Haberes buenos! Hebrew U initiates first Ladino intensive language program
Inaugural summer session attracted a diverse group of students, who took a deep dive into the living tradition of Judeo-Spanish and encountered native speakers
Gavriel Fiske is a reporter at The Times of Israel
The world’s first Ladino ulpan was launched this summer. For two-and-a-half weeks, 28 students were immersed in the Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardic Jews at the inaugural session of the International Ladino Summer School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The seed was planted five years ago when Dr. Ilil Baum, then a postdoctoral researcher in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan, began noticing a recurring question her students would ask: “Where can we study Ladino?”
“That was a good question!” Baum recalled, but she didn’t then have an answer, as the study of Ladino has traditionally been under-represented in Western academia.
“There are Yiddish summer programs, there is Hebrew ulpan, why wasn’t there a program like that for Ladino? I carried this thought with me for many years,” she said, speaking to The Times of Israel by phone.
This August’s program, according to Baum, is the first of its kind to offer academic credit for a Ladino intensive summer course.
Attended by students at different points in their academic careers, the program offered beginning and advanced tracks, each combining morning language classes with afternoon modules on archive use, research tools and studies in Sephardic culture.
The course was led by Baum, now a lecturer at both the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. David Bunis, head of the Ladino program at the Hebrew University.
“It’s a serious program. Many of our students were graduate students at the MA and PhD level. We also had some BA students and two at the postdoc level,” Baum said.
Much of the thrust, she said, “was about research tools, and working with Ladino materials on documents from the 17th and 18th centuries,” but it was also “very important to send them to document living Ladino speakers today in Israel.”
She said the students encountered 25 native speakers and documented their interviews
“What was really exciting about this program was that people came who were enthusiastic for Ladino and Sephardic studies. They were crazy about Ladino as much as I am,” Baum said. “Many of them have Sephardic heritage, but others just felt infatuated with the language. Not all of them were Jewish… So we had very interesting profiles of students and it was very exciting.”
What is Ladino?
Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish diasporic language, originated in the Golden Age of Medieval Spain and, after the late 15th-century expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula, became widely spoken across the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans after Jewish exiles from Spain were allowed to settle there.
Spain is known as Sepharad in Hebrew, and the Sephardic Jews of today are the descendants of these exiles, who brought with them to the east, and elsewhere, their Jewish Spanish culture, food and language.
The Sephardic Jews largely thrived under the Ottoman regime and developed into an important and recognized minority population in the empire. In some cities, especially Salonika (now Thessaloniki in Greece), Istanbul and Izmir, Ladino-speaking Jews developed sizeable communities and played important roles in economics, politics and culture. In Salonika especially, Sephardic Jews were the majority from the 19th century until WW II, and the port, where many worked, was famously closed on the Sabbath.
In the 20th century, a combination of historical factors contributed to a sharp decline in the language: the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War 1, which drastically altered Jewish society in areas formerly controlled by the empire; the Holocaust, which decimated Ladino-speaking communities in Nazi-controlled Europe, including in Salonika; and Zionism and the creation of the State of Israel, which led to a focus on modern Hebrew over diaspora languages.
The language itself is classified as a Romance language, being based on old Spanish, and until the early 20th century was written in Hebrew characters. Ladino vocabulary contains elements from Hebrew, Turkish and several Balkan languages, a testament to the language’s wandering path through time and history. A lesser-known dialect called Haketia, which evolved outside the Ottoman sphere among Sephardic exiles in Morocco, has a heavy Arabic influence.
Communities of mostly elderly native speakers still exist in Turkey, Israel, France and elsewhere, but unlike Yiddish, the most well-known and widespread Jewish diasporic language, Ladino doesn’t benefit from a society that continues to use it and pass it along to new generations, as Yiddish does in many parts of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world.
Also unlike Yiddish, Ladino hasn’t traditionally benefited from the same level of support from US and European academic institutions, cultural organizations and private initiatives, although some universities, especially in Israel, offer Ladino language and Sephardic culture courses.
