#judeo-spanish

[sefaradweb]

Judíos, conversos y el judeoespañol

🇪🇸 El artículo de Juan Antonio Frago analiza la historia del judeoespañol, desde sus orígenes en la península ibérica hasta la unificación lingüística que experimentaron los judíos expulsados en 1492. También se examina el papel de los conversos, tanto aquellos de última hora como las generaciones posteriores de cristianos nuevos, quienes a través de sus declaraciones ante la Inquisición proporcionaron información sobre su realidad cultural e idiomática. Se estudia una comunidad judía de Aragón como ejemplo del peso que las comunidades rurales tuvieron en la diáspora. El autor concluye que el judeoespañol ya existía antes de la firma del Edicto de Expulsión de 1492, en aspectos fundamentales relacionados con la diversidad lingüística de España en el siglo XV.

🇺🇸 Juan Antonio Frago's article explores the history of Judeo-Spanish, from its origins in the Iberian Peninsula to the linguistic unification experienced by the Jews expelled in 1492. It also examines the role of conversos, including late converts and later generations of new Christians, who provided insights into their cultural and linguistic realities through their Inquisition testimonies. The study focuses on a Jewish community in Aragón, highlighting the influence of rural communities in the diaspora. The author concludes that Judeo-Spanish existed before the signing of the Edict of Expulsion in 1492, in key aspects related to Spain's linguistic diversity in the 15th century.

[soundgrammar]

Listen/purchase: Onde que Tope una que es Plaziente (Where You Encounter a Pleasing One) by Jack Mayesh

[nesyanast]

How beautiful is the Ladino ✡️ language! I read this song is common at Sephardi weddings, but this version gives it such an enchanting ethereal vibe to it. I can't stop playing this track on Spotify, my new song fixation of the week.

[oatmilkandvellichor]

i love being in an excessively multilingual, multicultural relationship.

hahahaha, jajajaja, חחחחח, yalla, let’s go, dai, stop, cut it out, enough, nu?, so?, and?, ¿y?, what?, huh?, ¿que?, yes, yeah, sí, enka, yay, yesh, chabibi, achi, dude, bestie, compa, llave, kerido, querido, mi vida, cariño, tateleh, lovey, bitch, pendejo, shkots, fucking insane, descabellado, balagan, thank you, mvto, you good?, ‘stonko?

even the things that mean more or less the same thing Do Not mean the same thing in this house. if i’m laughing in hebrew instead of english there’s a reason. if i say querido instead of kerido there’s a reason. if zee calls me tateleh instead of papí there’s a reason. thanking you in creek instead of english isn’t a slip. etc etc etc.

i genuinely cannot explain this to you if you do not live in an excessively multicultural household. it is not enough to be bilingual/multilingual. i am spinning trying to explain this to people rn.

[adiradirim]

Karen Gerson Şarhon, editor in chief of El Amaneser ("The Dawn,") , a 32-page monthly Ladino supplement to Turkey’s weekly Jewish newspaper and the world’s only monthly Judeo-Spanish publication. El Amaneser is a project of the nonprofit she directs, the Sephardic Cultural Research Center, which acts as the hub of Istanbul’s Jewish community and a treasure trove of precious Ladino texts and translations. Included in these archives are recordings of native Ladino speakers preserved by the Center’s Ladino Database Project, and other undertakings such as the most comprehensive recordings and research of Maftirim, a musical tradition unique to the Turkish-Jewish community that emerged through interactions with Muslim Sufi orders in Edirne. Şarhon notes proudly that the center also has a variety of language-learning programs on its website, the only one on the internet with a Ladino language option. Şarhon grew up in a Ladino-speaking family in Istanbul, and her passion for the language intensified when she formed Los Pasharos Sefaradis (The Sephardic Birds), the first ensemble dedicated to researching and performing Sephardic music, in which she sang the old Ladino songs in the authentic style of her grandmothers. She went on to be a champion of Sephardic and Ladino cultural preservation. Read more about her accomplishments here.

“Ke mos biva esta lingua ermoza de muestros abuelos i el Dio ke mos de fuersa i enerjiya para luchar kontra su desaparision,” Karen Gerson Şarhon proclaims in Ladino. “Long live this beautiful language of our ancestors, and may God give us strength and energy to strive against its disappearance.”

[fatehbaz]

Thinking about the Holocaust in Africa.

Here, European notions of anti-Blackness and antisemitism became intertwined.

