Judeo-Spanish (Judezmo, Ladino)

The Ibero-Romance-speaking Jews of medieval Christian Iberia were linguistically distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors primarily as a result of their language’s unique Hebrew-Aramaic component; preservations from older Jewish Greek, Latin, and Arabic; a tradition of translating sacred Hebrew and Aramaic texts into their language using archaisms and Hebrew-Aramaic rather than Hispanic syntax; and their Hebrew-letter writing system. With the expulsions from Iberia in the late 15th century, most of the Sephardim who continued to maintain their Iberian-origin language resettled in the Ottoman Empire, with smaller numbers in North Africa and Italy. Their forced migration, and perhaps a conscious choice, essentially disconnected the Sephardim from the Spanish language as it developed in Iberia and Latin America, causing their language—which they came to call laðino ‘Romance’, ʤuðezmo or ʤuðjó ‘Jewish, Judezmo’, and more recently (ʤudeo)espaɲol ‘Judeo-Spanish’—to appear archaic when compared with modern Spanish. In their new locales the Sephardim developed the Hispanic component of their language along independent lines, resulting in further differentiation from Spanish. Divergence was intensified through borrowing from contact languages of the Ottoman Empire such as Turkish, Greek, and South Slavic. Especially from the late 18th century, factors such as the colonializing interests of France, Italy, and Austro-Hungary in the region led to considerable influence of their languages on Judezmo. In the 19th century, the dismemberment of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires and their replacement by highly nationalistic states resulted in a massive language shift to the local languages; that factor, followed by large speech-population losses during World War II and immigration to countries stressing linguistic homogeneity, have in recent years made Judezmo an endangered language.

שיבולת‎

In Judges 12, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. The text itself has to substitute a different Hebrew letter, the samekh, in order to convey the point of the story. The episode is preceded by the judge Jephthah’s sacrifice of his own daughter, as a result of a rash vow to God. These and other aspects of the text suggest that the shibboleth story points to an autoimmune disorder afflicting both text and social text, both patriarchal speech acts and their linguistic medium.

Karaism and Christian Hebraism: A New Document*

In September 1641 Joannes Stephanus Rittangel sent a Hebrew letter to John Selden, the prominent English jurist and Christian Hebraist, soliciting Selden’s assistance in publishing Karaite manuscripts. The letter’s publication here contributes both to our knowledge of the activities of Rittangel — expert in Karaism and Professor Extraordinary of Semitic languages at the University of Koenigsberg — and to the picture we have of Christian Hebraism in England. From this letter and from references to Rittangel in contemporary literature, we can reconstruct some of his activities from the time he was recorded to have been in Lithuania at the end of 1640 to his appearance in Amsterdam in late 1641. We can also appreciate how knowledge of Karaism was spread among English Christians such as John Selden and Ralph Cudworth, and also how that information contributed to the millenarianism of Samuel Hartlib and John Dury.