Jewish History 16: 225233, 2002. c 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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Introduction Ladino in Print

SARAH ABREVAYA STEIN
University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, U.S.A.

Until the early eighteenth century, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the language of the Sephardi Diaspora, was not widely used as an instrument of print culture. Only then, when Jacob Huli wrote his encyclopedic Biblical commentary Meam Loez 1 did the golden age of JudeoSpanish or Ladino literature begin. Meam Loez not only catalyzed the publication of other forms of rabbinic literature, it also crystallized and preserved Ladinos autonomous linguistic system.2 Prior to the eighteenth century, Ladino had been primarily a language of oral, not written culture. In the century or so following Meam Loez, a diverse array of religious and secular written texts would appear. The majority of these were rabbinic texts, especially biblical commentaries and ethical literature [musar ], a daily and periodic press, and a rich collection of translations. Although the signicance of this Ladino literary revolution is widely accepted, until recently, far more scholarly attention has been devoted to Sephardic life-ways than to the history of Sephardic print culture.3 This special issue of Jewish History attempts to redress this lacunae and will explore the historical and literary signicance of several of the myriad genres of Ladino in print. Its contributors address four distinct moments in the history of Ladino letters: the emergence of rabbinical literature written in the Sephardi vernacular since the eighteenth century (Lehmann); the subsequent blossoming of secular Ladino print culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Borovaia); Jews encounter with state-imposed nationalization in the wake of the Balkan Wars (19121913) and the dramatic decline in Ladino literacy
Several of the contributions to this issue represent revised versions of papers presented at a symposium convened at the University of Washington, Seattle in the Spring of 2001 entitled Ladino In Print. Other contributions to that symposium are being published under dierent cover: those represented here are unied in their interest in historical dimensions of Ladino print culture. Thanks are due to the Jewish Studies Program, the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Center for Spanish and Portuguese Studies, and to various programs of the Jackson School of International Studies (all of the University of Washington) for their support of the scholarly gathering from which this is issue derived.

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and uency that followed (Ginio); and, nally, the contemporary quest to salvage and catalogue Ladino sources, primarily for scholarly use (Ben-Ur). As the following essays intimate, one of the primary factors that enabled the Sephardi print-revolution was the cultural, social, and political climate of the Ottoman Empire, in whose boundaries the Sephardi heartland or Kulturbereich developed over a period of some ve hundred years.4 Signicantly, at the time at which Ladino print culture emerged, the Ottoman Empire in general, and Ottoman-controlled Anatolia and the Balkans, in particular, was enormously multi-ethnic and the leadership (auspiciously) disinterested in the cultural aairs of its subjects. Under the Ottoman leadership, the Sephardim were able to blossom culturally, socially, and economically: not only as a discrete community, but in symbiosis with the multi-lingual and multi-sectarian peoples alongside whom they lived. Yet if Sephardi culture in the Ottoman setting thrived in the early modern period, it was less stable in the centuries that followed. By the nineteenth century, as the empire attempted to rationalize its bureaucracy to imitate the nation-states of Western Europe, the pressure of centralization began to burden Jews and other minorities, which increasingly found the state intruding in communal matters.5 Moreover, although the Ottoman economy continued to expand, more and more economic activity was moving beyond the control of the state, leading the empire into an increasingly semi-colonial relationship with Western Europe.6 Jews, too, sought paths of social ascension outside the empires borders. An important part of this process was to acquire a secular education. In 1860, the Franco-Jewish elite founded the Alliance Isralite Universelle (AIU). Its goal was to Westernize Levantine Jewry e and ready it to succeed in the emerging world economy. With the assistance of the local Sephardi elite (including those both religious and secular in orientation) the AIU would educate over three generations of Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jews.7 Though the AIU discouraged the use of Ladino and favored French in its stead, its resources nonetheless enabled Sephardi intellectuals to produce new forms of Jewish cultural expression, among them numerous genres of Ladino in print. The amalgamation of historical opportunities and contemporary uncertainties was arguably proving a profound and creative catalyst. The feverish production of Ladino texts that resulted would last approximately a century. By 1913, there were no less than 389 Ladino periodicals published in Turkey and the Balkans: as Olga Borovaia

