The Spanish writer Unamuno defined language as the "blood of our soul". What a perfect way to describe the close connection of the Sephardim with their language, Judeo-Spanish. One is the synonymous with the other. You cannot be a Sephardi if you, your parents, or your ancestors did not communicate in our beloved language. Even if you lost the use of Judeo-Spanish you still have in your heart, in your soul the longing for the link that made you part of the Sephardic people.
You may have lost touch with the language when your ancestors first left for Portugal and scattered from there to South Western France, the Low Countries, England or the American continent centuries ago. Or you may have lost it when they left for the Italian States, Northern Morocco or the Ottoman Empire. You may have lost it when the schools of the Alliance taught you in French and told you that your language, Judeo-Spanish, was dead. You may have lost it when for economic reasons your family left for Western Europe, Central Africa or North America. You may have lost it when the linguistic nationalism in the successor states of the Ottoman Empire forced you to speak the native languages.
But wherever you went, whether you inter-married with someone who was not "de los muestros", whether you were unable to teach your children the few words of Judeo-Spanish that you remembered, you still kept deep inside your soul the longing for the language that we took away with us from Spain in 1492. As a matter of fact that was the only thing that we were allowed to take out!
And now even that memory is threatened by certain groups and individuals who claim that being a Sephardi is only synonymous with certain Jewish rituals and Hebrew pronunciation, and nothing else.
For those people, our language, our heritage, our traditions, our culture, our history, the way of life we have maintained faithfully for the last 500 years do not count at all. They claim that language is nothing and that religion is everything. They define thus as being also Sephardim our fellow Mizrahi Jews that come from Bokhara or from Marrakech, from Damascus or from Tehran, from Basra or from Harrar, from Bombay or from Sana'a.
True they pray like us, they chant like us, they follow the same rituals, but these are not Sephardic characteristics per se, but rather Jewish ones. Just because the Ashkenazim changed the traditional Jewish ways does not make the Mizrahim members of the Sephardic nation.
It is the height of ignorance to continue to insist that the Jewish people have only two major cultural groups, the Sephardim and the Ashkenazim.
Those groups and individuals that persist in their simplistic allegations are denying the right of the Sephardim to identify themselves, not only through their religion, but also through their language, their culture, their traditions, their heritage and especially their hisroy.
And the history of the Sephardim is clear. We were forced out of Spain because we were Jewish, but we call ourselves Sephardim because we came from Spain and kept our Hispanic language and culture alive for many centuries. And nobody should rob us of that.
Being Sephardim, once we left Spain, does not only mean being Jewish, but also being the bearers of a Hispanic tradition to which we have clung for the last 500 years.
To those groups and individuals that have an agenda that will in any way dilute our definition of Sephardi, we say do not try to counter the weight of history; in the end the truth will prevail.