18 Susana Lea Skura (Universidad De Buenos Aires) Jewish Languages and Jewish Spanish Speakers in Buenos Aires This Article Refl
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
18 Susana Lea Skura (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Jewish Languages and Jewish Spanish Speakers in Buenos Aires This article reflects part of a joint effort carried out by the Anthropologist Evelyn Dean Olmsted and myself since 2014. This comparative research is focused on ethnic and cultural markers of Jewishness in the discourse of the Jews of Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Mexico City from the perspective of Linguistic Anthropology and Discourse Analysis. In this first stage of the research, we asked whether there were particular ways of speaking Spanish among the Jewish residents of these cities. Our aim was to show that there are in fact uniquely Jewish uses of Spanish, as evidenced by certain topics, phonological and morphosyntactic phenomena, lexical items and formulaic expressions present in Jewish speech. This article is part of a series of publications on the Spanish of Jewish Latin Americans in which we employ Benor’s notion of a “Jewish ethno-linguistic repertoire,” or a “a fluid set of linguistic resources that members of an ethnic group may use variably as they index their ethnic identities” (Benor, 2010: 159). This perspective allows us to show an array of communicative practices and the complex relationships between language, identity and social life among Jewish Spanish speakers in Latin America. Here, I discuss the study of Jewish languages in Argentina and present preliminary data focused specifically on the Spanish of Ashkenazi Jews in Buenos Aires. Keywords : Jewish Languages, Jewish Spanish, markers of Jewishness, Linguistic Anthropology, Postvernacular Yiddish, Ashkenazi Jewry- Buenos Aires, Argentina Introduction I am grateful and deeply indebted to the American anthropologist Evelyn Dean-Olmsted of the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras, who suggested we should share experiences stemming from our corresponding areas of expertise. We set out to write articles with a comparative perspective — she from Mexico City and I from Buenos Aires — about a subject that we called “Jewish Latin American Spanish” (Dean-Olmsted and Skura, 2016), where we ask if Jewish immigrants and their descendants speak and write a particular form of Spanish. We have combined and presented our respective data on the characteristics of the spoken Spanish language of Jewish habitants of those two cities (Dean-Olmsted and Skura, 2016; Dean Olmsted 19 and Skura, forthcoming) 1. In this article, I first present historical and demographic information on the Jewish communities in Argentina. I then discuss the study of Jewish languages in Argentina and present examples of ethnic markers in the Spanish of Ashkenazi Jewish speakers in Buenos Aires. Jewish life and languages in Argentina 2 The Jewish communities of Argentina really began with the arrival of Russian Yiddish speakers from the Pale of Settlement at the end of the nineteenth century, and other waves of Jews coming from Central and Eastern Europe from early to mid-20 th century, which concluded after the Second World War. Many of the newcomers first inhabited agricultural rural settlements that were the property of a philanthropist named Baron Maurice Hirsch. By 1920, however, most of them had moved to urban centers like Buenos Aires, and had populated neighborhoods of ethnic diversity where they interacted with Jews from different ethnic backgrounds as well as non-Jews. Although slowing during the First World War, Jewish and other European migration continued at a steady pace until the global economic crisis of the late 1920s. Despite restrictive national policies, some 40,000 European Jews settled in Argentina during and after the Second World War. The last wave of European Jewish migration to the country occurred in the 1950s, primarily from Communist Hungary and Egypt (Lesser and Rein, 2008: 8–13). There were also smaller migrations from Morocco, Syria, and other North African and Middle Eastern countries, which peaked in the 1920s (Brodsky 2004, 2016; Bejarano 2005). These migrants generally spoke either Judezmo (Judeo- Spanish) or Judeo-Arabic as their mother tongue. Nowadays, Argentina has the largest Jewish population within Spanish-speaking Latin America, estimated at 181,500 (one hundred eighty one thousand, five hundred) (Della Pergola, 2013) 3. Of these, 1 I wish to thank Patricia Ochoa and Evelyn Dean-Olmsted for their assistance translating and editing this article. 2 A version of this paragraph appears in Dean-Olmsted and Skura Forthcoming. 