The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem

Cafe Society
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1

Has anyone watched this Netflix series? I started it on a friend’s recommendation, am three episodes in and it has got me hooked - a lot of stuff happens quickly, without lingering at great length on scene-setting, rather it jumps back and forth over a period of years (beginning in 1917 and on up to the late Thirties so far) to fill in the gaps; even so it’s not confusing in the least. You do have to deal with the world these characters live in, one of extreme patriarchy and fierce religious strictures mixed with superstition of the “Evil Eye must be tricked or your pregnant wife’s baby will die, or worse be a girl” variety.

But here’s what I really wanted to ask. I’m watching it with English subtitles, it’s supposed to be in Hebrew but I swear there are a lot of Spanish words and phrases dropped in - don’t speak Spanish but I know when the subtitles tell me a woman is being called a whore (happens a lot, it seems to be what you call any female with the slightest hint of self-reliance) and hear “puta” on the soundtrack - doesn’t sound like Hebrew to me. And there are lots of other examples. Has anyone else noted this, or am I nuts and did Jews in early-mid 20th Century Jerusalem mix a lot of Spanish into their dialect?

2

I haven’t watched the show, but It sounds like they were speaking Ladino, a language spoken at the time by many Sephardic Jews (although now mostly extinct). Ladino is to Spanish what Yiddish is to German - an archaic and idiosyncratic form of Spanish with a bunch of Hebrew words and grammar added on.

My wife’s family used to speak it. A beautiful language, with some great curses.

3

Thank you, excellent response.

4

Thanks!

Just to get a sense of the language, here’s a well-known Ladino folk song, “Kuando el Rey Nimrod”, sung by the great Yehoram Gaon:

5

The key quality of every great language. :slight_smile:

(I sometimes get my Tehran-born wife worked up on purpose so I can hear her snarl in Farsi. What a great cursing tongue.)

Thanks for the comment on the show, too. Sounds interesting.

6

Another movie with a lot of Ladino in it is the Tom Hanks flick, Every Time We Say Goodbye. That’s one of the reasons I enjoyed the movie.

The Wiki article on Ladino gives “fewer than 60,000” as the number of speakers. That’s a lot better than the situation with the Samaritans who only number around 840 as of last year and only use Samaritan in their liturgy, not in everyday speech.