There was a fusion between the dispossession and racism of European imperialism and colonization projects of the late nineteenth century, and the prison regimes imposed by European fascism in the early twentieth century.

Scholars Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum have recently written much about the importance of recognizing the trauma of labor and internment camps in North Africa during the second world war.

And I want to express my gratitude for their work. I want to share some of what they’ve written in a couple of recent articles.

In their words: “Nazism in Europe was underlaid by an intricate matrix of racist, eugenicist and nationalist ideas. But the war – and the Holocaust – appears even more complex if historians take into account the racist and violent color wheel that spun in North Africa.” [1]

France's prison camps in North Africa were filled with Algerians, local Jews, deported European Jews, Eastern European refugees, domestic political dissidents from France, people fleeing fascist Spain, Moroccan residents, Senegalese subjects of French rule, other West Africans displaced by French occupation, and more.

The anti-Blackness and antisemitism that had fueled Europe's colonial expansion was finding new expression in fascist Europe.

---

Seems France is a central antagonist in the story of evolving approaches to empire, racism, and resource extraction.

After their 1940 alliance with the Nazis, the Vichy French government maintained technical control of French colonies across Africa. Beginning in 1940, the French government “alone built nearly 70 such camps in the Sahara.” [1] This was in addition to another six labor camps which the French government built in West Africa (in Senegal, Guinea, and Mali).

---

By the beginning of the twentieth century, French-influenced or -controlled territory in North Africa was home to around 500,000 Jews, many of whom had been living in the region for centuries or millennia, speaking many languages, “reflecting their many different cultures and ethnicities: Arabic, French, Tamazight – a Berber language – and Haketia, a form of Judeo-Spanish spoken in northern Morocco.” [1] The Vichy French government officially stripped North African Jews of formal citizenship and seized their assets.

Then, deporting residents of Europe and political dissidents in “early 1941, the Vichy authorities transferred hundreds of Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, including women and children, to the Saharan labor camps.” [2] Under French rule “in Algeria [...], it was estimated that 2,000-3,000 Jews were interned in camps [...] resulting in a total prisoner population of 15,000-20,000.” [2]  France pursued an “unrealized dream of the nineteenth century” [2]: the completion of the Mediterranean-Niger railroad line in the Sahara, a transportation route across the vast desert to connect the prosperous West African port of Dakar with the Mediterranean coast of Algeria.

Meanwhile the “Vichy regime [...] continued racist policies begun by France’s Third Republic, which pushed young Black men from the empire into forced military service,” including forced recruitment from “Senegal, French Guinea, Ivory Coast, Niger and Mauritania; [...] Benin, Gambia and Burkina Faso; and Muslim men from Morocco and Algeria. In these ways, the French carried on a wartime campaign of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, pairing these forms of racialized hatred from the colonial era with antisemitism. Antisemitism had deep roots in French and colonial history, but it found new force in the era of fascism.” [1]

---

In late 1942, during the Nazi occupation of Tunisia, the SS “imprisoned some 5,000 Jewish men in roughly 40 forced labor and detention camps on the front lines and in cities like Tunis.” [2] The fascist Italian government had been experimenting with racist and anti-Black policy in their colonization of East Africa; these policies were expanded in Libya. Here, “Mussolini ordered the Jews of Cyrenaica moved” as “most of the 2,600 Jews deported [...] were sent to the camp of Giado” while “other Libyan Jews were deported to the camps of Buqbuq and Sidi Azaz.” [2]

---

Stein and Boum describe the diversity of prisoner experience: “In these camps, [...] the complex racist logic of Nazism and fascism took vivid form. Muslims arrested for anti-colonial activities were pressed into back-breaking labor” and “broke bread with other forced workers” including ‘Ukrainians, Americans, Germans, Russian Jews and others [...] arrested, deported and imprisoned by the Vichy regime after fleeing Franco’s Spain. There were political enemies of the Vichy and Nazi regime too, including socialists, communists, union members [...] overseen by [...] forcibly recruited [...] Moroccan and Black Senegalese men, who were often little more than prisoners themselves.” [1]

As Stein and Boum describe it: “Vichy North Africa became a unique site [...] where colonialism and fascism co-existed and overlapped.” [2]

They write: “Together, we have spent a decade gathering the voices of the diverse peoples who endured World War II in North Africa, across lines of race, class, language and region. Their letters, diaries, memoirs, poetry and oral histories are both defiant and broken. They express both faith and despair. All in all, they understood themselves to be trapped in a monstrous machine of fascism, occupation, violence and racism.” [1]

---

[1]: Sarah Abrevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “80 years ago, Nazi Germany occupied Tunisia - but North Africans’ experiences of World War II often go unheard.” The Conversation. 15 November 2022.

