Small Batch Dispatch | Venetian Yiddish??

Friends, it's been too long.

I had a grand vision for the blog post I had promised you. It was going to be insightful, full of research to back up what I think is a fascinating story. And, it was going to be ready by now.

This topic has proven to be more elusive than I had realized it would be - after a few failed starts, I realized that I needed to refine the question that I wanted to ask, to make it more specific [read: researchable]. I also came to find that the sources I wanted to utilize were more difficult to procure than I had realized they would be. Also, I learned that traveling for work and buying a new house would prove to be far more demanding of my time than I realized they would be. So, by long way of apology, I wanted to assure that I will have something [hopefully] stimulating [hopefully] soon about the twisted and beautiful journey of the Hebrew language, and to thank you for being patient.

But don't despair, for I *do* have another Small Batch Dispatch to share with you. And it is about Jewish languages, at least!

I was driving home today and heard an interview on NPR about a new production of Shakespeare's "Merchant of Venice" that's touring Washington, D.C. and which stars Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones, anyone?) as Shylock. In the interview they played a clip of some dialogue that had been added to the play (a comedy that is notorious for being, overall, rife with anti-Semitic themes and concepts) by The Globe, and I was surprised to hear that it was Shylock and his daughter Jessica speaking to each other in Yiddish.

Jonathan Pryce and his real-life daughter Phoebe as Shylock and Jessica (image courtesy http://www.thejc.com/arts/theatre/136020/review-the-merchant-venice)

My first thought upon hearing it was "Wait, is that Yiddish?"
My second thought was "Hmm, that's kind of an interesting choice."
And my third thought was "Wait, did the Jewish community of 16th century Venice even speak Yiddish?"

I had always thought that the Jewish community of Venice at the time that Shylock would have been alive (the time of the Renaissance in Europe, approximately) was largely descended from Jews who had fled Spain after 1492, and that they would have thus spoken Ladino (the language of the Jews who lived in Spain until they were expelled) or at least not Yiddish (which is the language of Jews from Germany and Central/Eastern Europe). However, it turns out that I was only partly correct - the Jewish community that was eventually allowed to settle in Venice was itself a melange of Jews from many different places, but it was divided into not one but two ghettos. The Ghetto Nuovo ("new ghetto") contained Jews of German and Italian extraction, and so it is likely to presume that Yiddish could have been spoken by the people who lived there. The Ghetto Vecchio ("old ghetto") was populated with Jews who had fled from Spain and Portgual - Yiddish would not have been the lingua franca of that community. (You can read more about that here)

So far, then, it seems plausible that Shylock and Jessica could have argued with one another in Yiddish. However, in thinking about Shylock's status as a wealthy merchant dealing with the Venetian ruling class of his day, it seems more likely that Shylock and Jessica would have been part of the Spanish/Portuguese Jewish community in the Ghetto Vecchio - that community was wealthier, more powerful, and overall more prominent than the Ashkenazi community living in the Ghetto Nuovo.

One thing I don't know is whether, at the time of Shakespeare's writing, the Jews of Spain/Portugal would have reached the prominence they eventually achieved over the Ashkenazi Jewish communities in Venice, and thus if the Jews of Venice at the time would have been known in Shakespeare's time as speaking Ladino or Yiddish (in addition to Italian and Spanish). (And you can read more about that here). Is that something that Shakespeare would have even known or cared about - which language Shylock would have spoken in the privacy of his own home?

Either way, it's interesting to ponder the accuracy of The Globe's decision to give Shylock a more sympathetic background by giving him and his daughter a scene in which they speak in their "native" tongue. The intention is noble enough - Pryce speaks convincingly of his view of Shylock as representative today of the outsider, the maligned immigrant, the feared "other," and so giving him a bigger dose of humanity is surely important. However, is it historically accurate to assume that Shylock would have spoken Yiddish? Of course, Yiddish is (after Hebrew) the language most commonly associated with Jews today, and so having Shylock speak Yiddish highlights his Jewishness and otherness for modern audiences in a way that they can relate to, perhaps more than if they had him and Jessica speak to each other in Ladino (which far fewer people might recognize), but the question of authenticity remains.

What's more, the question of authenticity is also connected to the integrity with which the story of the Jews is told - if Shylock speaks in Yiddish, but a Jew of his time and community would have actually spoken Ladino, are we not obfuscating the historical world and story of the Jews of Spain, and their descedants? Are we not flattening the story to make it more palatable to modern theatergoers, and thus denying it some of its truth?