A family affair
Paz Ben-Nissan, 28, was finishing a dual BA in International Relations and Middle-Eastern Studies at the Hebrew University when he saw “by complete accident” a notice about the summer session, he told The Times of Israel.
Ben-Nissan, an Israeli of partial Bulgarian-Sephardic descent, convinced a cousin who was also a Hebrew University student to take the course as well, which was “really nice. We are related on that side, so it was another way for us to get in touch with that part of our family,” he said.
Taking the course was “a really amazing experience” because “all of a sudden a lot of things clicked” about his family background, Ben-Nissan said, and he was able to invite his grandmother and her sister to the class to participate in the program as native speakers.
Now, “I do want to continue to study, it’s very important. It’s not just any old language,” he said. “It’s dying out. Most people who speak Ladino are not very young… there is a sense of responsibility for that language, it’s part of my family’s history.”
Another student with a family connection is Simone Salmon, a PhD student in ethnomusicology at UCLA who is currently a visiting researcher at Istanbul Technical University. Salmon’s Sephardic family immigrated in the early 20th century from Turkey to southern California, where she grew up. Her great-grandfather was a Turkish-Sephardic oud player and Ladino singer, and his wife would collect Ladino song lyrics from Sephardic women across the US, Mexico and Canada.
“She tried to make the most comprehensive lyrics that she could. She published quite a few notebooks” that were passed around among Jewish communities, said Salmon, whose academic focus herself is on the Ladino song tradition.
This diverse body of lyrics and melodies is a very prominent cultural manifestation of Sephardic culture. It includes ancient Romanzas dating back to Medieval times, folk and holiday songs, wedding songs, lullabies and more. Much of it was traditionally sung and passed down by women.
Salmon said she took the course to improve her translation skills and because she “especially wanted to better understand” the jokes and side commentaries she regularly hears as part of her research among a group of elderly Sephardic Jews in Istanbul.
It was wonderful being around “other people so passionate about Ladino, which is very rare” in normal academic settings, she said, and “it really lifted me up” to be in Israel, she added, after a challenging year as a Jewish academic in the US.
Further afield
Some students came without familial backgrounds, like Rima “Reyze” Turner, a University of Wisconsin PhD. student and Yiddishist living in Wrocław, Poland. She came to the program, she said, in part because “the folks in my world” of Yiddish scholars and students are “really interested” in the language.
After studying Ladino for a year, “I had already given a presentation, in Yiddish, about some of the similarities between Yiddish and Ladino,” Turner said. After the summer program, she “now feels confident” about working with Ladino texts and translations on her own and plans to begin a monthly “Ladino Zoom reading circle” oriented towards Yiddish speakers.
Turner plans to continue to study Ladino and incorporate it into her academic work, but said, as a Yiddish teacher, that “it’s really tough to teach” Ladino because in general, “there is just not very much prepared materials, pedagogy, curriculum… it’s not that organized.”
Other students came from further afield, like Shiyu Hong from Shanghai, who “attended this program out of interest as a linguist of Jewish languages, and [from] an interest in Sephardic culture,” she said.
Hong, a PhD. student in the Department of Hebrew Language at the Hebrew University, came to the field “just accidentally” after she took a Hebrew class as an undergraduate student in China.
“I found Hebrew interesting and continued,” she said. The summer course was the first time she had studied “a specific Jewish language like Yiddish or Judeo-Arabic,” although she has studied Aramaic, the ancient cousin of Hebrew used in the Talmud.
Hong plans to “integrate the Ladino knowledge I’ve acquired into further research on modern Hebrew,” she said, as “people in the Sephardic old Yishuv in Palestine spoke Ladino during the revival of modern Hebrew, so there are Ladino loan words that came into use.”
The program attracted two students from Turkey, and a history student who came from Greece to improve his ability to read Ladino newspapers published in Thessaloniki during the 1920s and 30s, part of the diversity of students that gave organizer Baum “a deep sense of hope.”
“In this crazy year, we came to celebrate together, study together and invest our energy in expanding our intellectual horizons and to connect, in the middle of war,” she said.
