Judeo-Turkish
Description by Laurent Mignon
Introduction
From the 16th to 20th centuries, Jews in Turkey produced Turkish-language manuscripts and printed texts rendered in Hebrew Rashi script. These include several periodicals in the late 19th century, intended mostly to teach Turkish to Ladino-speaking populations. In the early 20th century, Jewish journalists published periodicals in the Arabic-based Ottoman Turkish writing system. After the Turkish language shifted to Latin letters in 1928, Latin-letter Turkish texts also emerged in Jewish communities. While the Hebrew-letter Turkish texts do not display a distinctively Jewish linguistic repertoire, the later Latin-letter Turkish texts in religious publications do integrate Hebrew loanwords. In this article, Turkish texts in Hebrew letters are called Judeo-Turkish, whereas Turkish texts integrating Hebrew religious vocabulary are categorized as Jewish Turkish.
Modern Standard Turkish
Modern Standard Turkish forms part of the Oghuz (south-western) branch of the Turkic family of languages. It is closely related to languages such as Azerbaijani and Gagauz, the latter being mostly spoken in southern Moldova and southwestern Ukraine. Turkish is also more distantly related to languages such as Kazakh, Uzbek, Uyghur and also to Jewish languages such Krymchak and Karaim. Until 1928, Turkish was written in the Ottoman alphabet, a variant of the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Ottoman Turkish incorporated vocabulary from Persian and Arabic, including grammatical and syntactic structures. In 1928, the Turkish writing system underwent a radical change whereby the Ottoman alphabet was replaced by the Latin alphabet, which is still in use today.
Quick Facts
Names of language:
Turkish, Jewish Turkish, Judeo-Turkish
Territories where it was/is spoken:
Ottoman Turkey, Republic of Turkey
Estimated # speakers:
2022: 14,000-15,000
Vitality:
Vibrant
Writing systems:
Before 1928: Hebrew alphabet, Ottoman alphabet
From 1928: Latin alphabet
Literature:
Judeo-Turkish: Chronicles, press
Jewish Turkish: Religious publications, press, belles-lettres, non-fiction
Standard Turkish: Every possible genre
Language family/branch:
Oghuz (or south-western) branch of the Turkic family of languages.
Judeo-Turkish / Jewish Turkish
The linguistic Turkification of the Sephardic Jews of Turkey is a relatively recent development. The mass arrival of Sephardim in Ottoman lands dates back to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and Portugal in 1497, with the largest wave occurring during the reign of the Ottoman Sultan Bayezid II (1481–1512). A combination of factors such as demographic continuity, communal autonomy, and sociolinguistic insulation provided ideal conditions for the preservation of the Ladino language. Unlike in parts of the Armenian and Greek communities, literacy in Turkish remained the exception in the Jewish community, not the rule, and Turkish did not become a community language until the twentieth century. This development was largely the result of new conditions in nineteenth-century Ottoman society brought about by westernising reforms, the rise of competing forms of nationalism, and then pressure from the authorities after the establishment of the republic in 1923. However, the emphasis was on the adoption and use of standard Turkish.
It is therefore legitimate to ask whether there is even a language that could be called Judeo-Turkish. This depends how one defines a Judeo-X language. There is a range of texts written in Turkish in the Hebrew alphabet, usually Rashi letters, that do not have a distinctively Jewish linguistic repertoire. After the alphabet change in the republic of Turkey in 1928, which replaced the Ottoman version of the Perso-Arabic script with the newly devised Turkish Latin alphabet, and the gradual linguistic Turkification of the Jewish community, texts in Turkish began to integrate Hebrew vocabulary in publications dealing with distinctly Jewish religious matters.
Turkish Rosh Hashana (Roş Aşana) with a family holding a traditional dinner.
