Nu, Raytz Ladino?
by: Schvach Yid

What has become of the Ladino speakers of the world? I know what happened to the Yiddish speakers . In America they became American, some embarrassed by their heritage (eg. two former bosses of mine), others simply not interested, and over the course of perhaps 1 generation just lost it (I’m ignoring the Chassidic communities which by and large are too insular to make their mama loshen known to the larger community). And in Europe – well, there’s no need to go over that now.

And what of Ladino speakers? Well, I’m almost acquainted with one native Ladino speaker, a sabra, who went ‘chutz’ decades ago, and I’ve met a Ladino speaking family (that’s right, and entire family of Ladino speakers) in shul. Also, I had a classmate in high school whose parents were emigrants from Turkey; his grandparents conversed in Ladino and conducted the family Pesach seder in Ladino, in addition to Hebrew.

Where have they all gone? We all know – the same story as the Yiddishists. Salonika, formerly Thessaloniki, was a Ladino town, but that was before the Second World War.

Thanks to Batya Medad’s article on Arutz Sheva entitled When Will They Ever Learn? , at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7222, I’m ruminating about the Sefardim, more specifically, the so-called crypto-Jews of the Spanish speaking world. It’s past the half millennium mark since the Catholic Church of Spain inaugurated its Inquisition, which began about 1480, and crypto-Jews have been cryptic about their Judaism ever since. They’re still in hiding. What’s Spanish for oy veh! (no, it’s not ole!; according to one account I’ve heard, the Spanish ole takes its etymology from Arabic’s Allah).

Shavei Israel, headed by Michael Freund, dedicates itself to the repatriation of ‘lost souls’ to Judaism, worldwide, including the descendents of Conversos/Marranos. On Spain’s island of Majorca, the resident Jews were accorded a unique moniker – cuetas – I can only imagine.

Jews in the Spanish speaking domains are still in hiding. Perhaps the majority, according to a former article published by Moment Magazine about the Jews of Mexico, aren’t informed about their Jewish roots, blithely following Jewish religious practices handed down within their families for generations.
Thirty years ago I attended a New Years Eve party given by a married couple with whom I worked at the time – Latino. She was from Puerto Rico, he from Cuba (not Jewish). Most of their friends in attendance - ‘regulars’ who stuck together like glue – likewise were Latino and from the Caribbean. Yes, I had a great time, but at some point I injudiciously and naively said something about Israel. I never made that mistake again; of course, I couldn’t have, I had no subsequent invitations, except one – to the Christening of one this partying group’s babies. No kidding! There wasn’t an Arab or Moslem in the crowd, but just don’t mention Israel. I wish I had been forewarned, perhaps by 500 years.

My brother and his family live in central New Jersey (township, shmownship - what am I, a geographer?). Their three kids, my three nephews, all attend the local public schools, and each is required to take Spanish year after year until the start of high school, to the exclusion of all other ‘foreign’ languages. That’s right, they’re given no choice (America, the land of the free, with freedom of choice and diversity). What if Spanish religion takes hold? What then, more cryto-Jews, and this time in the USA?

As a Jew the thought of the reestablishment of Spanish cultural supremacy causes me some angst, to say the least. I behold psycho-images of Elizabeth Holtzman shoving her advocating clenched fisted arm into the air, missing its ostensibly undefined mark in the cyclopic politics of her day, pro anything that negated her Judaism. The desperation for success knows no reason.

Cezar Chavez and his organized United Farm Workers of America chose as their flag a design and color scheme that emulated the flag of the Nazi Party of Germany’s Third Reich. And let’s not forget the anti-Jewish and anti-Israel campaigns of Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.

This isn’t racial folks; there’s no ‘melanin power’ advocated or rejected here. We Jews count among our population lots of ‘dark’ Jews – Sefardim, Mizrachim – and I’m glad for it, as much as I am for the varieties of our culture within the Jewish community (see my earlier blog, Tali Farkash’s Déjà Vu, at http://schvach.blogspot.com/2007/04/tali-farkashs-dj-vu-tali-farkash.html). The point is about getting Jews who are uninformed about their Jewish identity and heritage, due to a centuries long rabid victimization, back into Judaism.

And what about ‘lost’ Jewish languages? A past edition of Pakn Treger, the quarterly publication of the National Yiddish Book Center (http://yiddishbookcenter.org/), founded by Aaron Lansky, listed over 20 Jewish languages, now mostly extinct or nearly so, and this shouldn’t be the case.