1. The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and their language
There is a particular Jewish culture which is now struggling to survive, but as late as the 1940s it was that of over 300,000 Jews who lived in the pre-1918 Ottoman Empire.
This empire, at its height in the 16th century, covered an area which extended south-east through what used to be called Yugoslavia, the Balkans, Northern Greece, much of what is now Bulgaria, Turkey, and through Palestine to Egypt, as well as in many of today's Arab States.
The dominant majority of the Jews who lived in the western part of this vast area spoke Spanish, because they were descended from the Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492, and from generations of forced converts to Christianity who managed to leave Spain and Portugal and make their way, sometimes indirectly, to the Ottoman Empire where they were welcomed and became a valued minority.
The Spanish that they brought with them and transmitted to their descendants was the language current in 1492, but over the following centuries it went through the natural changes of language and was heavily populated by words from the surrounding languages, particularly Turkish. Later, when the French Jewish organisation, the Alliance Israelite Universelle, opened schools from 1860 onwards all over the Sephardi world, the children who attended them were taught in French, which affected the Spanish that they spoke in cities such as Istanbul, Salonika, Izmir and Jerusalem. This form of Spanish is usually called Ladino. However, its speakers call it espanyol, so in Modern Hebrew it is called spanyolit as opposed to Sefardit, the Hebrew word for Spanish. The word Ladino, strictly speaking, refers to the literal translation into Spanish from the Hebrew Bible and particularly the Passover Haggada, so that for example, in the well-known line, Ma nishtana ha-laila ha-zeh micol ha-leilot, in Ladino the words ha-laila hazeh are la noche la esta [...] or, as it would be if English did the same 'the night the this' . Ladino is translation language, following the word order and sentence structure of the Hebrew, but it is not how Jews spoke everyday Spanish.
2. Decline
The Jewish populations of the Ottoman Empire and their language began to decline from the late 19th century onwards. Emigration to North and South America, to Palestine and to France led to subsequent generations knowing Ladino only as mother's and later grandmother's language. The growth of nationalist feelings among the peoples of the Ottoman Empire, particularly Greeks and Bulgarians, and the independence of all the Empire after 1918 except what is now called Turkey, encouraged young Jews to speak the local language rather than Ladino. When the Second World War came the Nazis deported and murdered the Spanish-speaking Jews of Greece and Yugoslavia. After the war, most of the survivors went to North or South America or to Israel. In Israel, Hebrew has been such a powerful influence that Ladino has now to be protected, taught in universities, and be known as a culture which has to be preserved, but it is doubtful how many people actually use it naturally in speech, leave alone read it. There is a Ladino section in a Jewish newspaper published in Istanbul and there are radio broadcasts in the language from Israel and Spain, but little more except for the web forum Ladinokomunita which circulates dozens of messages daily.
Furthermore, nowadays few people can read Ladino (called 'Judeo-Spanish' by scholars) in its original Hebrew alphabet. Like Yiddish and Judeo-Arabic, Ladino was written and printed in the Hebrew alphabet, in the type-face called Rashi because it is used to print the commentary on Bible and Talmud of Rabbi Shelomo ben Yitshak of Troyes(1040-1100), known as Rashi. Since about 1929, however, when the Turkish Government insisted that Turkish should be printed in the Roman alphabet, and not in the Arabic letters of before, Ladino also has been printed in the Roman alphabet, perhaps because the printers had incurred the expense of buying a new set of Roman type, with which they replaced the blunt Hebrew type they had used for a long time.
3. Ladino Literature
Ladino produced a considerable literature. A lot of this is oral, particularly the ballad tradition, which scholars study because medieval Spanish ballads have been preserved by the Sephardim ever since they left Spain over 500 years ago, and different versions of the same traditional ballad are tracked down to the last person who knows them, perhaps an old lady who no longer lives where she did as a child, in Istanbul, Jerusalem or Tangiers, but in Buenos Aires, Montreal or Seattle, and these versions are carefully studied by specialists to examine the method of transmission of a tradition. In the early 20th century there was a flourishing Ladino drama, but it hardly exists today.
