THE LADINO SPEAKERS

MARY BROWN SUMNER

For four years New York has had a steadily growing colony of Castilian speaking Oriental Jews. The major part of them speak a Spanish dialect known as Ladino, but use Hebrew characters in writing. Knowing no English, they have lived in isolation, the largest group between Essex, Rivington, Christie and Canal streets. The rest are east of Lenox avenue in about twenty blocks north of 100th street.

The biggest step toward the Americanization of this group, which now numbers 15,000 and is not yet too large or scattered to be handled by a group plan, was the calling at the University Settlement last month of a mass meeting of the race. Here Joseph Gedalecia, manager of the Free Employment Agency for the Handicapped established by the Jewish community of New York, and president of the Federation of Oriental Jews, and other speakers proposed plans for lectures on American institutions and opportunities and suggested classes in English for the adults of the race.

In 1492 or thereabouts persecutions drove from the shores of Spain the Jewish merchants and scholars to whom the nation owed not a little of its development. They were welcomed by the Mohammedans and settled both in European Turkey and on the Asiatic coast. Most of the settlements of refugees preserved their Castilian speech, and the Ladino dialect, which they use today, is only slightly mixed with Greek or Bulgarian or Turkish or Arabic words, accordingto the section of the Turkish empire in which they happened to settle.

THE CALL IN LADINO

ATTENTION BROTHERS AND SISTERS!It is high time for us to come together and discuss ways and means to improve our conditions. Most of our people come to this country from Turkey and the Orient not altogether prepared for the struggle for existence that awaits them. A good many remain idle, or their work is intermittent, and others, again, work in surroundings not conducive to good health, nor is the remuneration sufficient to enable them to earn a decent livelihood, resulting in time in poverty, and in some cases our people are obliged to live in congested surroundings with disastrous effect on their health, and some are becoming tubercular. A good many of our children do not attend religious school and roam the streets without having religious training or the ideals of our religion inculcated in them, which may prove disastrous to Judaism and good citizenship. No central bureau of information for our people is available when they are in need of advice of any kind.Therefore we appeal to you for the sake of yourself, your families and your children, as well as for the sake of Israel and your country, to attend a mass meeting which our federation has arranged to be held on Sunday, March 16, at the University Settlement where leaders of our community and other prominent men will discuss the issues affecting your interests.Don’t fail to attendand urge your friends to do the same.FEDERATION OF ORIENTAL JEWS OF AMERICA,Joseph Gedalecia, President.A. J. Amateau, Secretary.

ATTENTION BROTHERS AND SISTERS!

It is high time for us to come together and discuss ways and means to improve our conditions. Most of our people come to this country from Turkey and the Orient not altogether prepared for the struggle for existence that awaits them. A good many remain idle, or their work is intermittent, and others, again, work in surroundings not conducive to good health, nor is the remuneration sufficient to enable them to earn a decent livelihood, resulting in time in poverty, and in some cases our people are obliged to live in congested surroundings with disastrous effect on their health, and some are becoming tubercular. A good many of our children do not attend religious school and roam the streets without having religious training or the ideals of our religion inculcated in them, which may prove disastrous to Judaism and good citizenship. No central bureau of information for our people is available when they are in need of advice of any kind.

Therefore we appeal to you for the sake of yourself, your families and your children, as well as for the sake of Israel and your country, to attend a mass meeting which our federation has arranged to be held on Sunday, March 16, at the University Settlement where leaders of our community and other prominent men will discuss the issues affecting your interests.

Don’t fail to attendand urge your friends to do the same.

FEDERATION OF ORIENTAL JEWS OF AMERICA,

Joseph Gedalecia, President.A. J. Amateau, Secretary.

These Spanish Jews preserved their standing as merchants, artisans or even small semi-professionals. In some towns, notably Salonika, they came to form the bulk of the population. They were seldom persecuted as they had no suppressed nationalism to defend against an invader. They never sank to the level of the native peasantry. Though materially comfortable, their intellectual development stagnated, under Turkish discouragement of education, until the young Turk movement of a few years ago. This was accompanied by a spread of popular education and with it knowledge that there was a world outside their own particular corner of the Orient. Ambition and a desire to see the world stimulated an Oriental Jewish migration which is largely responsible for their presence in New York city. It is almost the only Jewish migration to America that was not due to poverty or persecution. The Spanish Jews chose America as their place of pilgrimage in the face of the fact that the Spanish government has recently sent representatives to Turkey for the purpose of inducing them to return to Spain, an evidence that that country believes them to have qualities that would be an asset to the country of their choice.

The present westward migration of the Spanish Jew had less to offer than their migration eastward five hundred years ago. In New York their isolation has been complete, for the Yiddish speaking East Side Jew does not understand them any better than does the American, and rather despises their lack of intellectual attainments.

In physical equipment these people are superior to the Russian Jew; they have strong, handsome physiques. The men have drifted to day labor rather than to the unwholesome work of the garment trades. The girls alone are in these trades; it is said, indeed, that they have usurped the whole of the East Side kimono work from the Russians. Free from the weakening effect of European persecution, the Ladino-speaking Jews have shown even in their short and handicapped history in America so far, a daring business sense which enables them to point to half a dozen American millionaires of their race. The Russian Jew among his million immigrants can point to scarcely more.

It is to give scope to these native abilities by adapting them to American conditions that Mr. Gedalecia and other leaders of the race have for four years been working up to the mass meeting of last month. This was held under the auspices of the Federation of Oriental Jews, a union of eighteen benefit societies which the Spanish and Portuguese Sisterhood and the North American Civic League for Immigrants were largely instrumental in forming about three years ago. Night classes for Ladino Jews have been opened in two public schools. Intensive work has been done by the Industrial Removal Office, also, in distributing individuals in other parts of the country besides New York or sending them to Panama, Central and South America and thePhilippines, where their antique Spanish dialect survives and where, without the handicap of language, in more than one case, beginning as peddlers, they have become merchants. Many of those who have succeeded in business import their goods from the United States, thus becoming a medium of bringing about business relations between this country and its Latin-American neighbors.

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