Asymmetric Fates: Secular Yiddish and Ladino Culture in Comparison

Contemporary speakers and scholars of Yiddish, on the one hand, and Ladino, on the other, face certain parallel pressures, most acute among them the evisceration of native speakers and centers of learning. Largely as a result, Yiddish and Ladino studies, perhaps more than ever, are conditioned today by nostalgia and mourning, sentiments both competing and complementary. If the fates of Yiddish and Ladino—and their speakers and scholars—have in certain respects converged, the paths that carried them to this point have been divergent indeed. What is more, a number of important differences, some of which are inherited from earlier periods, other of which are rather more contemporary in inspiration, delineate the current status and fate of these Jewish languages. This essay reflects on intersections and deviations in the story of Yiddish and Ladino, their speakers, and their scholars, rooting these meditations in a comparative history of Eastern and Southeastern European Jewries since the nineteenth century.¹

Within the context of a larger conversation on Jewish languages, paying heed to the theme of language use is, I submit, of keen importance. By studying Jewish languages in the context of social history, we may appreciate that they are passed on or abandoned, cultivated or eschewed, preserved or neglected, and, finally, shaped for reasons that are deeply historical and, in a broad sense, political. In making this argument, this essay—like much of the recent scholarship on Yiddish and Ladino—aims to extract Jewish languages from the realm of the static or sentimental—hopefully without dismissing sentimentality as a profound catalyst to the study of history and language. Engaging in a comparative study of Yiddish and Ladino provides a particularly good vantage from which to desentimentalize Jewish languages, for the act of comparison removes Yiddish and Ladino from presumed and sometimes glorified isolation. In so doing, a comparative approach highlights what is unique about the histories of Yiddish and Ladino, and, at the same time, illuminates the threads that weave through their otherwise cacophonous worlds.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the vast majority of the world's speakers of Yiddish and Ladino lived, respectively, in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and, more specifically, in the Russian and Ottoman empires. Ninety-seven percent of the roughly five million Jewish subjects of the Russian Empire declared Yiddish their mother tongue at the fin de siècle, while as late as the Second World War, 85 percent of Turkish Jewry and the vast majority of the roughly 250,000 Jews who resided in the Ottoman Empire's other successor states (Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Serbia, and Greece) identified Ladino as their native language. In both contexts, Jewish rates of literacy in these vernacular languages were extraordinarily high.²

The existence of vast numbers of geographically concentrated speakers of Yiddish and Ladino did not, in and of itself, lead to an explosion of secular Yiddish or Ladino culture. These demographic realities were accompanied by a confluence of other factors, which, as a whole, formed something of an incubator for modern, secular, vernacular Jewish cultures. Among these factors was the loosening (in the Russian setting) and relaxed (in the Ottoman) nature of the imperial grip on cultural production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the contemporaneous and symbiotic development of print and popular culture in other minority languages, the political and literary ambitions of Sephardi and Ashkenazi intellectuals, the evolution of Jews' educational and class status, and technological innovations which allowed for the production and distribution of affordable reading matter. Together, these forces led to the production of manifold genres of Jewish culture in print: original works of poetry, drama, fiction, scholarly essays, dictionaries and encyclopedias, translations of world literature, and daily, weekly, and monthly periodicals. These genres, which proved wildly popular among readers of Yiddish and Ladino, were both products and catalysts of a dramatic wave of social, political, and cultural change that rocked Eastern and Southeastern European Jewries in...