in Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online
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From the arrival in the South Slavic lands of Jews from Iberia following their expulsions from Castile, Aragon, and Portugal in the late 15th century, commercial, labor-related, and social contacts began to be woven between the Jews and the local Slavs. In some instances, Turkish served as a contact language; but some Jews also learned local varieties of Slavic, and their use of it with their neighbors is documented in the rabbinical responsa of the local Sephardic rabbis from the 16th century on. As a result of the interaction between Judezmo and Slavic speakers, the South Slavic languages began to make an impact on Judezmo early on, although in the early centuries of settlement, the impact seems to have been minor. However, from the second half of the 19th century, with the independence of the South Slavs from their former Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian rulers and the growing importance of their languages in the everyday lives of the Jews residing in the newly established Slavic nation-states, coupled with the concomitant decline in the role of Turkish in the region, the contribution of the South Slavic languages to Judezmo increased considerably. The contribution is documented primarily in the rabbinical responsa of the region, in locally published Judezmo rabbinical works, as well as in the Judezmo press, which began to arise in the region in the late 19th century. The increasing centrality of Slavic in everyday Jewish life, as well as governmental and social pressure on the Jews to use Slavic in all aspects of their lives, eventually resulted in the shift from Judezmo to Slavic as the primary daily language of the Jews of the region, especially outside the home and internal community settings. The article documents and analyzes the contribution of Slavic to Judezmo over the centuries of Sephardic residence in the region, from the 16th through the 20th centuries.
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in Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online
Search for other papers by David M. Bunis in
Current site
Google Scholar
(16,561 words)