[2]: Sarah Arbevaya Stein and Aomar Boum. “Labor and Internment Camps in North Africa.” Holocaust Encyclopedia online. Last edited 13 May 2019.

[eretzyisrael]

Who are the Mizrahim? History 101

Where do Jews come from and what is the difference between Sephardim and Mizrahim? Loolwa Khazzoom gives this succint explanation for the Jewish Virtual Library:

A Baghdadi Jewish family

Regardless of where Jews lived most recently, therefore, all Jews have roots in the Middle East and North Africa. Some communities, of course, have more recent ties to this region: Mizrahim and Sephardim, two distinct communities that are often confused with one another.

Mizrahim are Jews who never left the Middle East and North Africa since the beginnings of the Jewish people 4,000 years ago. In 586 B.C.E., the Babylonian Empire (ancient Iraq) conquered Yehudah (Judah), the southern region of ancient Israel.

Babylonians occupied the Land of Israel and exiled the Yehudim (Judeans, or Jews), as captives into Babylon. Some 50 years later, the Persian Empire (ancient Iran) conquered the Babylonian Empire and allowed the Jews to return home to the land of Israel. But, offered freedom under Persian rule and daunted by the task of rebuilding a society that lay in ruins, most Jews remained in Babylon. Over the next millennia, some Jews remained in today’s Iraq and Iran, and some migrated to neighboring lands in the region (including today’s Syria, Yemen, and Egypt), or emigrated to lands in Central and East Asia (including India, China, and Afghanistan).

Sephardim are among the descendants of the line of Jews who chose to return and rebuild Israel after the Persian Empire conquered the Babylonian Empire. About half a millennium later, the Roman Empireconquered ancient Israel for the second time, massacring most of the nation and taking the bulk of the remainder as slaves to Rome. Once the Roman Empire crumbled, descendants of these captives migrated throughout the European continent. Many settled in Spain (Sepharad) and Portugal, where they thrived until the Spanish Inquisition and Expulsion of 1492 and the Portuguese Inquisition and Expulsion shortly thereafter.

During these periods, Jews living in Christian countries faced discrimination and hardship. Some Jews who fled persecution in Europe settled throughout the Mediterranean regions of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, as well as Central and South America. Sephardim who fled to Ottoman-ruled Middle Eastern and North African countries merged with the Mizrahim, whose families had been living in the region for thousands of years.

In the early 20th century, severe violence against Jews forced communities throughout the Middle Eastern region to flee once again, arriving as refugees predominantly in Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the Americas. In Israel, Middle Eastern and North African Jews were the majority of the Jewish population for decades, with numbers as high as 70 percent of the Jewish population, until the mass Russian immigration of the 1990s. Mizrahi Jews are now half of the Jewish population in Israel.

Throughout the rest of the world, Mizrahi Jews have a strong presence in metropolitan areas — Paris, London, Montreal, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, and Mexico City. Mizrahim and Sephardim share more than common history from the past five centuries. Mizrahi and Sephardic religious leaders traditionally have stressed hesed (compassion) over humra (severity, or strictness), following a more lenient interpretation of Jewish law.

Despite such baseline commonalities, Middle Eastern and North African Mizrahim and Sephardim do retain distinct cultural traditions. Though Mizrahi and Sephardic prayer books are close in form and content, for example, they are not identical. Mizrahi prayers are usually sung in quarter tones, whereas Sephardic prayers have more of a Southern European feel. Traditionally, moreover, Sephardic prayers are often accompanied by a Western-style choir in the synagogue.

Mizrahim traditionally spoke Judeo-Arabic — a language blending Hebrew and a local Arabic dialect. While a number of Sephardim in the Middle East and North Africa learned and spoke this language, they also spoke Ladino–a blend of Hebrew and Spanish. Having had no history in Spain or Portugal, Mizrahim generally did not speak Ladino.

In certain areas, where the Sephardic immigration was weak, Sephardim assimilated into the predominantly Mizrahi communities, taking on all Mizrahi traditions and retaining just a hint of Sephardic heritage — such as Spanish-sounding names. In countries such as Morocco, however, Spanish and Portuguese Jews came in droves, and the Sephardic community set up its own synagogues and schools, remaining separate from the Mizrahi community.

