For four years New York has had a steadily growing colony of Castilian
speaking Oriental Jews. The major part of them speak a Spanish dialect
known as Ladino, but use Hebrew characters in writing. Knowing no
English, they have lived in isolation, the largest group between Essex,
Rivington, Christie and Canal streets. The rest are east of Lenox avenue
in about twenty blocks north of 100th street.
The biggest step toward the Americanization of this group, which now
numbers 15,000 and is not yet too large or scattered to be handled by a
group plan, was the calling at the University Settlement last month of a
mass meeting of the race. Here Joseph Gedalecia, manager of the Free
Employment Agency for the Handicapped established by the Jewish
community of New York, and president of the Federation of Oriental Jews,
and other speakers proposed plans for lectures on American institutions
and opportunities and suggested classes in English for the adults of the
race.
In 1492 or thereabouts persecutions drove from the shores of Spain the
Jewish merchants and scholars to whom the nation owed not a little of
its development. They were welcomed by the Mohammedans and settled both
in European Turkey and on the Asiatic coast. Most of the settlements of
refugees preserved their Castilian speech, and the Ladino dialect, which
they use today, is only slightly mixed with Greek or Bulgarian or
Turkish or Arabic words, according to the section of the Turkish empire
in which they happened to settle.
[Illustration:
THE CALL IN LADINO
]