I’ll be the first to tell you that I am proudly Ashkefardic: my father’s side of the family came from Pumpian (now Pumpėnai), a shtetl in northern Lithuania, while my mother’s family came from Rhodes and Turkey. Long before I began studying Ladino, I was enmeshed in Yiddish studies. These two Jewish languages now coexist inside me, and I cherish how both of them connect me to my family story. As a result, I also pay attention to the way these languages, and their surrounding communities and cultures, relate to each other.
Within the 21st-century multiverse of Jewish languages, I’ve observed an interesting phenomenon over the last two or three years: some Yiddishist organizations have pivoted to offering Ladino language classes. Historic stalwarts like The Workers Circle and newer groups like Yiddishland California, an initiative of YAAANA (The Yiddish Arts and Academics Association of North America), have listed Ladino classes ranging from beginner to advanced on their websites. In the wake of the “Zoom boom” that brought out scores of new Ladino learners during the pandemic, Ashkenazi-centered organizations are now helping to meet the ongoing demand for Ladino courses.
Is this merely a cosmic coincidence or the sign of a broader Jewish cultural synthesis? I decided that La Varika needed to investigate!
To sate my kuriosidad (curiosity), I spoke with someone with serious Yiddish yikhes (lineage): Sebastian Schulman, currently the director of special projects and partnerships at the Yiddish Book Center and formerly the executive director of KlezKanada. A prolific language learner, he also happens to be a regular participant in the ALL Ladino Lounge.
As our wide-ranging conversation revealed, the convergence of Yiddish and Ladino right now is more than just kismet (fate).
“What about Ladino?”
“The discourse around Ladino has shifted in the Yiddish community,” Schulman affirmed. For starters, fans of Yiddish are often interested in studying more languages. “This ethos has grown in the Yiddish community, and the attitude towards Ladino has been very open, like: you should explore this.” For example, Schulman noted that a weekend course on Ladino culture taught in 2016 by Professor Devin Naar was the most subscribed in-person program ever hosted at the Yiddish Book Center. Schulman himself has pursued a combination of Ladino self-study and various classes over the last several years, and this fall he enrolled in YAAANA’s advanced Ladino reading course, taught by Esther Rute.
Comparatists, beware: comparing these two minority Jewish languages is a risky endeavor, as neither their historic nor their contemporary situations are entirely parallel. It’s tempting to summarize Ladino as “just like Yiddish, but with Spanish instead of German,” but that is not quite accurate.
Yet Schulman noticed that a comparative-minded question, “What about Ladino?,” had begun trending at Yiddish-centered conferences that he was attending in recent years. The question had different implications depending on who was speaking, but at its root was a probing of what these two minority Jewish languages have to say to each other–and how their contemporary advocates can or should relate to each other at this point in their histories.
Schulman was so taken with this idea that he designed and taught a class at last summer’s KlezKanada festival with the title, “What about Ladino?,” pitched as “Judeo-Spanish 101 for Yiddishists.” Davke (contrarily) in the most Yiddish-y of Yiddishistic settings, he wanted to give participants (and himself) a chance to explore Ladino and the connections between the languages. “I’ve taken that question very seriously and tried to answer it,” he said. “I think that Yiddish and Ladino cultures and communities have so much to learn from each other, but that conversation hasn’t really happened.” Experiences of marginalization, catastrophic loss, revitalization, planning for future generations–these are all common threads between the languages, but the overlap remains largely untapped.
Reviews of Schulman’s summer course were glowing. One student called it “fascinating” yet “accessible for people from all different backgrounds.” An Ashkenazi participant thanked him for the opportunity to engage deeply with “Jewish difference writ large, as an Ashkenazi Jew.” A participant of Sephardic Moroccan descent who didn’t grow up hearing Ladino expressed her appreciation for having Sephardic representation at a klezmer camp.
What would it take for this mode of linguistic synergy to ripple out from the idyllic lakeside setting of KlezKanada into the broader Jewish community?
“Never stopped learning languages”
Inspired by a recent visit to Sarajevo, Schulman is now focusing on the Bosnian branch of Ladino. He is drawn to places that are mixed and layered, an interest he traces back to his college days at McGill University in Montreal. “I feel like I’ve never stopped learning languages,” he confessed, a sentiment that certainly resonated with me (though unlike Schulman, I have never gone so far as to learn Esperanto – that is the mark of a true linguaphile!).
The spike of interest in Ladino won’t ebb anytime soon because, Schulman said, the Yiddish-speaking audience in particular “is predisposed to be looking for those kinds of artifacts or modalities of Jewishness and of culture.” People want more in-depth explorations of Jewish identity, and languages offer a way in. His work in the field of translation offers more data points to support this claim: “In the translation community we’ve seen a huge explosion in interest in the U.S. reading public in literature in translation.”
Perhaps that is the next frontier of the Yiddish-Ladino relationship: mutual translation of classic or newer texts? There is definitely creative and scholarly potential in such work. However, looking beyond intra-Jewish translation, Schulman believes that “[t]here is a deep and necessary conversation to be had about translating out of Jewish languages into non-Jewish ones, as well as translating Jewish literature out of any language into others for (primarily) non-Jewish audiences.” This kind of endeavor, he says, could have “far more potential of shifting dynamics within our postvernacular communities, how they interact with each other, and how they are perceived by the outside world.”
One thing is for certain: the story Yiddish-Ladino relationship continues to be written.
Palavra preferada*
Schulman’s favorite Ladino word is zurzuvi, famously a word for a color that doesn’t exist. “It’s such an incredible concept, and the idea that this is one of those things that the culture has has created in and of itself is a very powerful idea. If I were to found a avant-garde literary journal in Ladino, I would call it Zurzuvi.” To which my response could only be a Yiddish expression: fun dayn moyl in gots oyern – “From your mouth to God’s ears.”
*Introducing a new feature of La Varika: whenever I interview someone, I will ask for their favorite Ladino word (palavra preferada)!
Opinions expressed in La Varika are solely those of the author.