Even within the Mizrahi and Sephardi communities, there were cultural differences from country to country. On Purim, Iraqi Jews had strolling musicians going from house to house and entertaining families (comparable to Christmas caroling), whereas Egyptian Jews closed off the Jewish quarter for a full-day festival (comparable to Mardi Gras). On Shabbat, Moroccan Jews prepared hamin (spicy meat stew), whereas Yemenite Jews prepared showeah (spicy roasted meat), among other foods.

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[rotzaprachim]

nothing like introducing a friend to the sheer joys of

a) https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/?startyear=1783&endyear=1981

the national library of Israel historic newspaper archive!!!! - this is one of the widest ranging collections of Jewish language documents I’ve ever found and includes quite literally millions of pages of Jewish papers and magazines not only in Yiddish and hebrew but also ladino, Spanish, French, judeo-Arabic, polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, the list goes ever on…. If you’ve seen the very very pretty covers to the milgroyim and rimonim art journals then you should know they are available online for free:

https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/rmn? https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/rmn? Learning ladino? Here’s a ten years of a monthly paper for ladino speaking immigrants to the early twentieth century U.S.:

https://www.nli.org.il/en/newspapers/laa? Here’s a Yiddish paper from 1920’s Havana!:

There’s so so much here! b) Yiddish book center! And their ELEVEN THOUSAND YIDDISH BOOKS which are free to read anywhere without an account! https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/search?f%5B0%5D=collection%3AYiddish%20Book%20Center%27s%20Spielberg%20Digital%20Yiddish%20Library

Overwhelmed? Here’s the top 1000:

still overwhelmed? Here’s a more manageable list of audiobooks read off by native speakers:

Learning Yiddish? Here are some readers and children’s books:

Enjoy!

[adarkrainbow]

As you might have noticed with my latest post, I have been looking into Frau Holle recently. And I just read an article by Dominique Peyrache-Leborgne which has some interesting points.

The article starts out by pointing out the difficulty of translating "Frau Holle", the very name of the tale/entity, in French. "Frau" can become easily "Madame" or "Dame", Miss or Lady, no problem... But what about "Holle"? The very name is a part of German folklore - and not just German folklore, a very specific regional folklore in Germany around Hesse - and as such it means nothing to a French audience. Not only that, but since French is a Latin-derived language, unlike German, the very name "Holle" does not bear any connotations, implications or echoes in French the same way it does in German or even English. As such, while there were translations as "Madame Hollé" as early as 1869, the idea of keeping "Frau Holle" as "Frau Holle" or just transliterating as "Lady Holle" is quite recent - and only applies to scholarly translations. Meanwhile, for older or more "common" translations, a specific trend appeared in France, a translation-tradition that still lasts to this day. Translating Frau Holle as "Madame la Neige" (Miss Snow), "Dame Hiver" (Lady Winter) or other cold-related names.

An habit that the author of the article severely criticizes, because while indeed snow plays an important part in the fairytale, Frau Holle is not supposed to be a spirit of winter or an embodiment of the snow - or at least she does not appear exclusively as such. Frau Holle is a very complex cultural figure with various functions and appearances.

To help the audience understand the complexity of Frau Holle, the article presents in a simplified and summarized version the list of supernatural beings that appear in variations of the "Frau Holle" tale around the world - a list extracted from a work by Warren E. Roberts, a "very complete synthesis" called "The Tale of the Kind and Unkind Girls" (1958). To highlight this intertextuality not only helps understand the various roles and elements surrounding the "part" Frau Holle is supposed to play ; while also proving how Frau Holle synthetizes all of those various aspects together.

