I have found a MAJOR pastime, hobby, and source of entertainment/growth (personal, cultural, intellectual). Writing, standardizing and correcting articles for the Ladino Language Wikipedia. This is my profile, which contains links to all of the articles I have worked with. I have become so fascinated with this language and all it means to (us) sephardic jews - what differentiates sephardim the most from the rest of jews, especially ashkenazim, who constitute the mayority of the world's jewry but not Israel's, where sepharadim + mizrahim are the majority, whilst somewhat discriminated by the secular ashkenazi establishment, but that's another story. Every time I go to the synagogue I listen to some words in ladino or in haketia (the moroccan/algerian variant of ladino, whose eastern/turkish variant, usually known as djudeoespanyol, is currently the most spoken) and that definitely inspired me. Ladino is the bond that links all sephardic jews that, after being expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, took with them as their most precious treasure, even more so than the gold and all the riches that secured their lives; they took it with them to their own Diaspora, because they considered Spain their homeland (yeah, Toledo wasn't called The Jerusalem of the West in vain) and they enriched it with the vernacular languages of their newly adoptive countries: Arabic, Italian, Turkish, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbo-Croatian and of course, Hebrew, the holiest language ever, French, influenced by the Alliance Israélite Universelle and Spanish, Catalan/Valencian/Aragonese, Galician and Portuguese, the languages of the lands they left behind. Sephardim are so attached to Ladino that there were cities like Salonika, where it came to be the commercial language of the entire city. Many sephardim found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where the sultans opened their doors to them, aware of the value that was protecting a small, close-knit community with ties to many places in Europe (good vision, boys) and the oh-so-open-minded Dutch did the same, and an era of trade blossomed, thanks to the sephardim in the Mediterranean, The Netherlands, the Hanseatic city of Hamburg, the French Midi, The Kingdom of Venice and the Maghreb, where sephardim ued to be the links between the local authorities and the foreign traders, sephardim as well. Also, The Franco-Spanish Colonization of Northern Africa favoured the role of polyglot Sephardim who acted as a bridge between French/Spanish colonizers and Arab and Berber speakers. The language thrived for a long time.. but then WWII came and the Nazis took the city of Salonika, which was in Greek hands, who were not thirsty of jewish blood at all. But the Nazis almost extinguished all the jews in Salonika. This text is from Wikipedia:
During Ottoman times, the city received an influx of Muslims and Jews. By 1478, Thessaloniki had a population of 4,320 Muslims and 6,094 Greek Orthodox, as well as some Catholics, but no Jews. By c1500, the numbers had grown to 7,986 Greeks and 8,575 Muslims, briefly making the latter the majority. Around the same time, Jews were arriving from Spain. In c1500, there were only 3,770 Jews, but by 1519, there were 15,715, 54% of the city. The invitation of the Sephardic Jews that had been expelled from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, was an Ottoman demographic strategy aiming to prevent the Greek element from dominating the city. The Sephardic Jews, Muslims and Greek Orthodox remained the principal groups in the city for the next 4 centuries. The city remained the largest Jewish city in the world for at least two centuries, and of its 130,000 inhabitants at the start of the 20th century, around 60,000 were Sephardic Jews out of a total population of almost 120,000. Some Romaniote Jews were also present.
Ladino has aroused the interest of linguists because it preserves gramatical structures from Old Spanish; it's like speaking in the language of El Quixote with a turkish or arabic accent, to a certain extent :-) It fascinates me because of all the background it has, perhaps richer than yiddish and because it is linked both to my (non-jewish) hispanic and Dutch/Altoner roots. Here are my two cents to contribute to enrich ladino and help it from disappearing more than 500 years of a culture that still mourns being separated from its mother land. Ke biva el lashon djudeoespayol!
