In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond

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 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 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">166 </li><li style="flex:1">Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes </li></ul>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 JudeoSpanish 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 JudeoSpanish 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 JudeoSpanish 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 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Aldina Quintana </li><li style="flex:1">167 </li></ul>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 Ralba ḥ, 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 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">168 </li><li style="flex:1">Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes </li></ul>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. Where there is a degree of mutual intelligibility among the ingroup (dia)lects of the old groups, a new lect may arise out of the fusion of the old. Koineization, i.e. the levelling of differences, is one of the versions that may appear, as was the case in the Sephardic communities. In this type of process, the old (dia)lects cease to exist, usually together with the disappearance of the third generation of speakers who were involved in the process of levelling of dialectal differences.19 <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Aldina Quintana </li><li style="flex:1">169 </li></ul>Most of the features of Portuguese borrowed into Judeo-Spanish should belong to patterns and lexical items selected in the process of levelling of differences among dialects, which took place in the communities of the Ottoman Empire after its creation, as a consequence of the encounter between speakers of mutually intelligible dialects. In fact, some loanwords borrowed from Portuguese are already found as incorporated words to the Spanish spoken by the Jews in documents written in the 1560s. This group includes words such as the nouns apetite (HhL20, 33; SN21, 52; Cast. apetito), “appetite, desire”, bico (HhL, 72v; MA22, 48v; Cast. pico) “peak”, and the adjectives acabidada (SN, 7, 47) “advised, informed” (Port. cavidar) or contente (HhL, 141; RV23, 21, 37v, 137; MA, 78v; Cast. contento) “satisfied”. Small differences in the form of cognates usually give rise to new hybridized forms, and as occurs in other Spanish varieties in contact with Portuguese, the free morpheme constraint is observed. This means that only stems were borrowed such as in lembraçión (HhL 54b) “act of remembering” (Port. stem lembraç- + Cast. suffix -ión). In addition, there is frequent use of the prefix tres- (trevariant), both instead of tra(n)s- (lat. trans; cast. trans- and tras-), but also meaning “three” (cast. tri-) in verbal formations and the corresponding deverbals: trespaça (RV, 43v) “he oversteps” (Port. trespassa), and especially in hybrid new forms such as tresquilar (MA, 131) “to scalp, to shear” (tres- + Cast. (tras)quilar), tremudaçion (RV, 77) “to change, to move”; trespone (Port. trespoer-se) “he transposes, the sun sets”; trestornose (RV, 25v) “he went crazy”, trespaçar (RV, 44v) “to transfer”, tresbariar (RV, 103) “to rave” (Port. desvairar), and tresdoblado (HhL, 96v) “to triple”. The role of this Portuguese-speaking minority in the process of levelling of dialectal differences — like the role of other Ibero-Romancespeaking minorities24 — was marked by their need to acquire the dominant language, i.e., Castilian, without abandoning their native language that undoubtedly continued to be spoken in the private domain, and which the first two generations probably still transmitted to their children. However, the largest exodus of Portuguese Jews to the Ottoman Empire occurred after 1535, and especially between 1550 and 1590. 1.2. Migration of Portuguese Jews to the Sephardic Communities Official approval of the Inquisition in Portugal in 1535 and its establishment in 1539, the partial expulsion of the Jews from Antwerp in 1550, and the conquest of Antwerp by the Spanish army in 1585 led to the <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">170 </li><li style="flex:1">Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes </li></ul>mass migration of Portuguese Jews to Italy, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, especially prior to 1609, the year of the signing of the armistice agreement between Spain and Holland, subsequent to which Amsterdam became the most important destination of Portuguese conversos.25 Once in the Ottoman Empire, the Portuguese Jews succeeded in integrating into the Sephardic communities created by the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula over half a century earlier, but not without having some influence on the language of the Sephardim, which was at the beginning of the process of formation. Dona Gracia Mendes, one of the most influential Portuguese figures of this period, followed this route on her flight from one place to another: she left Portugal in 1535 after the approval of the Portuguese Inquisition, and after having passed through Antwerp and Venice, she returned openly to Judaism in Ferrara, and finally settled in Constantinople in 1553.26 During these decades many converted Jews left Portugal to settle in the most important Jewish centers of the Ottoman Empire: the Latin and philosophy professor Aaron Daniel Afia27 and the physician Amathus Lusitanus 28 are just two of the many HispanicPortuguese intellectuals who followed a path similar to that traveled by Dona Gracia. Like Afia and Amathus Lusitanus, many Portuguese Jews had studied in Spanish universities, and they were therefore undoubtedly proficient in Castilian. 