Spanish?

[deleted]

Sephardim are descended from Spanish and Portuguese Jews, but it is not correct to state, as you did that they were also "descendents of Dutch ... French, Italian, Portuguese, Greek, British, Anatolian Jews" However, following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (and later Portugal), the Spanish and Portuguese Jews did move to Holland, France, Italy, Greece and Anatolia (well, pretty much all the territories that were part of the Ottoman Empire, including present-day Greece, Turkey, Bulgaria and most of the countries that made up the former Yugoslavia). But it is incorrect to refer to Separdim as "British Jews" for instance, although many Sephardim did resettle in Britain. British Jews can be Ashkenazi or Sephardi. And I doubt that of the original Spanish-Jewish settlers that moved to Britain in the 1600s, that any of them still speak Ladino. Unfortunately, Ladino culture is rapidly dying out, as the last generations that used Ladino as their primary language ages and dies. Most of the Jews who grew up speaking it in countries like Greece, for instance, were killed by the Nazis, the survivors moved to Israel where there children grew up speaking Israeli Hebrew. Others immigrated to the USA, where they assimilated to English, or various countries in Latin America, such as Mexico and ARgentina, where, ironically their knowledge of a language so close to the local dialect of Spanish caused the Ladino ot be lost in 1 generation. The few Sephardic Ladino speaking Jews who stayed on in countries where Ladino was widely spoke, e.g., Greece and Turkey, most of their kids grew up speaking Greek or Turkish.

For a good movie that uses a lot of Ladino, much better than "Every Time We Say Goodbye," (IMHO) see "novia que te veas" which is about 2 Jewish girls growing up in Mexico. One of the girls portrayed in the movie comes from a Sephardic family that immigrated to Mexico from Turkey and they show all of her relatives speaking Ladino.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladino_language