3 The figures presented in this chapter are of estimated “core” Jewish populations, defined as “all persons who, when asked in a socio-demographic survey, identify themselves as Jews; or who are identified as Jews by a respondent in the same household” (Della Pergola, 2013: 11). Estimates of “enlarged” Jewish populations, including those with maternal or paternal Jewish ancestry, are generally greater in each country. 20 165,000 Jews live in Buenos Aires (Della Pergola, 2013: 50). Most of these Jews were born in Argentina and have Spanish as their mother tongue. Around 80-90% are Ashkenazi, while the remainder is Sephardi or Middle-Eastern Jewish. Buenos Aires has more than thirty Jewish educational institutions serving some 22,000 students. Marriage between Jewish and non-Jewish partners is estimated at 43% (Jmelnitzky and Erdei, 2005: 40). Most Jews live in mixed neighborhoods with other religious and ethnic groups. Although a large part of the Jewish population is secular, the influence of ultra-Orthodox or Haredi Judaism has grown in recent decades, including the Chabad Lubavitch group. This is evidenced in new ultra-Orthodox religious and educational institutions and political representation of these groups in the central organ of the Jewish community, the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA). Their distinctive manner of dress has also become increasingly noticeable in some areas in the city. The trajectory of Yiddish in Argentina from the past century through the present day is similar to processes that occurred on a global scale. When European Jewish immigrants began to establish themselves and identify with the expectations and aspirations of the outgroup, the number of exogamic marriages increased notably (Asría, 2006). Consequently, the transmission of Yiddish gradually declined in institutional spheres. Meanwhile, in the home, it was used only as a language of interaction among older generations, as a language for secrets. These uses of Yiddish generally excluded children, who lacked the necessary communicative competence to participate in everyday conversations. This must be understood as part of the immigrant parents’ desire for their children to master the Spanish language. As Hebe Gonzales observed in his study of linguistic minorities in San Juan (a provincial zone of Argentina), “Jewish immigrants were aware of the importance of speaking Spanish as a mean of social mobility. Those who did not have the educational opportunities in their native countries put a special interest on giving their children the education they needed for succeeding and, of course, this included a good command of Spanish” (Gonzalez, 2001: 13). The characterization of Yiddish as a “dead language” soon became commonplace. This shift, however, was not immediate nor unilineal. Upon the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, Hebrew was presented as the lingua franca that would ensure the possibility of 21 communication between Jews of different communities, as Yiddish was traditionally used among Ashkenazim (and still is by some). In those sectors most strongly aligned with the Zionist project, Modern Israeli Hebrew gained prestige as the language of the concretized utopia of a national project that represented the new, the vital, the young and thriving. Yiddish, on the other hand, became associated with nostalgia for a lost past, linked to the traumatic and the old. At the same time, progressive, non-Zionist sectors linked to the Communist Party increasingly preferred Spanish. But these changes coexisted with domains in which Yiddish continued to be, for decades, the preferred linguistic option; or at least, a frequent choice for communication in homes, theaters, schools and other institutions. First used as a whole, spoken language, it later manifested in postvernacular form through songs, sayings, jokes and word play in Spanish discourse (Skura, 2012). Jewish languages as a topic of study in Argentina The topic of Jewish languages is one that is very personal for me. I am a “native” anthropologist; I have been working on this topic in my own city for twenty years. Yiddish was the mother tongue of my parents and grandparents, as it was for many of the adults I knew in my childhood. I grew up listening to their animated conversations in the mame-loshn (mother tongue). At the same time, socially, the language was characterized as either slang or a dead language. In my Jewish school, when they decided to replace Yiddish classes with Hebrew, it was not a traumatic change for us. In the 1970s, Yiddish was the language of old people, whose strange pronunciation of porteño Spanish (the Spanish of the city of Buenos Aires 1) made us laugh and made us feel ashamed. This disparaging attitude was not limited to children. This double condition of Yiddish (as the language of everyday communication while at the same time neglected in public and Jewish institutional spaces) must be considered an important variable in asking why Yiddish was not considered worthy of academic study for so long. Fortunately, in the late twentieth century,