Turkish in the Hebrew Alphabet
At a very early stage of Sephardic presence in Ottoman lands, there is evidence of engagement with the Turkish language. One anonymous manuscript called Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (History of the House of Osman), written in Rashi script, dates from the early sixteenth or seventeenth century. The text appears to be an attempt to render, in Hebrew characters, a shortened version of one of several chronicles relating to the early history of the Ottoman dynasty. It is unclear, however, whom this specific version of the text was intended to address as its audience.
This curious case has attracted the attention of several scholars, including the Italian Turkologist Ugo Marazzi, who published a transcription of the text accompanied by a study and a black-and-white facsimile of the manuscript (Marazzi 1980). It is the identity of the anonymous author that has particularly troubled researchers. Adolf Neubauer (1831–1907), who compiled a catalogue of the Hebrew manuscripts in the Oxford Bodleian library, noted that it was “written in Turkish, apparently by a Muhammedan beg,” a high-ranking Ottoman official, though the librarian did not substantiate his claim (Neubauer and Cowley 1906). More plausibly, Franz Babinger (1891–1967), the German Orientalist and historian, believed the author to have been a Sephardic Jew who apparently had no knowledge of Arabic, in view of the many incongruities in the transliteration in Hebrew characters. He also maintains that it was written in one of the great Ottoman Jewish centers: Istanbul, Salonika, or perhaps even Izmir, conclusions that were also shared by Marazzi (Babinger 1932). This might well be true, but the lack of standardization of the Hebrew transliteration – the fact that selfsame words could be spelled differently – shows that most probably the text was dictated to the writer. Had the writer been copying a text written in the Ottoman Turkish alphabet, there would have been fewer discrepancies as it would have been relatively easy to transliterate the Perso-Arabic script into Hebrew script.
Here is a passage from the Tevarih:
אנדן אק בייק דֵדֵם אַייְדֵיר אונדן אוטורי קים סיזליר זינא אטדוגויז וֵליִוַאד אטדוגויז ואקג֒ אי ריבאייא וירדוגויז וחלאלי חראמי פֹארק אטמדוגויז אומי קְאוֹם דאכֹי סיזדן גיורדי
Andan Aqbıyıq dedem eydür ondan ötürü qim sizler zina etdügünüz ve livada etdügünüz ve aqçayı ribaya verdügüŋüz ve helali haramı farq etmedügüŋüz ümmi qavim daħi sizden gördi
Then Akbıyık Dede said[:] Because of this, that you committed fornication, and engaged in sodomy, and lent money at usury, and did not distinguish the lawful from the unlawful, the unlearned people also learned (it) from you.
Interestingly, early historians of the Jewish community in Ottoman Turkey, such as Moïse Franco (1864-1907) and Abraham Galanté (1873-1961), do not mention the existence of the Judeo-Turkish version of the Ottoman chronicle. Their ground-breaking studies are fundamental works for obtaining information about an important new development in the history of Turkish written in Hebrew characters, namely the appearance of Judeo-Turkish periodicals in the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of them like Şarkiye (The Easterner), Zaman (Time), and Ceride-i Tercüme (The Translation Magazine) survive only as names in the documents in the Ottoman archives or on the pages of Galanté’s and Franco’s works, as no physical copy seems to have survived into the twenty-first century. One exception is the Üstad (The Master) newspaper published in İzmir between 1889-1891 by Moïse Fresco (1859–1912), copies of which are held in the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem.
In the aftermath of the 1839 Tanzimat reforms and unrelated rising anti-Jewish exactions, the use of Turkish had become a pressing issue within the Ottoman Jewish community. Although the reforms granted to non-Muslims had expanded political rights and access to the civil service, predominantly Ladino-speaking Jews had benefited little, since Turkish literacy was a prerequisite for state employment. During his 1840 visit to Istanbul, Moses Montefiore (1784–1885), accompanied by Adolphe Crémieux (1796–1880), future founder of the Alliance Israélite Universelle, had observed the community’s poverty and marginalization. They urged the Chief Rabbinate to introduce compulsory Turkish instruction in Jewish schools. Turkish gained modest educational prominence, especially in Alliance schools, though it remained subordinate to Ladino, French, and Hebrew. Publications in Turkish printed in the Hebrew alphabet, among them Üstad, were another means of teaching the language of administration and literature.