1.2.1. The Prestige of Castilian and the Jewish-Spanish Elite in the mid-16th Century Another factor that favored the use of Castilian among the Portuguese intellectuals was its prestige. Literary Castilian in particular, which already had a wide reputation at national level prior to 1492, 29 increased in importance in the international arena in the 16th century due to Spain’s ranking as a world power. Castilian began to acquire importance in the late 15th century among the Portuguese people, to the extent of becoming the second language of culture in Portugal: “Between the mid-fifteenth century and the late seventeenth century Spanish served as a second language for all educated Portuguese... Sixty years of Spanish domination (1580-1640), which coincided with the most brilliant period of the 'Golden Age', accentuated this linguistics impregnation. It is only after 1640, with the Restoration and the accession to the throne of King D. João IV, that certain anti-Spanish reaction set in. The bilingualism, however, continued until the time of the disappearance of the last representatives of the generation that had grown up before 1640. <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">Aldina Quintana </li><li style="flex:1">171 </li></ul>Thus, for approximately two and a half centuries, Spanish was a second culture language in Portugal...”30 Portuguese intellectual Jews who migrated to the Ottoman Empire during this period were also Castilian speakers; they belonged to a group that influenced a sector of the Sephardic communities in the process of creation in the Ottoman Empire. According to Nelson Novoa,31 “…the intellectual culture of the conversos who returned to Judaism in the East reflects the reality of the members of their communities, trained in Europe and imbued with the culture of the time, which reflected the glimpses of the Renaissance. Within the Sephardic communities, the humanistic, literary and medical culture of the European universities, the incipient empirical and critical spirit, the great Hispano-Jewish philosophical tradition and the rabbinic culture converged”. This Sephardic elite, who in the middle of 16th century were also imbibing the European culture that ex-conversos transferred to the communities on Ottoman soil, included sages such as Rabbi Moshe Almosnino whose work was written and published partly in a Castilian cult style, but which already displays influences from other languages spoken in Salonika, such as Portuguese.32 As we have seen in paragraph 1.1.2., several loanwords borrowed from Portuguese are already found as fully incorporated in documents written by Spanish Jews in the 1560s. The question now is, to what extent did the Portuguese and Castilian spoken by the bilingual Portuguese influence the formation of Judeo-Spanish in the middle of the 16th century? In the absence of earlier texts to confirm this, we can assume that these borrowed words had been incorporated into the Castilian spoken by Sephardim before the beginning of the massive arrival of converts from 1536 onward, while nonce borrowings — most of which were also incorporated later in Judeo-Spanish, as more recent documents show — represented grammatical features and lexical items that were still candidates for incorporation into the Castilian spoken by members of the communities established earlier. Therefore, the contact with the recently emigrated Portuguese speakers would be a deciding factor in the final incorporation of these and other Portuguese elements into the new Castilian variety which was in the process of formation. The question that arises here is that of the transmission path of these and other features and lexical items that have been preserved until today in Judeo-Spanish. In this context, it may be suggested that the nonce borrowings included in the works of Almosnino (RV) represented elements of a new Castilian variety spoken by a particular group — the <ul style="display: flex;"><li style="flex:1">172 </li><li style="flex:1">Judeo-Spanish in Contact with Portuguese: Linguistic Outcomes </li></ul>elite of the Portuguese conversos with which Rabbi Almosnino was in close contact throughout his life — from whence they were incorporated into the new Castilian of the whole speech community, due to the prestige of this social group. One could also assume, however, that the definitive incorporation of such Portuguese elements into the new Castilian occurred as a result of contact between speakers of Portuguese and the new Castilian variety on a broader social level. 1.2.2. Borrowings from Portuguese Detectable in Documents Written in the 1560s Portuguese nonce borrowing is well detectable in 16th Jewish texts, and not only in Almosnino's works: nouns such as alfinete (MA, 55) and alfilete (MA, 54, 55) “brooch”, amañana (MA, 83v) “very early part of the morning”, beçoç (MA, 12) “lips” (Port. beiços), çerbeja (MA, 36) “beer” (Port. cerveja), conçidrasion (HhL, 11v) “consideration”, emprestimo (RV, 102) “loan”, esnoga (MA, 7v, 10v) “synagogue”, legumes (SN, 313) “legumes”, lembrança (HhL, 34v) “remembrance”, plaina (MA, 2v) “sander”, risco (MA, 109) “line”, esturmentos (HhL, 4) “torments”, vidro (MA, 15, 57v) “glass”; adjectives: afastado (RV, 35v) “departed from, deviated”, arreigado (RV, 102v) “rooted”, enxalsado (MA, 164) “praised”, escuro (MA, 152) “dark, somber”, sequiozo (RV, 144v) “thirsty”, somenos (HhL, 53v) “minor, inferior in quality or value”; verbs such as anojar (RV, 55v) “to nauseate, to dislike”, esfriar (MA, 98) “to become less hot; fig.: to discourage”, conçidrar “to take into account” (HhL, 11v), fadar (MA, 4) “to predestine”, salprezar (MA, 80) “to salt lightly”; and the adverb en fito (HhL, 24v) “in a fixed manner”, were all incorporated into Judeo-Spanish. Not so the words adoesto (RV 44) “misfortune, dishonour”, and natureza (RV, 31, 36, 97) “character, temperament”, which could be identified with higher registers of language.33 They are words borrowed via a cultural adstratum and not from intercommunication developed in the new social network, which explains why they have not been accepted in the Judeo-Spanish koine. One of the morpho-syntactic patterns found in documents written by Castilian-Aragonese rabbis or their descendants of them in the 1560s is the conjugated infinitive following the Portuguese model (1, 2, 3): 34

In the Iberian Peninsula and Beyond

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