In most fairytales of the type "The Kind and Unkind Girls", the supernatural being is a female entity of magic. For example, a fairy - fairies are very recurring in this type of fairytale though, unlike in Perrault's famous "Diamonds and Toads", there is never just one fairy, they are always three. It is exemplified by Basile's "The Three Fairies" in his Pentamerone ; they also appear within several Judeo-Spanish fairytales of the Balkans (there was a recent anthology of them translated in French published by the José Corti edition), and it is quite common for these three fairies to be washer-women, or at least tied to water/rivers (several variations in the French region of Gascogne have the fairies as washer-women by the river). There is also an equally important number of fairytales, among these "female tales", where the girls rather deal with witches - characters that very easily replace or are confused with fairies in folktales. The most famous of those witches tale is the one Afanassiev called simply "The Baba Yaga", and where the famous Russian witch plays the part of Frau Holle. A third option also exists for the female magical being: just "an old woman", "little old woman", who is clearly magic but never called by any specific name like "fairy" or "witch" (this type of character, the "magical old woman", not quite a fairy not quite a witch, is very common among the Grimm fairytales). The "simple old woman" appears for example in another one of Basile's tales "The two little pizzas", and in a Bulgarian fairytale "Girl of gold, girl of ashes" (a story which did reach France through the Père Castor collection for children). Sometimes the old woman will ask to have lice removed from her head (for example in Greek fairytales). Finally, in lands with a strong Catholic presence, of course, the female supernatural entity is replaced by the Virgin Mary - something very common among Christianized fairytales, where the Virgin Mary plays the part of every positive female magical character (an example is the Spanish fairytale "Three Balls of Gold").

So we have here a quite coherent group of female entities, though quite ambiguous, the fairy-witch group. There is also a share of those stories that have male characters as the supernatural entity. Usually these are earthly entities tied somehow to nature: in the Ludwig Bechstein's "Golden Mary, Sticky Mary", it is a "wild man" or "savage man", the "Thürschemann" ; in Afanassiev's The Old Grumpy Woman it is a leshy, a male "forest spirit" ; and in Grimm's own "The Three Little Men of the Forest" it is, as the title says, three dwarves living in the woods. When it comes to the male stories, having them be a specific entity related to the weather or the flow of time similar to Frau Holle is quite common: in England you have Jack Frost, in Russia Grandfather Frost ; and in many European fairytales the supernatural group of men embodies either the four seasons or the twelve months (Basile's "The Months" for example ; the article also notes a 1996 French children book "Adeline, Adelune et le feu des saisons", Adeline, Adelune and the fire of the seasons).

Finally, there is also a set of tales with more enigmatic and mysterioues entities, whose roots seem to belong in myths, religious symbolism or magical rituals. For example in the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions, the entity is usually three disembodied heads within a well, that asked for their hair to be brushed, or simply to be treated with respect. Miranda Jane Green evoked this trope within her "Celtic Myths", and James Orchard Halliweel collected a version of it, "The Three Heads in the Well" for his "Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England".

And Frau Holle, as an old and ancient avatar of a lost Germanic goddess, manages to compile and regroup all of those aspects and all those various entities within her. Like the three heads in the well, she is associated with ancient myths and the world of the dead. Like the four seasons, the twelve months, and Jack/Grandfather Frost, she is a spirit of the weather and the cycle of time. Like the wild-men and forest-spirits, she is an entity of wilderness and nature (the Brothers Grimm, in their "German Legends", do note several times that she leads a "Wild Hunt" throughout the forest). And finally she is the ultimately fairy-witch ; she is the kind and benevolent wise woman... and the terrifying ogress-like long-teethed hag.

A complexity of character, a multiplicity of faces, that is retranscribed within the ungoing debate surrounding the etymology of "Holle". For those who want to study the German fairytales under a mythological angle (Jacob Grimm was one of the most famous names to do so, more recently Eugen Rewermann, a religion specialist, took back the Grimm theory), Holle is survivance of the old pagan goddess of Germany Hulda, a mother-earth goddess (hence why Frau Holle lives underground, down a well). This is notably this analysis that led Lucie Crane, the woman that translated the Grimm fairytales for the edition illustrated by Walter Crane, to translate "Frau Holle" as "Mother Hulda": it was an attempt to give back to her a mythological glory. But other scholars have argued that Frau Holle could also be a female version of this Norse winter-god associated with the dead that appears in the Eddas: Uller/Holler. Another analysis, that is tied to the fairytale, is the homonimy between "Frau Holle" and "die Hölle" - which is "Hell" of course, but since here Frau Holle rules over a benevolet underground "land of the dead", we can think of it as a generic term for the "Underworld" (the same way for example in some languages the Greek Underworld are referred to as "Hell" despite having the paradise of the Elysian Fields). And more so: "Holle" coul also be... "die Holde", which means kindness or benevolence.

