From Neutral Usage to Caricature: German Influences on Bosnian Judeo-Spanish, as Reflected in the Writings of the Sephardic Circle

The peculiar Bosnian dialect of Judeo-Spanish (later in the Text BJS) has attracted the attention of researchers as late as the beginning of the previous century, when Julius Subak (1906) published his article “Zum Judenspanischen” in the Zeitschrift für Romanische Philologie. Ever since, its different aspects have been documented, analyzed, and treated by a variety of scholars. The first two researchers after Subak came from the ranks of the Bosnian Sephardic community itself, in the interwar period. Kalmi Baruh described its main phonological and morphological characteristics, in his studies in German (1923), Spanish (1930), French (1935), and Serbo-Croatian (1936).