.
universities that teach students how to read Ladino in Hebrew script, as it
was written until the mid-1900s. This is particularly difficult when it
comes to handwritten Ladino because, Naar says, “the way Sephardic Jews
write Hebrew
<http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/how-to-write-soletreo-ladino-alphabet-with-david-bunis/>
looks
almost nothing like the way other Jews write Hebrew.” Cursive Ladino, in
fact, is reminiscent of Arabic.
Related story

Seattle Jews weigh becoming Spanish citizens, 500 years after expulsion
<http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/seattle-jews-weigh-becoming-spanish-citizens-500-years-after-expulsion/>

Naar, trying to decipher letters left behind by a Sephardic great-uncle,
taught himself to decode the script using library books.

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Once local Sephardic Jews discovered that, they started bringing him Ladino
items they had squirreled away: a grandfather’s will, letters, newspapers,
wedding contracts, songbooks, photos with inscriptions. And books. Lots of
books.

In all — including the voluminous materials Naar found in a cache of
Safeway bags buried in the basement of Seward Park’s Sephardic Bikur Holim
Congregation, dubbed the “Safeway Archives”— Naar has collected more than
700 Ladino books and at least as many items of other types.

The Ladino collection is among the nation’s largest, second to the one
housed at Yeshiva University in New York. Among the finds is a rare book of
ethics published in Istanbul in the 1740s and a 1916 book
<http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/a-guide-for-sephardic-immigrants/>of
advice to immigrants to the U.S., which among weightier matters carries a
useful explanation of how to eat ice-cream cones. (Ice cream, Sephardic
Jews had seen before. Ice cream *cones*, not so much.)
[image: Devin Naar taught himself to decipher Ladino using library books.
(Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)]Devin Naar taught himself to decipher
Ladino using library books. (Bettina Hansen/The Seattle Times)

As excitement built among Seattle’s Sephardim, who still use some Ladino
words in prayers and everyday speech, several families and a foundation
donated money to get a new Sephardic studies program
<http://jewishstudies.washington.edu/sephardic-studies/>off the ground. It
started three years ago, with Naar as its chairman, as part of UW’s Stroum
Center for Jewish Studies.

Naar and his small team are digitally scanning their Ladino materials to
create what they believe will be the world’s first interactive, online Ladino
library and museum
<http://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16786coll3>.
They have started to upload materials, along with English translations of
key passages and historical context.

And Naar, now 32, with youthful ringlets that belie a mature, scholarly
manner, is fast becoming a Sephardic guru. He recently returned from a
conference in France, where he delivered a lecture about Seattle’s
Sephardic Jews — in Ladino, joining a small group of people from around the
world who understand the centuries-old language.

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/uw-builds-largest-digital-library-of-sephardic-language/

-- 
=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+

 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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