In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond

In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond A History of Jews and Muslims th (15th-17 Centuries) Vol. 2 Edited by José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros and Lúcia Liba Mucznik In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond: A History of Jews and Muslims (15th-17th Centuries) Vol. 2 Edited by José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros and Lúcia Liba Mucznik This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by José Alberto R. Silva Tavim, Maria Filomena Lopes de Barros, Lúcia Liba Mucznik and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7418-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7418-2 As a two volume set: ISBN (10): 1-4438-7725-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7725-1 JUDEO-SPANISH IN CONTACT WITH PORTUGUESE: LINGUISTIC OUTCOMES ALDINA QUINTANA THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM* Introduction Besides containing Hebrew and Aramaic elements as do all languages spoken by Jews, modern Judeo-Spanish, whose main base is the Castilian spoken in 1492 in the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, shows influences of Hispanic Arab, Aragonese, Catalan and Portuguese origin, and also of Italian and other languages, which are the result of contact with speakers in the Balkan Peninsula, Turkey, and the Middle East, and with French and German as languages of culture since the half of the 19th century. Linguistic factors, like the nature of the relationship between languages in contact — specifically the degree of typological similarity between them — and relevant social and socio-political aspects of the contact which operated at both the individual and group level, involved varying degrees of influence of each of these languages, first on the Castilian spoken by Jews expelled from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon in 1492, and later on Judeo-Spanish. Several grammatical patterns and lexical items from non-Castilian are detectable in modern Judeo-Spanish. Among these borrowed materials, those whose source is Portuguese stand out, although in Sephardic literature, one rarely finds references that indicate any relation of Judeo-Spanish to Portuguese.1 The contact of Judeo-Spanish speakers with Portuguese speakers involved not only those who arrived in the Ottoman Empire shortly after the expulsion from Castile and Aragon in 1492, but also ex-conversos, i.e. Jews and their descendants who, after voluntary or forced conversion to Christianity, decided in the first decades of the 16th century to return to the open practice of Judaism, and those who throughout the 17th and 18th 166 Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes centuries emigrated from Portugal to the Ottoman Empire or settled in the port cities on the Adriatic Sea and the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Cases of (dia)lectal shift 2 are detectable only when the shift is imperfect.3 There is no doubt that Portuguese speakers shifting to Judeo- Spanish acquired the bulk of the target language (TL) grammatical structure along with the TL vocabulary. But some of the linguistic features they carried over from Portuguese also led to slight changes in the Judeo- Spanish grammar and lexicon, without changing, as a whole, its Castilian background.4 Other than the fact that features of Portuguese are detectable in Judeo-Spanish, we know little or nothing about the situations of contact among Judeo-Spanish and Portuguese speakers. Questions about what types of shift took place, what was the intensity of the contact, how and when Portuguese patterns were transferred to Judeo-Spanish, what was the social context in which language contact occurred or the degree of cultural pressure to which the Portuguese Jews were subjected, have not yet been addressed in research. A description of the most salient modern Judeo- Spanish features which have been identified as Portuguese features and their analysis within the framework of language in contact theories, will allow us to deal with some of those questions.5 1. Portuguese and Castilian/Judeo-Spanish Speakers in Contact Portuguese — together with Aragonese and Catalan — and Castilian, the base language of the Judeo-Spanish koine, belong to the same language family: they are historical dialects of spoken Latin, and they constitute the geographic continuum of Romance languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula, and the typological fit is close for all grammatical subsystems, including the lexicon. Therefore, to establish to which Iberian-language specific Judeo-Spanish grammatical patterns and lexical items are related is not always easy, and in some cases it may be even impossible. According to Thomason and Kaufman,6 dialectal borrowing is very typical where the typological fit is close for all grammatical subsystems, including the lexicon. 