Many, many possible readings all true in their own way, which not only testifies to the cultural wealth behind the figure of Frau Holle, but also reflects perfectly how the character is one of paradoxes, duality and multiplicites. Frau Holle is so powerful that she mixes the up and the down - her realm is underground and yet in it she makes it snow in the sky, as a goddess both chthonian and celestial... With Frau Holle, life and death becomes a blur ; and more importantly Frau Holle gathers within her all seasons, because she might make it snow like in winter, her domain is stilled filled with the fresh flowers of spring and the hot sun of summer...

[The author of the article did praise greatly John Warren Stewig's decision of translating the character's name as "Mother Holly" in 2001. "Holly" is close enough to "Holle" in sonority, but it also makes the character feel more familiar to an English-speaking audience since it is a quite common name ; and "Holly" also plays cleverly on both "holly", the plant, one of the defining symbols of winter, and "holy", evoking Frau Holle's alternate roles as a saint or a goddess]

[sefaradweb]

Centro Sefarad-Israel premia al Instituto Cervantes "por su labor en la difusión del legado cultural sefardí"

🇪🇸 El 30 de septiembre de 2024, el Centro Sefarad-Israel otorgó al Instituto Cervantes el Premio Corona de Esther en reconocimiento a su "labor en la difusión del legado cultural sefardí" y su contribución al estudio del judeoespañol. El director del Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, destacó la importancia de conservar esta lengua como una herramienta contra los discursos de odio. La ceremonia coincidió con el inicio del año judío 5785, marcado por la festividad de Rosh Hashaná, y contó con la presencia de figuras como Carmen Magariños del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Antonio Garde de la Comunidad de Madrid. Además, el presidente de la Federación de Comunidades Judías de España, David Obadía, advirtió sobre el preocupante aumento del antisemitismo en Europa.

🇺🇸 On September 30, 2024, the Centro Sefarad-Israel awarded the Instituto Cervantes the Corona de Esther Prize in recognition of its "work in promoting Sephardic cultural heritage" and its contribution to the study of Judeo-Spanish. The director of the Instituto Cervantes, Luis García Montero, emphasized the importance of preserving this language as a tool against hate speech. The ceremony coincided with the start of the Jewish year 5785, marked by the Rosh Hashanah festival, and was attended by figures such as Carmen Magariños from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Antonio Garde from the Madrid Regional Government. Additionally, the president of the Federation of Jewish Communities in Spain, David Obadía, warned of the worrying rise of antisemitism in Europe.

[spacelazarwolf]

if you don’t know who flory jagoda is, you absolutely should. she was a sephardic bosnian jewish musician who was famous for her interpretations of judeo-spanish (ladino) folk songs. her music is on spotify and if you haven’t listened to it you are missing out.

[jewishpositivity18]

Across the Jewish diaspora, Jewish people have adapted to the cultures they've lived in, even creating their own languages! Of course there's Hebrew, the OG Jewish language, but there's also: Yiddish (Judeo-German)

Ladino (Judeo-Spanish)

Judeo-Arabic

and more!!

[mariacallous]

The inside cover of my grandmother’s cookbook is inscribed with her handwriting, “Think of me when you cook.” It is a copy of the same spiral-bound book that has been given to all of the women in my family. “The Sephardic Cooks: Comé Con Gana” has somehow made its way from one synagogue in Atlanta to Sephardic communities and families from New Jersey to California. It has all the classic recipes, including a section titled “Main Dish Pastries.” These dishes are the cornerstone of the Sephardic tradition, desayuno.

The word “desayuno” literally translates to “breakfast” in Ladino, the dying Judeo-Spanish language historically spoken by Sephardic Jews. Yet, the meaning extends beyond that one meal. In Sephardic culture, desayunois a category of foods associated with the large Saturday morning meal that would be served after Shabbat, including egg dishes and savory pastries. 

These desayuno foods are some of my favorite things to eat and the ones I most associate with my own family traditions. The blocks of crustless quajado (spinach quiche) that always seemed to be in my childhood freezer, ready to thaw for lunch. The doughy, cheesy spinach boyos my grandmother would have ready for our breakfast every time we traveled to visit her. The pasteles (mini meat pies) my great-aunt taught to a room filled with four generations of cousins at our family reunion last summer. The rice-and-cheese-filled bureka pastries my mom comes over to make with my kids and me. 

While delicious and crowd-pleasing, these are also some of the most time-consuming recipes to prepare. I picture my great-grandmother standing in a friend’s kitchen as all the ladies of the community work together to knead mounds of dough, mix a vat of filling, fold and crimp sheets and sheets of burekas. Whether this is accurate or just my imagination justifying why it feels intimidating to make these by myself, desayuno pastries do not align well with today’s fast-paced, individual lifestyle. Save for the times my mom comes to bake with us (importantly, bringing a container of prepped filling), making dough and pastry from scratch is not happening in my kitchen. 

