Beginning Ladino: The Language and Literature of the Sephardic Diaspora

Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, is the linguistic legacy of Sepharad, the Hebrew term for the Iberian Peninsula, which for over a thousand years was home to a vibrant Jewish cultural life. The Jewish presence in modern-day Spain and Portugal was established in antiquity and eliminated, violently and systematically, through the series of tribunals, expulsions, and mass conversions organized under the Inquisition. Although the language—with its signature blend of Hispano-Romance and Hebraic elements—disappeared from the Iberian Peninsula long ago, it lives on in the Sephardic diaspora, in Israel and, to a lesser extent, the United States as well as Turkey, where for centuries ancestrally Spanish and Portuguese Jews intermingled with their Ottoman hosts, acquiring numerous loanwords in the process. As its community of native speakers contracts, Judeo-Spanish today faces a future perhaps more uncertain than that which it faced on Iberian soil when the Inquisition began in 1492. Blending conventional coursework in language instruction with elements of literary and cultural studies, this course is a first experiment in reviving the language at home, in Cambridge. In class we explore a series of basic provocations about the nature of the language, including: just how capacious is the term Ladino? Is an aljamiado (that is, Hebrew-script) text in Spanish by default a Ladino text? What distinguishes, culturally and concretely, this language from Old Spanish and its modern descendants? In addition to supporting students' progress in reading, writing, and rudimentary oral and aural skills, the course attempts to trace the long line connecting us, as learners, to the Romance-speaking Jews of medieval Iberia—and to appreciate the cultural artefacts by which that lineage is so spectacularly distinguished.