It was the Spanish Jews who brought the first printing press to the Ottoman empire, and published many Hebrew texts as well as books in Ladino on religious subjects. The first book was the Arba'ah Turim, by Rabbi Ya'akov ben Asher, a code of Jewish law written in Spain, which was reprinted in Istanbul , according to the printer's colophon, on 4th Tevet, 5254 or 13th December, 1493. The most famous of Ladino texts is a rabbinic work, published in a series over the 18th and 19th centuries under the title Me'am Lo'ez. This is a phrase from the psalm which begins: 'Be'tset Yisrael mi-Mitsrayyim, bet ya'akov me'am lo'ez' or 'When Israel went out of Egypt, the House of Jacob from a people speaking a strange language'. Me'am Lo'ez is a massive running commentary on Scripture, extracted from rabbinic sources, but unlike most rabbinic literature it was not written in Hebrew or Talmudic Aramaic, but in the language of the people, in Spanish in Hebrew characters, and we have evidence that the majority of households possessed at least a few pages of it and read it habitually on Shabbat, and we also learn that shopkeepers would pull out a well-thumbed copy from under the counter when business was slow, while fathers used to give it as part of their daughters' marriage dowries. And so a tradition developed in cities like Istanbul, Salonika, Izmir, Edirne (Adrianopolis), Jerusalem and the areas of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria where Jews lived, to do what in Ladino is called meldar, meaning to read together.
4. The Novel in Ladino: Elia Karmona.
To come to fiction, there was no tradition of written fiction in Ladino, or in the Ottoman Empire at all. The Ladino novel arose from the Ladino press, which flourished from about 1860 onwards.
Ladino fiction began in about 1880, when people read a chapter of a novel or a novelette printed in their weekly newspaper. Many of these novels are now lost for ever. Later, printers issued novels in weekly parts, and this is the case with the novel which I published in a bilingual edition in February, 2009. Called La muzher onesta, or 'The Chaste Wife' It has seven parts of 16 pages each, bound into a paper booklet to be sold as cheaply as possible. Its author was Elia Rafael Karmona of Istanbul (1869-1932), one of the best known Ladino writers of his time. Like other authors, he had to earn his living in many ways. He was a journalist, the editor of a comic newspaper and the writer of most of it, and sometimes even the typesetter. Most of what we know about him comes from an autobiography he wrote in 1908, when the relaxation of censorship following the revolution of the 'Young Turks', allowed him to publish his fiction and his comic newspaper El Djugeton ('The Clown') freely.
Karmona wrote close on 60 novels. Altogether scholars calculate that the total number of Ladino novels is anywhere between 350 and 500, many of which are known only by their titles because publishers listed them at the back of their novels. However, we have very few catalogues of library holdings. The largest Ladino stock is in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem, but we are also fortunate to have a recent of British Library holdings in Ladino. Otherwise, there are catalogues of the Ladino material in the Library of Congress and some private collections, and that is all. This is a major problem: we don't know what there is or where it is save for the private Valmadonna collection which was in London but is at the time of writing about to be sold in New York.
5. The Chaste Wife
Karmona's novel, whose full title is La muzher onesta provada por su marido or The Chaste Wife tested by her Husband, was published in 5685, according to the title page, that is 1924 or 1925. As far as can be seen, it is an original novel, although the literary trope of a jealous lover or husband testing his mistress or wife is frequent (Mozart's Cosí Fan Tutte is an example). Most Ladino novels, however, are translations or adaptations of sensational 19th century French or other novels (The Count of Monte Cristo and Les Miserables are the best-known) or novels which had an element of adventure in them, beginning with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver's Travels, and then other 18th and 19th century French novels such as Manon Lescaut, Paul et Virginie, La Dame des Camelias, and so on. These were usually very much shortened or rewritten, as were many other novels which are little known today but best-sellers in their time, such as Sue's Mystères de Paris.
However, even original novels tended to the grotesque, violent and horrific on the one hand, or the novellettish and sentimental on the other.
I wanted to transliterate and translate an original novel and one which read as if it really might have happened, that is, was realistic, and preferably dealt with contemporary Ladino-speaking society. There was also the question of length. Most Ladino novelettes are very short, although some are extremely long. La muzher onesta has 15-16000 words, in a few chapters, and was sold in weekly parts of 16 pages in small format, without covers or pictures, and this would have brought the price within household budgets. Its length was about right for my purposes. It is in a bound volume in the British Library.
The story is simple. The characters are prosperous young Jews. The text never says they are Jewish, but they do use one or two Hebrew words in their Spanish. (While Ladino novels often lack Jewish content, they were read and written only by Jews, so in this sense they are part of Jewish literature). One assumes that the action is contemporary, because cars are mentioned, and that the events take place where Karmona and probably most of his readers lived, that is Istanbul, not that this really matters for the story. There is a newly married couple. The husband determines to test his wife's fidelity by sending young men to try to seduce her. The young men, either unwilling or boastful of their seductive powers, visit her and fall immediately in love with her. She - her name is Julietta - sends them packing. Karmona's point of view is that the husband's attitude is wrong. He thinks that he must be fiercely suspicious of his wife in order to prove his manliness and his love. Julietta, the wife, says that if he doesn't trust her he cannot really love her, and that sending men to test her chastity is insulting. She loves only her husband, but she points out to him that if he keeps on trying to see if she will fall for a persuasive man, maybe she will, but that he is wrong to trust the young men to tell him if she does promise her favours. In the end, Julietta manages to play a trick on him by locking one of the men in a cupboard and she proves to her husband that the hopeful lover thinks he only has to wait for the husband to leave and Julietta will release him and let him have what he wants. With that the novel ends.