I hope to be a part of the thread that keeps Sephardic traditions alive, yet I do not want to let perfection be the enemy of my intentions. I think my grandmother would agree. While she baked burekas with all of her grandchildren and always had a freezer full of freshly baked rosca (coffee rolls), she was never one to turn down a good shortcut. She developed her own boyo recipe featuring Hungry-Jack biscuit dough as the base and once described to me a full lentil soup recipe, only to end it with, “or you could just buy a can of lentil soup.” She loved when I would call her to share that I had tried a Sephardic recipe, such as cinnamon biscocho cookies or lemon chicken soup. Whether my attempts had been successful or a flop (like my rock-hard biscochos), her smile would be audible through the phone saying, “I’m just so glad you tried.” 

As Sephardic culture and traditions fade and assimilate, food provides an important outlet to preserve history and share it with family and friends. More important than getting it right or spending hours in the kitchen is remembering our traditions, trying recipes, talking about or simply eating Sephardic foods, regardless of who made them.  

In that spirit, I would like to propose lowering our standards, for the greater good of keeping traditions alive. Consider a desayuno with fewer parts or with a little help from the freezer aisle. Rather than the large spread my ancestors would prepare for days in advance, consider making one thing from scratch (though I won’t tell if you cook zero things). You could make a batch of burekas or a quajado, arguably the easiest of the Sephardic breakfast dishes, or even just prepare a pot of hard-boiled eggs. Supplement with frozen spanakopita, Ta’amti Bourekas or a Trader Joe’s Greek cheese spiral for a full table. 

Nothing will taste quite like homemade pastries fresh from the oven and I still aspire to make them (occasionally). Yet, even when I munch a makeshift Sephardic meal, I will be thinking of my grandmother, just as she inscribed in her cookbook. As long as we are sharing food together, talking about Sephardic traditions, remembering meals and people who matter to us, I will call it desayuno. I think my grandmother would be proud. 

[sunflowersandcherryblossoms]

Another thing that irks me about the quote-unquote expanded lore: They gave the Soul King's real name.

The whole purpose of a character like the Soul King is they are a force of nature personified. They are a temporal abyss in the vague approximation of human form.

They are meant to be unknowable, alien. The universal reaction to such creatures should be "What the fuck are you?!".

Especially in a world where names have power, the Soul King's should've been a tightly held secret. Imagine what a flex that would be: a name so power and so hidden even Ichibei, the man who NAMED THEIR REALITY, hasn't the faintest clue what it is, thus couldn't take it away - making it very apparently clear the only reason this world exists is the Soul King's whim.

But no, Kubo casually shits in our dinner once again.

Also, among the many many retcons done between adaptations, I refuse to believe Yhwach is the Soul King's son. For starters; how the corner stone of reality make something that looks like it fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down?

I went back ten seconds to rewatch and listen again to the absolute bonkers way they said his name...

Because Yhwach (which we know that even if it's pronounced with more letter than showed... You-Ha-Baha... What the fuck is even that? I pronunce it YiVach.) pronounced it Adonaios (think Greek...)

Well... It's just another "Let's slap Judeo-Christian sounding names to a Japanese, supposedly Buddhist, anime"

Adonai?

It's another name/title for God.

Which, by the way Yhwach is also similar/reminiscent of that

I don't know why these monotheistic Stand-Ins are doing in my Shinigami story...

I went along with the "Hollows are Spanish coded" because it allows me to do the Spanish Inquisition/Monty Python joke, but a mishmash of Nazi Cult meets Judeo-Christianity?

Ugh...

We knew they'd already said some changes would be made and some extra scenes were going to be added, but retconning things no one asked for is ridiculous.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Hello! Centuries after Jewish people were expelled from Portugal and Spain, Portugal allowed them to return, but I don't know if Spain did the same. I read your post about Jews in Catalonia, and was wondering if some came back and if there is still a Jewish comunity there today? :o

Yes, the same happened, but they are still few in number.

Some Jewish people returned to Iberia in the 20th century. It might come as a surprise to many, but it was during the proto-fascist dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and during the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco when more Jewish people moved to Spain.

Philosephardism became popular in the early 1900s. That's when the first campaigns to bring Sephardi people close to Spain started, many of them led by the politician Ángel Pulido Fernández.