Üstad was bilingual, publishing content in Turkish in the Hebrew script and in Ladino. Notably, news and articles on Jewish topics were in Ladino. This limited the need to develop new vocabulary or incorporate Ladino or Hebrew elements into Turkish prose. However, in the Turkish parts of the paper, whenever words were deemed unfamiliar to the readers, Ladino translations were added in parentheses.
The language used in Üstad reflected conventional but straightforward written Ottoman Turkish of the late nineteenth century. Its publishers adopted typographic practices typical of the Ladino press, setting article titles in Hebrew square script and printing the main body of the text in Rashi script. They were confronted with the formidable challenge of rendering the eight vowels and twenty-one consonants of modern Turkish within a system comprising just twenty-two letters. Although the long-standing use of the Perso-Arabic script for Ottoman Turkish and the Hebrew alphabet for Ladino offered some precedent, the task of reconciling these phonological demands remained complex. It appears that the precedent set by the Tevarih-i Al-i Osman was not known to the editorial team, as they developed a new system of transliteration.
In its first editions, Üstad published a brief Ladino notice titled “A nuestros lektores” (‘To our readers’), outlining how the editors chose to represent Turkish sounds in writing to make the newspaper easier to read. To clarify their system for marking vowels, they drew on readers’ familiarity with Hebrew vocalization signs, equating specific Hebrew letters with particular vowel values represented by diacritics in the chart such as kamats, holam, shuruk and tsere. Yet the actual practice was more complex: for example, the letter vav stood for both /o/ and /œ/, while double vav indicated /u/ and /y/.
One especially unusual feature was their use of the final form of khaf (khaf sofit) to mark what they termed a “hey degusha,” distinguishing between /h/ and /ḥ/ found in Arabic-derived words (even though modern Turkish pronunciation does not differentiate these sounds). As a result, this final-form letter appeared in unexpected positions, including at the beginning or in the middle of words. This unconventional adaptation reflects the editors’ attempt to construct an almost fully phonetic orthography in the service of a broader pedagogical objective.
Use of the khaf sofit in initial (ךאנגי, hangi) and word-internal positions (קאךרהמאן, kahraman):
קוג'א קאךרהמאן סהן ךאנגי מהמלהקייהטליסין?
Koca kahraman sen hangi memleketlisin?
Great hero, what country are you from?
(Anon. “Vantrilok”, Üstad, July 10, 1889)
In subsequent issues, the editors expanded their explanations. They noted that the combination gimel-yod signaled palatalization, a pattern also common after kof. They assumed readers’ familiarity with Turkish when indicating that gimel with a dagesh represented /d͡ʒ/, while gimel with double dagesh marked /t͡ʃ/, illustrated with very common words such as ג'אם [cam] (glass) and ג''וק [çok] (a lot, many). In most other respects, they followed established Ladino spelling conventions.
Use of gimel with dagesh (sole or double) representing /d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/ (גייוג'ווגין [çocuğun], 'of the child'):
אישטה שהךהרלי ג''וג'ווגין ב'וג'וודונדה בוולוונאן שהיילהר סאגלאם ךאב'אדא ייאשאמאדיגינדאן מיידאנה ג''יקאר.
İşte şehirli çocuğun vücudunda bulunan şeyler sağlam havada yaşamadığından meydana çıkar.
These are the things found in the body of a city child resulting from not living in the fresh air.
