Greece and Italy

In earlier chapters we traced how Alexander’s conquests introduced the Greek language into Palestine, where it became a common vernacular of Jews there, and in Greek colonies and Byzantium; we also saw the development of Latin as the language of Jews in the Western Roman Empire, including in due course Andalusia (Spain) and France, constituting what Weinreich labeled Western Loez. In this chapter we explore the development of what Weinreich calls Southern Loez in Greece and Italy, preparing ourselves to look for evidence of the northward movement into Slavic lands, where we will see the traces of Knaanic (Judeo-Slavic) and the spread of Yiddish and the post-expulsion migration of Judeo-Latin (actually, Judeo-Spanish – Ladino, Judezmo) into the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey.

In this chapter, we look at the developments in Greece and Italy that provided the source for some of the Jewish migrations already described. By now the general picture should be clear: Jewish sociolinguistic ecology (which, remember, is the topic, rather than the historical and geographical processes that are its cause) was being modified by migration, as Jews picked up new languages (and sometimes dropped old ones) as a result of voluntary movement (usually the pursuit of trade) or involuntary expulsion (basically, the effects of anti-Semitic outbursts sparked by Christian or Muslim fanatics). The learners of these new languages were involved in assimilation, which could be sped up by forced conversion or encouraged by economic and social acceptance, or blocked by external or internal isolating forces, and which regularly suffered major losses of speakers through massacre or plague. On occasion, the conversion of others to Judaism added a language to the repertoire. In all this, one sees the maintenance of historical Jewish multilingualism, especially in the development of plurilingual proficiency, but including a continued central role for Hebrew – or, rather, Hebrew–Aramaic – as sacred and literate languages. We start with Greece.