From Neutral Usage to Caricature: German Influences on Bosnian Judeo-Spanish, as Reflected in the Writings of the Sephardic Circle

Abstract

The peculiar Bosnian dialect of Judeo-Spanish (later in the Text BJS) has attracted the attention of researchers as late as the beginning of the previous century, when Julius Subak (1906) published his article “Zum Judenspanischen” in the Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie. Ever since, its different aspects have been documented, analyzed, and treated by a variety of scholars. The first two researchers after Subak came from the ranks of the Bosnian Sephardic community itself, in the interwar period. Kalmi Baruh described its main phonological and morphological characteristics, in his studies in German (1923), Spanish (1930), French (1935), and Serbo-Croatian (1936). And Samuel Romano’s trilingual, BJS/French/German, dictionary Dictionnaire judéo-espagnol parlé français – allemand, avec une introduction sur la phonétique et sur la formation des motsdans le judéo-espagnol (a Ph.D. dissertation presented to the University of Zagreb in 1933 and not published until 1995 in Jerusalem) represents a first step in the lexical documentation of the dialect. Only two decades after the German-backed Croatian occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Holocaust that it brought about, Baruh’s and Romano’s work was resumed by Edward Stankiewicz (1964), August Kovačec (1968), Juan Octavio Prenz (1968), and Krinka Vidaković-Petrov (1976).