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demonstrates, estimates by scholars of the number of Ladino works produced in this region is ever on the rise.8 More and more Jewish readers in Southeastern Europe were coming to rely on Ladino in print as a source of news, ethical instruction, and entertainment. Ladino sources and readers were internally quite diverse. Yet one may argue that by the eighteenth century, Sephardi vernacular rabbinical literature already anticipated patterns and forms, as well as techniques of translation, that would be rmly in place by the close of the nineteenth century to constitute a Ladino public literary sphere.9 As Eyal Ginio demonstrates, this outpouring of cultural productivity would decelerate in the inter-war period, as the various nation-states and republics that succeeded the Ottoman Empire introduced policies of cultural and linguistic homogeneity. In Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, and elsewhere, the laws imposing this homogeneity decreased rates of Ladino literacy, especially among Jewish youth; perhaps more importantly, they generated anxieties about minority cultural expression as appropriate. Emigration, too, weakened the Sephardi Kulturbereich, even if it made Ladino print-culture possible in the United States and elsewhere.10 The death knell for Ladino culture, however, came with the Holocaust. The destruction of the majority of the Jewish communities of Southeastern Europe meant, ipso facto, the destruction of the majority of the worlds speakers of Ladino. Ladino literature persists it has also known a small revival even today. But between this and a true post-Holocaust viability of Ladino print culture, in particular, as a popular cultural form, the gap is large.11 In the aftermath of the War, pressures to acculturate in the United States, Israel, and South America attenuated though did not completely extinguish Ladino print culture. In a strange reversal of history, oral culture has again superceded written culture in the Ladino-speaking world (though even as a spoken language, Ladino is in serious jeopardy) while a number of academic and popular journals carry on the medium of Ladino in print. In a number of important respects, the four essays that follow represent a new generation of Sephardi Studies and Jewish Studies more generally. This is in part because the contributing authors are scholars early in their careers: but it is also because, as a group, they have turned their attention to sources and historical moments that have not, to date, generated sucient scholarly interest. The focus of the essays that follow is on phenomena that have, by and large, been considered derivative (the translated novel), culturally uneventful (the eighteenth

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century), outside the Jewish experience (the modern Hellenization of Jewish culture), or inaccessible (private collections of Ladino texts). Examined with a fresh eye, they all reveal themselves to be integral aspects of modern Jewish culture. The case studies that follow are truly diverse. Although principally they consider Ladino sources published in Southeastern Europe, they examine a number of genres of Ladino print culture published in various political and social climates, and over the course of two centuries: genres designed for readers religious and secular, to be read in times of study and leisure, to educate, entertain, indoctrinate, to preserve tradition and to radically transform it. Yet despite these dierences in foci, the essays all return to a number of common themes. First, they convincingly argue that the diverse genres of Ladino print culture ought to be employed as tools of the social and cultural historian. This is not, of course, a new argument, but it is nonetheless one that has not fully permeated the eld of Sephardic Studies. Scholars of Sephardi history and culture have relied upon a wide variety of Ladino sources before, among them rabbinic and secular literature and the Ladino popular press.12 What is unique about the essays that follow is that they turn to Ladino sources not only for the news or information they convey (as has a previous generation of scholarship), but out of an interest in these sources social and literary texture: their linguistic make-up and cultural allusions, their symbolic and literal import, and their relationship to authors and readers, both imagined and real. As a result, this issue of Jewish History approaches modern Sephardic culture and its history from a decidedly literary angle. This is not to suggest that the essays that follow peer exclusively through a discursive lens. On the contrary, they share a keen interest in the social, economic, and political networks in which Ladino texts and the sociological phenomenon of reading, more generally were situated. Their authors have considered the wider social landscapes that prompted shifts in Ladino cultural production and the local, regional, imperial, national, and trans-national conditions that inuenced the direction of Sephardi culture. Taken as a whole, they suggest quite strikingly that Jewish culture in Southeastern Europe did not exist in isolation; nor, for that matter, did Jewish readers. As Borovaia demonstrates, the texts they engaged with, borrowed from, improvised o, and were referential to, texts in Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, and Hebrew among other languages. Perhaps uniquely so: the cultures that the following pages portray strike me as being particularly porous, uniquely able to absorb diverse inuences, yet still retaining their own