The first campaign was in 1904, but it was more about creating shared organizations with Sephardis in Northern Africa and not so much migration yet. In 1910, the King of Spain Alfonso XIII founded the Spanish-Hebrew Union (Unión Hispano-Hebrea), which saw 4000 people sign up as members in the Moroccan protectorate (remember that at this time Morocco was a protectorate of Spain). This Union created schools for Sephardi children in Morocco and the Balkans to teach them Spanish.

The moment where many Jewish people migrated to Spain, creating a significant Jewish community for the first time since the Middle Ages, was during the First World War (Spain was neutral in WW1, so it was a safe area compared to most of Europe). Barcelona was one of the places that received the most Jewish immigration in this period: about 1,000 people, most of them coming from Austria-Hungary and some from France.

More continued to migrate to Spain during the Primo de Rivera dictatorship (1923-1930), because in 1924 the dictatorship made a law that all Sephardi people could get the Spanish nationality. According to the Comunitat Israelita de Barcelona (the association of Jewish people of Barcelona), in 1936 there were already 5,000 Jewish people, more than half of them newly arrived from Poland and Germany, and others having arrived from Austria, Hungary and Romania.

As expected, the immigration continued during the Second World War, escaping the Holocaust (even though Spain gave support to the Nazis and sent some legions to fight against Russia on Germany's side, it was mostly neutral in WW2 because the Spanish Civil War had just ended, leaving the country in extreme poverty and destruction). The regime said that they were only allowing the Jewish people to cross Spain on their way to somewhere else and that they didn't want them to stay, but after all they weren't really checking on each person, so some stayed.

Even with this situation, make no mistake: Jewish people were not well seen during the dictatorships. It was mandatory to be Catholic, and everything bad in the world was attributed either to the "separatist reds" (national minorities, independentists, communists, anarchists, anticlericals, atheists) or to a "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" (Jewish people and Freemasons), thought to be working together to destroy Spain and the Christendom. This wasn't just a matter of the early years, no: it was a constant reasoning during the whole dictatorship in the schools, media, speeches, everything. Even in Franco's very last public appearance (October 1st 1975, celebrating his 39th anniversary since he was "appointed" as dictator, when the last week there had been demonstrations in different places around Europe against the death sentence that the regime had condemned some political dissidents to), he blamed the eternal communist, Freemason, Jewish international conspiracy for those demonstrations.

Despite their antisemitism, after the Second World War the fascist dictatorship of Spain also used the fact that they were "helping" Jewish people as a propaganda point to get the sympathy of Western countries, as a way to show that they had sided with Hitler and Mussolini because of a common hatred of communism but not because they hate Jewish people. This way, the dictatorship hoped to be accepted as a normal country, join the UN, with no sanctions. And it worked, mostly because the USA was promoting fascist countries as a way to counter communism.

In the late 1940s, the dictatorship allowed private individual worship to any religion (you could pray to whoever in your private home), even though everyone still had to take part in the Catholic rites in public. In 1949, Franco officially recognised the Barcelona Israelite Community, who opened a synagogue in Barcelona in the year 1954. This was the first synagogue in all the state of Spain since the Jewish people were expelled or forced to convert in 1492.

In the 1950s, the biggest Jewish immigration wave to Spain arrives from Northern Africa, and in the 1960s from South America. In 1968, the Vatican and Spain symbolically revoked the 1492 decree of expulsion. After the end of the dictatorship (1977), there is freedom of religion in Spain.

Nowadays, there is a small but existing Jewish community resulting of these waves of immigration throughout the 20th century. They are only a few thousands, so it doesn't show up in any religion statistics, but they are there.

Percentage of the Spanish population that identifies with each religion. Data from Observatorio del Pluralismo Religioso de España.

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Curanderismo: Mexican American Folk Healing by Robert T. Trotter II & Juan Antonio Chavira

“At least six major historical influences have shaped thebeliefs and practices of curanderismo by Mexican Americans in the Lower Rio Grande Valley: Judeo-Christian religious beliefs, symbols, and rituals; early Arabic medicine and health practices (combined with Greek humoral medicine, revived during the Spanish Renaissance); medieval and later European witchcraft; Native American herbal lore and health practices; modern beliefs about spiritualism and psychic phenomena; and scientific medicine. None of these influences dominates curanderismo, but each has had someimpact on its historical development.”