Dramatic Dialogues in the Judezmo Press, 1873

Part One – Sociolinguistic Remarks on Representations of Multiple Social-Register Conversational Language

Resumen

Before the 1860s, dialogues attempting to represent conversational Judezmo (or Ladino, Judeo-Spanish) were essentially limited to lines of speech attributed to various characters portrayed as interacting in otherwise non-conversational prose works; such works were mostly of a religious nature, and the characters they depicted were mostly historical figures from the Bible, Mishnah and Talmud. Moše Šĕmu’el Kofino’s original Judezmo play, Pyesa de Yaakov Avinue i sus ijos (Bucharest, 1862), constructed almost entirely of lines of direct speech attributed to its diverse characters, with some stage instructions, took the modern dramatic form; but its characters, too, were limited to Biblical figures, interacting with one another using somewhat stilted, often non-conversational language.

One of the earliest attempts to represent actual spoken language as used by individuals belonging to diverse social sectors of a Judezmo speech community, that of late nineteenth-century Istanbul, was an anonymous series of dialogues entitled “Novetaḏes de la noche” (News of the evening), appearing in the Judezmo periodical El Tyempo of Istanbul in 1873. The language placed in the mouths of its fictional characters, who take turns uttering their lines as in the modern drama, incorporates numerous features of contemporary spoken language; other features typical of the modern drama are also present, such as stage instructions and dialogues within dialogues.

The “Novetaḏes de la noche” dialogues appeared a little over a decade after the Turkish playwright, Ibrahim Şinasi Efendi (Istanbul, 1826-1871) had returned from France and, under modern French literary influence, in 1860 published a play entitled Şair Evlenmesi (The Poet’s Marriage). Şinasi’s play reveals analogues of many of the same popular conversational features later evinced in “Novetaḏes de la noche.” In the present article it is proposed that the Judezmo dialogues might have been influenced, directly or indirectly, by Şinasi’s drama, and a general awareness of the contemporary dramatic genre amongst the Jews of late nineteenth-century Istanbul, indicating a degree of Jewish cultural integration within the surrounding Ottoman society.