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specic cultural integrity. The enormously referential nature of Ladino sources is arguably one factor that has frustrated the production of detailed bibliographies of Ladino sources: as Aviva Ben-Ur suggests in the essay that follows, this lacunae continues to constrain our scholarly imagination and reach. One can, perhaps, go a step further: the authors represented here seem to agree that the production of Ladino print sources did not just rely, but depended upon acts of literal and cultural translation: from the world of the religious to the world of the secular (and back again), from one language to another, and between enormously disparate social contexts that had to be meticulously, if uidly, explained. Such acts are not to be understood as but another sign of the hybrid nature of modern (or post-modern) culture writ large: they are, instead, a distinct facet of modern Sephardi culture, and, perhaps, a product of the multi-ethnic landscape of Southeastern Europe. Some of the contributors to this issue seem to understand this inter-textuality as a bridge to acculturation (Ginio): others eschew this model of cultural change, suggesting, instead, that translation into Ladino did not imply or invite cultural capitulation (Lehmann, Borovaia). Historians of cultural change, not only those of Ladino literature, should take note of these theoretical dierences; they participate in a larger conversation about the process and implications of cultural change. Strikingly, the essays in this issue are not pre-occupied with selfconsciously politicized texts, or, at least, not those that have often concerned scholars of Southeastern European Jewish culture. Ginios contribution begins with the story of a 1933 encounter between his father, then a young boy, and his cousins: the former reared in Palestine, the latter in Salonica. Most scholarship of the era, Ginio recounts, follows the tale of his fathers milieu; his approach pursues the story of the cousins who remained in Salonica to experience the Hellenization of their city and state. Ginios focus is, in a certain sense, representative of the other essays, which have turned away from topics that have occupied Sephardi scholars the most the so-called cultural stagnation that followed the Sabbatian crises in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the rise of anti-Semitism and Zionism in the nineteenth century, and the destruction of the Sephardi heartland in the mid-twentieth to concentrate instead on topics less well plumbed. In the process, these essays overturn a number of myths about Ottoman and Balkan Sephardi culture: that Sephardi culture stagnated in the early modern period; that there existed no original Ladino literature; that Jews were hapless victims of nationalization in the early

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twentieth century; and that they were not actors who engaged with this process in a variety of creative ways. As a group, the articles that follow unfurl a body of vernacular literature for scholarly scrutiny. They invite us to apply their empirical ndings and interpretative theories to other contexts. And they press us to apply this intellectual rigor to other genres of Ladino in print.

Notes
1. The language of Sephardi Jewries is referred to by a variety of names, including Ladino, Judezmo, and Judeo-Spanish. Many scholars employ the terms JudeoSpanish or Judezmo to refer to the vernacular language that was spoken and printed by the Sephardim of Southeastern Europe, preserving the term Ladino for the highly literal calque of Hebrew used primarily in religious study and prayer. Though I recognize this linguistic distinction, I have chosen to refer to spoken and printed Judeo-Spanish as Ladino simply because the latter term is popularly recognizable; the contributing authors to this issue rely on terminology of their own choosing. 2. On the development of Ladino musar literature in the eighteenth century, see Matthias Lehmann, Judeo-Spanish Musar Literature and the Transformation of Ottoman-Sephardic Society (Eighteenth Through Nineteenth Centuries), (dissertation submitted to Freie Universitt Berlin, 2001). On the emergence a of a distinct Sephardi language and literature in the eighteenth century, see Iacob Hassan, La literatura sefardi culta: sus principales escritores, obras y generos, in Angel Alcala, ed., Judios, Sefardies, Conversos (Valladolid, 1995), 319330. 3. This is particularly true if one considers the eld of Sephardic Studies at its most expansive, that is, if one surveys not simply that body of scholarly work that explores the culture of Ladino speaking Jews, but the larger body of scholarship that studies Sephardi and Middle East Jewries more generally. In this regard, one thinks of the work of Jolle Bahloul, Shlomo Deshen, Walter Fischel, Harvey e Goldberg, Raphael Patai, and Walter Zenner, among others. See, for example, Joelle Bahloul, The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 19371962 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Shlomo Deshen and Walter P. Zenner, eds., Jews among Muslims, Communities in the Precolonial Middle East (London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1996). Walter J. Fischel, The Jews of Persia: 17951940, Jewish Social Studies, old series, 12 (1950), 119160; Walter J. Fischel, Isfahan: The Story of a Jewish Community in Persia, Jewish Social Studies Publication V (1953): 111128; Harvey Goldberg, Cave Dwellers and Citrus Growers, A Jewish Community in Libya and Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Harvey Goldberg, The Book of Mordechai, A Study of the Jews of Libya (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1980); Harvey Goldberg, Jewish Life in Muslim Libya: Rivals and Relatives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Raphael Patai, The Seed of Abraham: Jews and Arabs in Contact and Conict (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1986). Raphael Patai, Jadid

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4.

5.

6.

7.

al-Islam: The Jewish New Muslims of Meshhed (Detroit: Wayne State Press, 1997). I borrow the concept of the Sephardi Kulturbereich from Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry, A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Other studies of Sephardi culture in the Ottoman lands include Avram Galante, Histoire des Juifs de Turquie, 9 vols. (Istanbul: Isis, 1985); Jane S. Gerber, The Jews of Spain: A History of the Sephardic Experience (New York: Free Press, 1992); Stanford Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York University Press, 1991); Avigdor Levy, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: The Darwin Press, Inc., 1992); Walter F. Weiker, Ottomans, Turks, and the Jewish Polity (New York/London: University Press of America, 1992); Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); Norman A. Stillman, The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1984). On the eects of the Tanzimat reforms on Ottoman Jewry, see Aron Rodrigue, From Millet to Minority: Turkish Jewry, in Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation: Jews, States, and Citizenship (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995). On the eects of this legislation on other of the empires millets, see Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London/New York: Routledge, 1993); Roderic Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire 18561876 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963); Sukru M. Hanioglu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Aykut Kansu, The Revolution 1908 in Turkey (Leiden/New York: Brill, 1997); Kemal Karpat, Millets and Nationality: The Roots of the Incongruity of Nation and State in the Post-Ottoman Era, in Benjamin and Bernard Lewis Braude, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982), 141169; Hasan Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 19081918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism, Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). Suraiya Faroqhi et al., An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, Vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sevket Pamuk, The Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 18201913: Trade, Investment, and Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Aron Rodrigue, French Jews, Turkish Jews: The Alliance Isralite Universelle e and the Politics of Jewish Schooling in Turkey, 18601925 (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1990); see also Esther Benbassa, LEducation feminine en Orient: Lecole de Filles de lAlliance Isralite Universelle a Galata, e Istanbul (18791912), Annales, Histoire, Economie, et Socit 4 (1991), 529 ee 559; Paul Dumont, Jewish Communities in Turkey during the Last Decades of the Nineteenth Century in Light of the Archives of the Alliance Isralite e Universelle, in Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, the Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982), 209242; Harvey Goldberg, The Maskil and the Mequbbal, Mordecai Ha-Cohen and the Grave of Rabbi Shimon Lavi in Tripoli, in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jew-

