See the pdf of the text published in Les Nouveaux Cahiers

This is only a reading note, but it seems to me sufficiently instructive to appear in this "passage en revues" section, especially since it was then reproduced in all the press addressing the Jewish world, in Europe and the Americas, in English as well as in Yiddish. Indeed, it seemed necessary to me to signal and comment if necessary on the work concerning my mother tongue (I say mother tongue, the one my mother taught me) before the monumental thesis of Haïm Vidal Sephiha (1923-2019), Le ladino (calque Judeo-Spanish): Structure and Evolution of a Liturgical Language, Paris, éd. Vidas Largas, 1982. The latter reserves the term ladino for the language he studies in the Judeo-Spanish versions of the Bible. So be it. However, in my family, this same term designated the language we spoke among ourselves, at home. To avoid getting bogged down in eternal controversies, we have always agreed, Mr. Vidal Sephiha and I, to say between us "la lengua de mosotros", with this "m" in place of the "n", characteristic of the deformations of the spoken language, to designate our ancestral speech. For him, I had a "Judeo-Spanish" position created at the Sorbonne by Minister Savary, at the time when I was president of the University of Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. I don't know how, the chair ended up at the Institute of Oriental Languages, where it still exists. But, for the moment, it was a matter of an applied linguistics work by Raymond Renard, Sépharad: The World and the Judeo-Spanish Language of the Sephardim, Annales universitaires de Mons, 1966 - 245 pages. Being then a professor at the Institute of Applied Linguistics created by Petar Guberina and Paul Rivenc in Paris, at 1 Place des Vosges (4th Arr.), it naturally fell to me to bring this work to the attention of the widest public, even if, here again, I could not subscribe to the use of the term "sepharad" to designate my own language.

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The language spoken by the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 is in the process of disappearing due to the assimilation of the multiple Sephardic communities in the countries where they have settled, and also because the Sephardim who have settled in Israel increasingly tend to use this language only for domestic use, their children preferring Hebrew as a cultural language. It was therefore important to establish a description of Judeo-Spanish before its total extinction. This is what Mr. Raymond Renard, professor at the University of Mons, has undertaken in a work on The World and the Judeo-Spanish Language of the Sephardim, to be published shortly. But beforehand he gave two remarkable articles in the Revue de Phonétique appliquée (1) which he directs. In the first, he was concerned with characterizing the phonic system of the essentially spoken language, based on field studies conducted in the Middle East, the Balkans, North Africa or America, for ten years. These studies, he confronted them with previous analyses and texts. It is interesting to know if Judeo-Spanish was, originally, different from Spanish. Indeed, culture, civilization, mentality, way of life, the use of Hebrew in religious services, must have led the Spanish Jew to practice a language somewhat different from the official language. However, it is appropriate not to exaggerate these intellectual influences, and Mr. Renard affirms that Judeo-Spanish confronted with Spanish writings of the time reveals only slight differences on the lexical level. It is remarkable to note that while Castilian had not imposed itself throughout the Iberian territory, the Jews practiced it in a general manner and therefore had a common vehicular language after their expulsion. It is also noted that this language has changed very little over the centuries and that it still presents, today, a remarkable similarity with that used by Cervantes. One would like to know why Judeo-Spanish spoken in Istanbul, for example, undergoes no transformation, while Castilian developed, changed some of its phonemes at the Court of the Very Catholic Kings. Would this be the fact of a people particularly faithful to tradition? Mr. Renard then draws up a careful picture of the phonic system of the language, which nevertheless has such variants (and each of those who speak it could add more) that one can wonder if there exists a common way of speaking among all the communities surveyed. However, here again, these are only minor differences that do not prevent the Jew of Salonika from understanding the one from Sarajevo. In the second article, the linguist was concerned to know if the mode of transcription of the language had not been harmful to the phonic system itself. Spanish Jews did not use Latin characters to correspond with each other, but the Hebrew alphabet, most often written in Rashi cursive. Now this alphabet has only twenty-two signs, representing consonants (and even their pronunciation is different from Spanish consonants), so that all the phonetic richness could not appear in writing. There were indeed some attempts at adaptation by means of new symbols, but very clumsy and of little extension, so that the Rashi cursive, devoid of vowels, soon no longer allowed perfect and uniform understanding between communities. The same phenomenon was reproduced when in the 20th century the Jews of Turkey were imposed the use of the Latin alphabet, because they had to use the Turkish adaptation, and not the Castilian one. Hence a large number of confusions, uncertainties, which did not facilitate things. The same is currently still the case in Israel. Mr. Renard cites a savory editorial by the Editor-in-Chief of El Tiempo, the most important Judeo-Spanish weekly in Tel Aviv, where he announces to his readers that he would well use a phonetic transcription system "which is none other than Castilian", if he did not risk losing 70% of his subscribers! The linguist therefore regrets that the transcription mode did not play the normative role it has in other languages. From this study, one can draw a lesson of general scope. The Sephardim, like any speaking subject, found themselves, at a given moment, faced with this crucial choice: to adopt a rigid alphabet, which can freeze the language but allows it a certain general audience, or to let it evolve anarchically, for lack of a reference system, at the risk of seeing it disappear as a cultural language. However, one cannot explain why Judeo-Spanish, which had no grammar, no precise spelling, no dictionary, was able to preserve such an archaic aspect, that is to say such fidelity to its initial image.

See the pdf of the text published in Les Nouveaux Cahiers

Henri BEHAR.

(1) Raymond Renard: "The Phonic System of Judeo-Spanish" Revue de Phonétique Appliquée, Centre Universitaire de l'Etat, No. 1, 1965; and "The Influence of the Transcription Mode on the Phonic System of Judeo-Spanish", ibid. No. 2, 1966.