1.1 Portuguese Speakers in the Early 16th Century 1.1.1 Historical Background Most Portuguese Jews came to the Ottoman Empire after having undergone experiences that were quite different from the experiences of Aldina Quintana 167 the Jews expelled from Castile and Aragon in 1492 and from Navarra in 1498. Many of them were refugees from the Spanish Expulsion in 1492, who, along with the native Portuguese Jews, were baptized en masse on March 19, 1497.7 Those who managed to leave Portugal in the course of these years and after the Lisbon massacre in the spring of 1506 settled in Italy and the Ottoman Empire with the rest of those expelled in 1492.8 They constituted the first group of Portuguese Jews arriving in the Ottoman Empire whose members participated in the creation of the new Sephardic communities, in the same way as had the earlier refugees. They were old Jews, who had never voluntarily left Judaism. One of the most illustrative cases was that of the famous 16th century Rabbi Levi ibn Habib, known as Ralbaḥ, who was born in Zamora in 1483, and fled with his father to Portugal in 1492, where they were forced to undergo baptism in 1497. However, they managed to escape to Salonika shortly thereafter, and to reintegrate into the Jewish community there.9 Tragic experiences like this and the expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula — who were certainly carriers of different customs and dialects — reinforced the need for integration into a new larger and homogeneous group in the new locations.10 Besides this, the Expulsion caused the breakdown of social networks and the strong social ties that had existed within Jewish communities before 1492 and led to a situation in which weak ties predominated in the new settlements outside the Iberian Peninsula, before the new social bonds could be created.11 Such a situation implies a greater openness to change language and it encourages linguistic innovation. 12 Under these circumstances, the speech of the expelled Jews would have undergone several changes. According to Ross, “[w]here speakers are conscious of their membership of the new group rather than the old, features in which the old lects differ are suppressed, especially where these are emblematic of a particular old group. Sometimes this levelling has only minor effects. In more extreme cases, the outcome is koineization, i.e. the levelling of differences”.13 Of course, the Judeo-Spanish koine is the result of the levelling of dialectal differences existing among Ibero-Romance dialects and their varieties. This linguistic process was part of a broader process of internal reorganization that resulted in the formation of the Sephardic communities, in which the members’ ethno-religious Sephardic identity and the definition of cultural and communal boundaries emerged via hybridization and from the assimilation of elements of diverse cultural origin. 14 Although it is not possible to reconstruct the demographic 168 Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes makeup of the Sephardic communities outside the Peninsula, and therefore we cannot know what proportions of speakers used which varieties of the Ibero-Romance languages, it is likely that speakers of Castilian varieties were in the majority,15 but variants of other Iberian dialects were often selected in place of these varieties.16 1.1.2. Levelling of Dialectal Differences in the Sephardic Communities in the Early 16th Century Dialectal levelling is a case of extreme “catastrophic change”, to which (dia)lects with a high degree of similarity are subject. This occurred because the dominant lect — in this case, Castilian — was not accessible to the shifting groups — each group of speakers of Portuguese, Aragonese, Catalan and other non-Castilian languages — to the necessary degree or for sufficient time for its members to acquire native-like mastery. In such a situation, problems of communication will arise, and they will be compensated for through new strategies of intercommunication developed in the new social network.17 In the view of Ross — “[c]atastrophe' seems always to entail the enforced melding of groups with different ingroup lects into a new larger group, where enforcement is either by human intervention or by natural disaster. A new social network is abruptly created or rearranged, so that old groups are compelled to become more open, establishing multiplex relationship links with each other”.18 In such a sociolinguistic situation, in the newly established communities in the Ottoman Empire after the traumatic experience of the expulsion of 1492, non-Castilian speaking groups shifted quickly to Castilian, the language of the dominant group, but without achieving a perfect command of it. In those situations of large-scale-shift, the shift brought about change, because it was imperfect, and several of the grammatical patterns and lexical items that first were transferred from the source language (SL) of the shifting speaker groups to the TL, were eventually adopted by the whole speech community in their multiplex relationship links with each other.

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