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

ries, History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 168189; Michael M. Laskier, The Alliance Isralite Universelle e and the Jewish Communities of Morocco: 18621962 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Amnon Netzer, The Jews of Persia and the Alliance in the Late Nineteenth Century: Some Aspects (Jerusalem: The Hebrew University of Jerusalem/Ben-Zvi Institute, 1974); Simon Schwarzfuchs, Les Juifs DAlgrie et la France (18301855) (Jerusalem: Institut Ben-Zvi, 1981); Yaron e Tsur, Haskalah in a Sectional Colonial Society Mahdia (Tunisia) 1884, in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Sephardi and Middle Eastern Jewries, History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 146 167; Zvi Yehuda, Iraqi Jewry and Cultural Change in the Educational Activity of the Alliance Isralite Universelle, in Harvey E. Goldberg, ed., Sephardi and e Middle Eastern Jewries, History and Culture in the Modern Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 134145. Abraham Galante, La presse judeo-espagnole mondiale (Istanbul: Societe Anonyme de Papeterie et dImprimerie (Fratelli Haim), 1935); Moshe David Gaon, Haitonut be-ladino: Bibliograa (Jerusalem: Ben Zvi, 1965); Gad Nassi, ed., Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2001); Gad Nassi, Synoptic List of Ottoman-TurkishJewish and Other Sephardic Journals, in Gad Nassi, ed., Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2001), 2972. I am inspired here by Matthias Lehmanns description of the emergence of a Judeo-Spanish public sphere as early as the eighteenth century; Lehmann, Judeo-Spanish Musar Literature. See, for example, Marc Angel, La America: The Sephardic Experience in the United States, 1st ed. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1982); Aviva Ben-Ur, The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 19101948, in Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998b), 6477. For a similarly pessimistic view of the demise of the language, see Tracy K. Harris, Death of a Language: The History of Judeo-Spanish (Newark: Associated University Press, 1994). For a more optimistic reading, see, for example, the introduction to: Salvador Santa Puche, Antolojia de poetas Sefaradis Contemporaneous (Valencia, 1999). See also Aviva Ben-Urs contribution to this issue for reference to recent literary creations in Ladino. See, for example, David Altabe, The Romanso, 19001932: A Bibliographical Survey, The Sephardic Scholar 3 (19771978), 96106; Olga V. Borovaia, Translation and Westernization: Gullivers Travels in Ladino, Jewish Social Studies, new series, 7, no. 2 (2001), 149168; Iacob Hassan, La literatura sefardi culta: sus principales escritores, obras y generos, in Angel Alcala, ed., Judios, Sefardies, Conversos (Valladolid, 1995); Elena Romero, La Creacion literaria en lengua sefardi (Madrid, 1992). There is also a burgeoning literature on the Ladino popular press: Aviva Ben-Ur, The Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) Press in the United States, 19101948, in Werner Sollors, ed., Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 6477; Esther Benbassa,

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Presse dIstanbul et de Salonique au service du sionisme (19081914), Revue Historique 560 (1986), 337367; David Bunis, Voices from Jewish Salonika, Selections from the Judezmo Satirical Series Tio Ezr I Su Mujer Benuta and Tio a Bohor I Su Mujer Djamila (Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1999); Abraham Galante, La presse judeo-espagnole mondiale (Istanbul: Societe Anonyme de Papeterie et dImprimerie Fratelli Haim, 1935); Iacob Hassan, El estudio del periodismo sefard, Sefarad 26 (1988), 229236; Selim Kaneti, La Presse en Ladino sous la Republique en Turquie, in Trkiyede Yabanci Dilde Basin u (Istanbul: Istanbul Universitesi Yayinlari, 1985), 927; Avner Levy, The Jewish Press in Turkey, in Gad Nassi, ed., Jewish Journalism and printing houses in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2001), 13 28; Robyn Lowenthal, Elia Carmonas Autobiography Judeo-Spanish Popular Press and Novel Publishing Milieu in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire, circa 18601932 (Ph.D., University of Nebraska, 1984); Michael Molho, Haitonut haespaniolit bSaloniki, in Saloniki , ir ve am bisrael (Jerusalem: Centre de recherches sur le Judaisme de Salonique, 1967), 103109; Gad Nassi, ed., Jewish Journalism and Printing Houses in the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey (Istanbul: The ISIS Press, 2001); Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Creating a Taste for the News: Historicizing Judeo-Spanish Periodicals of the Ottoman Empire, Jewish History 14 (2000), 928.