engleski

Immigration of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to the Southeastern European Territory (Primarily to Dubrovnik and Sarajevo)

It is commonly accepted that, prior to their expulsion from Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1496 (notwithstanding numerous subsequent migrations in this particular case) and Navarra in 1498, Jews had used as their vernaculars the Romance languages of the co territorial non-Jews. After the expulsion this « ; ; linguistic baggage» ; ; was taken to diasporas, where eventually a Judeo-Spanish koiné was formed (on the Ottoman Empire and Maghreb territories), using the Castilian as the basic language component. As for the other Ibero-Romance languages (Araginese, Leonese, Catalan, Portugese) spoken by the exiled Jews, they eventually became obsolete but nevertheless did leave numerous features in phonology, morphology, syntax and especially in the lexicon of the newly formed Judeo-Spanish koiné. According to some scholars, the strongest impact of the Aragonese and the Portugese in the Judeo-Spanish can be observed in the Sephardic communities of the eastern coast of the Adriatic (it is Dubrovnik, Split and Valona), Sarajevo and Bitola. The fist part of this paper is an attempt to determine the ethnic structure, regional origins and possible routes of arrival of the Sephardic Jews in Dubrovnik (Croatia) and Sarajevo (Bosnia-Herzegovina) by analyzing their surnames. In the second part of this paper the autors are examining whether the strong Aragonese and Portuguese influence in the language of the communities of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo was indeed related to the Aragonese/Portuguese origin of their members. The results of the analyses of the Sephardic surnames in these two towns from the very foundation of these communities to the beginning of the 18th century show that the presence of the Aragonese features is not related to the regional origins of the families forming these communities. On the contrary, the high density of the Portuguese features, particularly until the middle of the 17th century, finds its explanation in the fact that roughly a half of the Jewish population of Dubrovnik from that period was of the Portuguese origin, most of them coming from important Portuguese centers in Italy, such as Ancona, Ferrara, Pesaro and, to a lesser extent, Venice. As for Sarajevo, although the density of the Portuguese surnames in this town is not nearly as high as in Dubrovnik, particularly after 1697, the high percentage of the Portuguese features is to be explained by extremely close relations that the Sarajevo Jewish community had with the one of Dubrovnik throughout the centuries.

Sephardic Jews ; Judeo-Spanish ; Sarajevo ; Dubrovnik

Rad će biti objavljen u Proceedings of the Interantional Conference « ; ; Language Contact And Minority Languages On The Littorals Of Western Europe» ; ; , July 11-13, 2002, St Andrews University