(Anon. “Hava”, Üstad, May 28, 1889)
Taken together, these choices reveal the considerable care invested in devising a detailed and systematic orthography—one that was, in certain respects, more explicit than Ottoman Turkish, where a single letter could represent multiple vowels and consonants, and more precise than Ladino, which used the same letter sequence to represent both /d͡ʒ/ and /t͡ʃ/. Although the alphabet largely reflected Ladino conventions, it functioned in a quasi-phonetic manner. Turkish, however, is an agglutinative language distinguished by vowel harmony and consonant assimilation. The editors of Üstad adhered to Ottoman orthographic norms, preserving fixed spellings for grammatical case endings and possessive suffixes rather than adjusting them phonetically. Unfortunately, some authors did not follow the conventions and copy-editing standards were poor.
Mario Levi, the Jewish Turkish novelist, speaking about the Jewish district of Istanbul (21:50-22:40).
Towards a Jewish Turkish?
Short-lived as it was, Üstad always had as its main aim the promotion of Turkish in the Jewish community. Therefore, eventually writers and intellectuals transitioned to publications in Turkish in the Ottoman version of the Perso-Arabic script, sometimes in bilingual publications alongside Ladino. This transition by no means signified a desire to renounce an openly Jewish identity in the world of the press.
One Jewish Turkish periodical written in the Ottoman alphabet in the late Ottoman period was the short-lived biweekly Mir’ât (The Mirror). Published in 1909, a time when the restoration of the constitutional order created spaces of freedom for the press and the wider publishing world, the journal was an outspokenly Jewish publication. Edited by Avram Naon (1870-1947) and İsak Ferera (1883-1933), two published poets and lawyers, the journal defined itself as “an Ottoman literary, scientific, political, social and ethical journal serving the progress of the country and the enlightenment of the ideals of Ottoman Jewish writers”. Among the aims of the journal was to provide young Jewish writers an outlet for their literary works, so as to refute the critiques that the Jewish community lacked Turkish literacy. That the use of the Turkish language was evidence of good citizenship became a recurrent theme in the coming years, especially among writers advocating greater participation in wider Ottoman Turkish society, and, after the foundation of the Republic in 1923, in the new state. Unsurprisingly, with the increasing influence of Turkish nationalism throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, external pressures to assimilate also increased.
In the context of the “Citizen, speak Turkish!” campaign starting in the 1930s, pressures were exerted on members of all minorities, including the Jews, to speak Turkish in public spaces. Echoing language used by the authors in Mir’ât almost half a century earlier, the poet and painter Jozef Habib Gerez (1926-2022) emphasized the need for Jews to write literary works in Turkish, in an article in La Luz de Turkiya, noting, in view of the large numbers of Jews who were by then fully literate in Turkish, that “the time had come for Turkish Jews to prove their real citizenship by also producing works in Turkish” (Gerez, “Türk Yahudilerini Hakiki Vatandaşlıklarını Türkçe Eser Vermek Suretiyle Göstermelidirler,” La Luz de Turkiya, September 21, 1955). Such an approach left little room for the flourishing of non-standard Turkish. Quite to the contrary, a few months later, Gerez wrote another piece in La Luz de Turkiya making the case that Ladino was being “Turkified” and that this process was “an expression of closeness to the Turkish language” (Gerez, “Türkçeleşmiş İspanyolaca Türkçeye Duyulan Yakınlığın bir İfadesidir,” La Luz de Turkiya, February 1, 1956). This increasing Turkification would remain a constant concern of Ladino writers in Turkey. In a piece written decades later in the Ladino pages of the weekly Şalom, the Jewish weekly founded in 1947 by Avram Leyon (1912-1985) and which is now almost entirely in Turkish, the Hispanicizing author Salamon Bicerano noted that “our generation and the generation of our children are so used to thinking in Turkish, that some of the words of Spanish origin that we use appear foreign to them” (Bicerano, “Refleksyones sovre la lengua Judeo-Espanyola,” Relatos i Refleksiones, Istanbul: Gözlem Basın ve Yayıncılık, 1994: 145). In his Ladino articles in Şalom, Bicerano gave the Turkish equivalents of select Ladino words, a reversal of the authors of Üstad providing Ladino glosses of Turkish words in their Turkish articles a century earlier.
