Texts in Hebrew Script

Medieval Judeo-Portuguese texts can be found in libraries all around the world. The oldest known document is a treatise on the art of manuscript illumination dating from 1262, written in Portuguese with Hebrew characters –O livro de como se fazem as cores. It is a document of prime importance for the history of Hebrew manuscript illumination, as the instructions contained in the text were used for the illumination of an elaborate Bible manuscript in Corunna, Galicia, in 1476 (Blondheim 1929-1930).

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The oldest known liturgical text is a Spanish Mahzor in Hebrew script, published in Portugal around 1485, which includes ritual instructions in Portuguese Aljamiado (Metzger 1977). Other old texts include the following:

• A medical treaty of ophthalmology in Aljamiado Portuguese from 1300, located in Biblioteca Publica Municipal 14 in Porto, Portugal;

• A Spanish prayer book from the fifteenth century with Portuguese instructions, located in Oxford's Bodleian Library (Ms. Can. Or. 108);

• A treaty of medical astrology containing a part in Portuguese from the XVth century, located at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (Ms. 2626);

• An astrological guide from the fifteenth century in Aljamiado Portuguese, located in the Bodleian Library (Ms. Laud Or. 282, also known as De Magia).

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For more early sources, see Wexler 1985.

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Non-Jewish Sources

The famous fifteenth-century Portuguese dramatist Gil Vicente presents a Judeo-Portuguese passage in his play Farca de Inês Pereira where a distinctive form of Portuguese is used: "Alça manim dona, o dona, ha." Manim appears to be the Spanish mano with the usual Hebrew masculine plural suffix -im (Heb. dual yadayim 'hands'). Spanish words in Judeo-Portuguese are common. Thus we see that Gil Vicente has presented in a single word two non-Portuguese influences in the language of Portuguese Jews (Artola and Eichengreen 1948).

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Emigré Judeo-Portuguese

Emigré Judeo-Portuguese developed in the early sixteenth century in places where the Portuguese Marranos re-assumed Judaism and developed flourishing Jewish communities: Northern Germany, Holland, France, Italy, England, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Judeo-Portuguese was called the language of the Portuguese Nation (Nação Portuguesa) and was the official language spoken and written in the diaspora communities. In Western Europe it was used in numerous domains: the home, commercial transactions, administration, formal ceremonies, greetings, sermons, speeches, legal exchanges, registrations, tomb inscriptions, community reports, etc. Only after 1850, with the introduction of public schools, did its use diminish, becoming limited to home use, sometimes only on the Sabbath.

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In Emigré Judeo-Portuguese communities, liturgical writings translated from Hebrew were generally in Spanish. But in the seventeenth century many Judeo-Portuguese secular texts appeared in the domains of philosophy, moral literature, drama, and poetry. These texts were published in Italy and Germany, as well as Amsterdam, which became a center of Jewish literary and scientific activity. A compilation of Judeo-Portuguese texts published in Amsterdam can be found in Mendes dos Remedios (1911).

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Little research has been done on the linguistic features of Emigré Judeo-Portuguese. According to Germano's (1968) study of texts from Amsterdam and Hamburg between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, the Jewish variety included more archaic forms than the standard Portuguese of that time. The Portuguese linguist B.N. Teesma (1975) calls the eighteenth-century language of Mendes-Franco (1975[1772]) a "fossilized Portuguese" and an "Ibero-Galic-Dutch hodge-podge." Mendes-Franco's text, written in Latin letters, includes numerous Hebrew loanwords, mostly from the semantic fields of Jewish tradition and community life. The Hebrew words appear either in Hebrew characters or in transliteration. The transliterations allow insight into the Judeo-Portuguese norms of pronunciation, as we can see in the following examples: