Cambridge Festival: DJUDEO-ESPANYOL OF THESSALONIKI: AN ENDANGERED LANGUAGE AND HERITAGE – 17 March 2023

5:00pm-6:30pm on Friday 17 March

Times shown are in GMT (UTC +0) up to the 26th March. For events on or after 27th March times are in BST (UTC +1).

Booking/Registration is: REQUIRED

Djudeo-espanyol (Judeo-Spanish, Ladino, Djudesmo) is a Romance language, spoken by the descendants of those Jews who left the various kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula in the aftermath of the persecutions, expulsions and forced conversions that took place in the 15th and 16th centuries.

Expelled Jews found shelter in the Ottoman Empire, which was looking to expand her commercial activities. Many Jews settled in the buoyant Byzantine city of Thessaloniki (Salonica), later known as ‘Jerusalem of the Balkans’. However, the linguistic history of this community is neither unified nor well documented. It is unclear whether arriving Jews were already speaking a distinct variety of Old Spanish; or just a local variety of Old Spanish; or, rather, their language morphed into what later became Judeo-Spanish once in contact with other Romance vernaculars of the time and Balkan languages such as Greek. By the 16th century, there were synagogues in Thessaloniki named after Jews’ native lands (Castilia, Majorca, Lisbon, Sicilia), thus indicating the multilingual origins of Judeo-Spanish since its emergence until its sudden decline due to the atrocities of the Nazis.

We set out to reconstruct the sociolinguistic world of these communities in 16th-century Thessaloniki, which gave rise to this vanishing language and culture. In doing so, we ask questions such as: Is Judeo-Spanish a language or a dialect? Is it a mixed language? Is it a simplified version of Spanish? Will it survive? We’ll explore these questions with the aid of two international experts: Dr Željko Jovanovic (INALCO, Paris), an expert on Sephardic culture in the Balkans, and Professor Andrés Enrique Arias (Universitat de les Illes Balears), dialectologist and Director of the documentary film Once Upon a Time at 55th and Hoover.

Ioanna Sitaridou is Professor of Spanish and Historical Linguistics; Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Greek Studies; Fellow, Tutor and Director of Studies in Linguistics at Queens’ College. Since her Cambridge appointment in 2004, she has taught more than a thousand undergraduates a lecture on Judeo-Spanish, a language that she has first-hand experience of from her native city of Thessaloniki. As a leading expert on 13th-century Spanish syntax, she will be exploring the affinities between Judeo-Spanish and Old Spanish, to reconstruct the multilingual sociolinguistic conditions that led to the emergence of the former.