Between the down and the setting of the sephardim wisdom

Between the down and the setting of the sephardim wisdom

The poesic confession of the beautiful Flerida of Casablanca reminds us of its fate: “To unknown tracts my road would take me. Where sweet caress would call upon me... (A folk song of the 15th century).
The Mediterranean Diaspora of the late 15th century is not only the tragic outcome of the religious conflict between the Mediaeval Inquisition and the Star of David. The events in that remote time and their consequences, still catching up with us, have created a string of problems, most of them of universal importance. This year, when we mark the 500th anniversary of the Diaspora, the history of the Spanish Jews should invite comments and evaluations of both their experience after March 31st, 1942, as well as their fate under the peaceful roof of the Pyrenees. The key to the historic events is the notion of Sepharad – a biblical place name which the Jewish tradition identities with Spain (comparative the Obadiah 20:...and the captivity of Jerusalem, which is in Sepharad, shall possess the cities of the south).
The alterations in the meaning of Sepharad correspond to the main periods in the history of its bearers. The first period could be called Sepharad 1, and is connected with the land of the other side of the Mediterranean, where the long-suffering children of Israel turned their hopeful glances after the razing of Solomon’s temple by the Roman conquerors in the 1st c. AD. The long stay in the Pyrenees ended at the close of the 15th c.
This is the time of the joint flowering of the three cultures in Spain – the Christian, the Arab, and the Jewish – which reached their zenith under the reign of the enlightened king Alfonso X (the Wise), who founded and managed the famous Toledo school of translators.
The grateful generations have always linked that constructive Mediaeval period with the work of the great Jewish poets Mose Ibn Ezra, Jehuda Ha-Levy, and Selmo Gabriol, the name of the remarkable thinker Maimonide (b. Moses ben Maimon), called later on the Aristoteles of Judaism in Spain, as well.

The late 14th century however heralds troubles times for the Jewish community. The drama builds up all the time and finds its denouement on March 31st, 1492. By force of decree, signed by the Catholic kings Isabelle and Fernando the Sephardim are banished from the territory of the newly restored kingdom.
This is the beginning of the second period in the history of the Spanish Jews and it ends at the outset of the present century. In exile the former Biblical toponym Sepharad 1 becomes an ethnonym Sepharad 2 and has a new meaning: “A Jewish community, coming from Spain”.
And indeed those people who migrated to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans were Jews in religion, but at the same time believed themselves Spanish because of the language in which they willingly communicated and maintained their tradition for quite a long time. The change was also true of the derivative Sephardic. In the place of the former meaning of Jewish after the Diaspora there is new one: “Jewish-Spanish”, i.e. what was brought along from Spain and preserved in the new lands. Nowadays we speak in this sense of a Sephardic culture, or, in particular, of a Sephardic language, of a Sephardic literature, etc.

The most important amongst the problems, connected with Sepharad 2 are the following: emergence and development of the Sephardic language as an archaic speach outside its homeland;
Defining, genre classification and themes of the Sephardic leiterary and folk tradition; the role of the Spanish Jews in the contacts between the Ottoman Empire and the European Renaissance;
The wonderful power of resistance of the human spirit, which does not submit to arbitrariness and violence, and the vital popular conciousness of the origin of the Sephardic way of life and mentality.
The list could go on, but here we have only pointed to those of these phenomena, which make for an objective evaluation of the Diaspora. Related to the foregoing period the problem of Sepharad 2 show their historic continuity emerging from the achievments of Sepharad 1.
The power of this tradition finds its most vivid projection in language and literature. The Sephardim bring to the Balkans the Spanish language in two forms – written and oral. The written one, called ladino, was semi-archaic and served solely for the translation of the liturgical books which followed stricly the Hebrew original, including the word order. This is the reason wy some authors call it loantranslation language.
The colloquial popular form was a motley blend of Spanish dialects with admixtures of Hebrew and Arabic lexical elements, its integrity was intact until the early 17th c. By 1620 the Sephardim have new worries.
The links with Spain we are weakening. The radical changes in the structure of literary Spanish during the Golden Age did not affect the Sephardic speech. Severed from its homeland and finding itself in foreign language surroundings it became a sort of koine, to be called later judezmo (from the colloquial jidio – a Jew, with the meaning of Jewish-Spanish speech).
The judezmo stands out with its archaic system of the late mainly on the other Balkan languages. The French and Italian elements have come with the effort of Europe of the time of Enlightment to re-discover the Sephardim by way of economy and culture, responding to their needs. The circumstances determing the historical development of the judizmo have not affected its historical and typological oneness with Spanish.
The Bulgarian analogue of this is the Banat Bulgarian. During the Sepharad 2 period judezmo was not solely a means of communication in the household and as an occupational language. An extensive and varied literature – religious, secular, folklore – was created in it. Religious literature in the cultural history of the Sephardim goes beyond the framework of theology, because it is not simply translation and commentary of liturgical books. It reflects the philosophy, the way of life and the psyche of a people with historical roots in the far removed Biblical times.
The classical works of Yacob Yuli, Shemuel Arana, Yacob Uziel, and Abraham Toledo are an example of the perfect harmony of a Spanish verbal form and its content – the age-long experience of the Jews. The Revival Period of the Balkan nations pushes the Sephardic writers towards secular themes, after the models provided by authors like Dumas, Hugo, Goldoni etc.
Precedence in this type of literature was given to prose, drama and non-fiction.

As a matter of fact the latter had a broad circle of readers. In the course of almost a century there were about 50 periodicals in Bulgaria alone. The contemporary Evreyski Vesti (Jewish news) could in all justice believe itself to be the successor of the former La boz de Israel (Sofia, 1887), El Tresoro (Rouse, 1893), Alilat Haddam (Pazardjic, 1894), Carmel (Plovdiv, 1895), etc. Historical continuity has been most stable in folklore tradition.
The surviving models of romances, lyrical and wedding songs, of proverbs and saying take us over to the Iberian Penisula, to the roots of Sephardic wisdom.
After so many centuries of contacts with religiously tolerant nations it would be quite natural for a number of Balkan motifs to be found in the Jewish tradition. However they have been recreated in full harmony with the Spanish heritage. Sepharad 3 is our present and a sad epilogue to a cultural heritage. A number of external and internal factors interrupted the creative processes, the folkloric debirs started to erode in the mind, the natural links of language and society were disrupted...judezmo ceased to develop.
The linguistic and cultural integration of the Sephardim with the nations among which they have been fated to live has been brought to its conclusion. The official languages of the Balkan countries have become a conscious necessity, i.e. an acquired freedom to communicate in the street, in the marketplace, in the school and ...finally in the family. Where only the oldest people would from time to time stretch their memory, cast in ancient Spanish, as they recall past experiences.
The essence of the historical events, which have taken place between the dawn and the decline of Sephardic wisdom, defines the object and predetermines the immediate tasks of an emerging field of scientific inquiry, deservedly called Hebrew-Spanish Studies.