Techniques of modern criticism cannot be easily applied to this novel. It might be better to think about the Ladino novel as audiences of the same epoch looked at the silent film. This required a simple plot line, fierce emotions conveyed by gesture and accompanying music, brief subtitles, and an audience which wanted easily-understood but exciting drama and violence, but all to come out right in the end. And this is largely what the Ladino novel gave its readers.
Nevertheless, what is refreshing about this particular novel is the main female character, Julietta, the newly-married wife whose husband tests her fidelity. Unlike other women in Ladino novels, Julietta is not a dragon-lady, not some fierce dominatrix, nor a hysteric, not a silently-suffering wife of unbelievable self-sacrifice, but a women who reacts with dignity to her husband's offensive behaviour. She neither screams at him, nor weeps nor begs. She behaves with dignity and aplomb. She reacts to the young men's protestations of love not with giggles, embarrassment or outrage, but with gentle scorn. Since she has a school friend who is introduced as Madame Clotilde, we may assume that Karmona hoped that his readers would think that Julietta had enjoyed a French education of the sort that was given in the schools of the Alliance, which Karmona himself had attended, and she reacts to the young men's declarations of love like a sophisticated Parisienne. She comes out of the novel very well, as a real modern heroine, who controls her husband and indeed preserves him from making an absolute fool of himself. In this novel it is the men who look arrogant and ridiculous, which leads me to imagine the contrasting ways in which men and women would react to the book when it was read aloud, as was the practice.
Indeed, how extraordinary it seems that on a Shabbat afternoon, somebody would read this story, with its theme of attempts to seduce a married woman, aloud in the family circle, in the presence of children and young married couples. However, seduction and adultery are major themes in the medieval ballad tradition which was so popular among the Spanish Jews, so when Maurice, Richard and Giacomo, the three young men with their Europeanised names, tell Julietta, 'Madame, me muero por vos, tened piedad', that is 'I'm dying for you, have pity'), it did not perhaps cause as much of a shock as it might have done in a more prudish Jewish society.
6. The text and problems of transliteration
So let us have a brief look at the text. Below is the title page, then a page in the original Hebrew letters, then the transliteration into Spanish and lastly my translation into English. Let me just call your attention to the text in Hebrew letters. You'll notice that it is not in the usual square capitals that we know. This is rabbinic or Rashi type. Now, as in most Hebrew printing there are no vowels, but alef+yod stands for 'e' or 'i' and the vav for 'o' or oo'. Some letters have a little half-circle or diacritic mark above them. This is because the Spanish spoken at the time of the Expulsion in 1492 had four sounds which could not easily be rendered in the Hebrew alphabet that the medieval Spanish Jews used. These were: sh, zh, ch and ge, so for zh they used the Hebrew zayin with the diacritic. In transliterating today, my problem was that modern Spanish does not have those sounds, except the ch. How, for instance, does the transliterator who is writing for the modern Spanish reader, who does not have the sound zh, convey the sound Muzher for instance, in the title? There are different conventions for transliteration. I chose to transliterate in the way I thought would give modern Spanish readers the clearest guide to pronunciation, so I've had to reproduce zh, for example, as ž, and sh as š. I don't always know if Hebrew gimmel with the diacritic was pronounced j or ch. Ch is easy because the sound exists in Spanish and is written ch, but g does not, so for the word for 'Jewish' I've written gudiyo, and told readers in the Spanish preface that the g is to be pronounced like j in the English word 'John'. If I wrote the sound as 'j' a modern Spanish reader would pronounce the letter like the Hebrew khaf guttural.
The title page is partly in Hebrew square capitals but some in in Rashi type. It tells us that the book is called La muzher onesta and that its author is Elia R. Karmona 'direktor del Gugeton (Karmona's comic paper)' and that it was published in Constantinople in 5685 and where it was printed. The page in Hebrew letters text is the beginning of Chapter Two, together with the text in transliteration, which produces Spanish in slightly unfamiliar spelling, and then the translation.
It is important that a few of the publications of this endangered Jewish language should be preserved and transliterated, because they are living examples of a rich Spanish Jewish culture which is rapidly disappearing.
TO READ MORE:
See Introduction to Michael Alpert, The Chaste Wife, translated from the Ladino, (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2009. ISBN 9 781905 512669), Introduction.
Michael Alpert, 27 November, 2009