As a consequence of the correlation on citizenship and proficiency in Turkish, considerable emphasis has been placed on the use of the standard language in the publishing world, both during the late Ottoman and the Republican periods. It must be said that even the exploration of Jewish themes in Turkish-language literary works by Jewish authors remained rare before the late 1990s, when the intelligentsia became interested in minority cultures.
Distinctive Linguistic Features of Jewish Turkish
In Jewish Turkish-language publications in the Hebrew and Ottoman alphabets, occasionally the choice of words or their orthography might have indicated the influence of Ladino or of religious sensitivities. These instances were rare and tended to be far from unequivocal. The lack of orthographic standardization and the many misprints in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century publishing render the interpretation of certain vocabulary choices and spellings difficult. Here are a few examples from the Ottoman Jewish press:
In an article with the title “Bir Seyahat-ı Garibe” (“A Strange Journey”) published in the June 19, 1889 edition of Üstad, the anonymous author refers to טהאטרו (teatro, ‘theater’) and שהנא (shena, ‘scene’), exemplifying a rare incursion of Ladino terms in the author’s otherwise impeccable Ottoman Turkish prose. The use of teatro and not tiyatro (تیاترو), the Turkish word for theatre that could have been easily written in Hebrew letters, might be explained by the relative novelty of Western-style theatre in the Ottoman Turkish world of arts and the lack of a settled vocabulary to refer to the performing arts in Turkish. Remarkably, unlike in Ladino, the author chooses to represent the phoneme /e/ with the letter hey (ה) rather than the letter yod (י), thus following the phonetic spelling of Ottoman Turkish words espoused by the newspaper. Similarly, in שהנא the author uses alef (א) to represent a final /a/, not the letter hey (ה) as would be common in Ladino. Nevertheless, it would be too farfetched to argue that this represents a deliberate attempt to “Judaize” the language of the publication. The author draws on vocabulary with which he is familiar, rather than on a newly developing theater terminology in Ottoman Turkish of which he may not have been fully aware.
In a passage of his opening editorial for Mir’ât on February 14, 1909, Avram Naon asks his readers for understanding regarding possible formal and stylistic infelicities in the publication. He promises, however, to continue striving towards excellence. Interestingly, he uses a highly unusual contracted form of the Arabic expression inshallah (انشالله) (God willing), namely inshaah (انشااه). This might well have been a spelling mistake, but it would have been rather unfortunate, if not ironic, in a sentence promising a determined fight against editorial errors. A more likely interpretation is that the contraction was deliberate and that the author may have wished to avoid the use of the term Allah, associated with Islam, though it was also used in set expressions in Ladino and by Turcophone Christians. That said, one may wonder whether this contraction represented an extension into a secular language of the ancient Jewish practice of showing reverence for the Hebrew name of the Creator, and thus aligned with modern practices such as writing “G-d” in English and similar euphemisms in other languages. This, however, seems rather unlikely as Naon, and the journal more generally, stood for a liberal understanding of religion, close to that promoted by the Alliance Israélite Universelle.
After the switch from the Perso-Arabic to the Latin alphabet in 1928 and the gradual linguistic Turkification of the Jewish community, Turkish-language pages on religious matters in newspapers and other publications began to offer noteworthy examples of standard Turkish sentences integrating Hebrew terminology, thereby producing a register only intelligible to readers with a basic grounding in Jewish culture and theology. For instance, in the multi-authored Yahudilikte Kavram ve Değerler (Concepts and Values in Judaism, 1996), an instructive volume providing information on religious feasts, concepts, and objects, the following sentence appears in the section on the significance and history of the kapparot in the chapter on Yom Kippur:
“Tarihte, Yeruşalayim’deki Bet Hamikdaş’ın var olduğu devirde, Yahudiler, yaşamlarının kefareti olarak Tanrı’ya korban sunarlardı” (Alalu et al., Yahudilikte Kavram ve Değerler, Istanbul: Gözlem, 1996: 45).
(In history, during the period when Beit Hamikdash [The Holy Temple] in Yerushalayim [Jerusalem] existed, the Jews offered korban [sacrifice] to God as atonement for their lives.)
In this sentence, Hebrew names and nouns are perfectly integrated into Turkish syntax. The locative suffix -da followed by the nominal inflectional marker -ki are added to the Hebrew name of Jerusalem and the genitive suffix -nin follows the Hebrew name of the Temple. Both Yerushalayim and Bet Hamikdaş are identified as proper nouns and, thus, are separated from their suffixes by an apostrophe. The Hebrew term for sacrifice, korban, is used in the same way as its Turkish Islamicate cognate kurban in the expression korban or kurban sunmak—to offer (a) sacrifice.
More recent examples abound in the Kavram (Concept) page discussing religious matters in Şalom. For instance, in a piece dated April 6, 2022, titled “Kurbağalardan ders almak” (“To learn from the frogs”), Hessi Ennekavi writes:
“Satılmaya getiren olayların temelinde, kardeşlerinin Yosef’i kıskanmalarının yanı sıra, Yosef’in onlar hakkında babaları Yaakov’a şikâyet ve laşon ara yapmasıydı”.
“The events that led to the sale were fundamentally rooted in the brothers’ jealousy of Joseph, as well as Joseph’s complaints and lashon hara (evil tongue) about them to their father Jacob.”
In this specific case, we see, beside the preservation of the Hebrew names of Joseph and Jacob, the use of a Hebrew halakhic term integrated into a Turkish expression lashon hara yapmak. In an article entitled “Hukat-Anlayışın Üzerinde Olmak” (“Chukat-To be beyond Understanding”) discussing the significance of the red heifer, Rav İzak Alaluf writes:
“Kızıl inek mitsvası Hukat peraşasının girişinde çok büyük bir soru işareti ile peraşayı incelememize neden olur” (Alaluf, 29 June 2011).
“The mitzvah of the red heifer at the beginning of the parashah Chukat causes us to examine the parashah with a very big question mark”.
In this example too, the Hebrew term mitsva is treated like a common Turkish noun. Hence, we see the addition of the possessive suffix –sı in the construction kızıl inek mitsvası (‘the mitzvah of the red heifer’). Similarly this suffix follows peraşa (parashah) to which the genitive suffix -nın is added in the construct Hukat peraşasının girişinde (at the beginning of the parashah Chukat). At the next occurrence of peraşa we see the addition of the buffer letter “y” that follows vowels before the accusative suffix -ı.
While the use of Hebrew terms such as korban, mitsva, and peraşa in otherwise standard Turkish prose in religious contexts is not dissimilar to the use of Arabic religious terminology in Turkish texts on Islamic topics, one could argue that these are indeed examples of Jewish Turkish.
Jewish Turkish Today
Today, the Jewish population of Turkey is estimated at around 14,000–15,000, most of whom are of Sephardic origin. Though small, the community is institutionally organized and maintains a handful of publications, primarily in (Jewish) Turkish. These include the weekly newspaper Şalom, which contains some content in Ladino; its monthly Ladino supplement El Amaneser; the monthly magazine Şalom Dergi; and digital platforms such as Avlaremoz, as well as the religious and educational website Sevivon.
Founded in 1992, the publishing house Gözlem primarily publishes books in Turkish, covering historical and cultural research, as well as novels, short stories, essays, cartoons, art books, and poetry. The language of these publications is standard Turkish, based on the Istanbul dialect.
Due to the sensitivity of the topic, relatively little research has been conducted on the historical development of the spoken language, an area that requires further investigation.
To cite: Mignon, Laurent. 2026. Judeo-Turkish. Jewish Language Website, Sarah Bunin Benor (ed.). Los Angeles: Jewish Language Project. https://www.jewishlanguages.org/judeo-turkish. Attribution: Creative Commons Share-Alike 4.0 International.