Ladin٥: a Sephardic Glossary of Queerness

Dotan Moreno

This past year, I had been reading a Ladino-Turkish dictionary (yes, cover to cover) when I came across the word karucha with the following definition: 

[Greek]

1. Wheel, pulley 

2. Homosexual (slang).  

This was a curious discovery in the midst of rising hostility against queer identities in Turkey. After a government crony was appointed to run Turkey’s premier university, Boğaziçi, in January, students and faculty joined forces in an ongoing protest movement. Some of the strongest resistance against the appointment was organized by queer and feminist student groups, which drew the ire of the government. From February onwards, the criminalization of queerness in Turkey reached new heights, and the “see no evil” policy of the public sphere was broken. One exchange emblematic of Turkey’s new perception of queerness occurred when a judge asked a protesting student, “Are you a member of LGBT?” using phraseology generally reserved for suspected terrorists.

Queerness also started appearing in the fraught language politics of Turkey, such as an article discussing terms for queer identities in Kurdish. Having learned about the word karucha, I wondered about the nuances and implications of this word— particularly its use as a slur— and set out to find other words like it. After asking the all-knowing void of Twitter (and tagging Ladino-related accounts I know), I was met with shrugs. It seemed the only way to learn how Sephardic Jews referred to queer people during a time when Ladino was widely used was to ask Ladino speakers who have been around for a long time.

Though I was initially reluctant to ask elderly community members “How would we refer to homosexuality in Ladino?” I was encouraged by the vibrant push in favor of queer rights coming from opposition circles. Among the Ladino speakers I contacted, some did indeed view the topic unfavorably, declaring it “improper” and asking, “why are we talking about this?” However, most were more than willing to help record this largely undocumented facet of our language. 

One of the first examples people mentioned was the word omoseksual though this was unanimously marked as a recent borrowing and a polite term that never saw much vernacular use. All the other words I encountered, including the aforementioned karucha, were entirely derogatory. The word blando, or its diminutive blandiko, meaning “soft,” suggests a slur meant for gay men who act effeminately, similar to a Turkish usage. It is the most straightforward insult I encountered; one based on a perceived failure of performing “proper” masculinity. A similar example is dulse, sweet, used in the same sense. The word kulampara, borrowed by the Sephardim from Turkish, is a bit more complex. It is originally a Persian compound word, gholāmbāreh (غلامباره; someone who likes boys), and specifically describes what we now refer to as a top.

Another term, kulo alegre, appears positive at first glance despite its use as a pejorative. Literally meaning “happy ass,” it resembles the etymological development of the word “gay” in English, in that there is an association between queerness and joviality. More euphemistically, a Ladino speaker could simply say about a man es o bichim, embedding a Turkish phrase into a Ladino sentence: “[he] is that way.”

Many of the Ladino terms I discovered related to themes of circularity. Like in Turkish slang and hand gestures, circles have come to represent queerness in Ladino. This is clear in karucha and is used in the same way as its Turkish equivalent, tekerlek, also meaning “wheel.” Other terms adhering to this circular motif stem from the Arabic numeral for the number five — ٥ — a circle. According to Ladino speakers from Izmir and Istanbul, queer men could be called la de sinko, meaning “of the fives,” or simply described as “a five:” es un sinko. Likely a more recent coinage, the term can also be expressed in a heavily Turkish-inflected manner: este es eski Turkche besh to mean “this one is an old Turkish five,” where “old Turkish” refers to the Arabic script previously used for Ottoman Turkish. 

All these insults bear more than a passing resemblance to Turkish ones such as top, yuvarlak, and the aforementioned tekerlek, respectively ball, circle, and wheel— all denoting roundness. To understand where this geometric association between roundness and same-sex male sexuality originates in Ladino and in Turkish, we need to look at Ottoman understandings of sexuality. In his work surveying Ottoman and pre-Ottoman Turkish texts on sexual terminology, İrvin Cemil Schick posits that “sexuality was defined not by the gender of one’s partner but by whether one penetrates or is penetrated.” 

Such a perception has endured in Turkish and appears likely to have carried over to Ladino; all the derogatory terms I encountered specifically denoted men being penetrated, though have since shifted to fit our contemporary understanding of homosexuality, regardless of sexual role. But how did this idea spawn insults about circles? We can divine an answer from Arslan Yüzgün’s  groundbreaking 1986 text Homosexuality in Turkey: Yesterday, Today. In this early study, Yüzgün surmises that all these slurs describing circularity are physically literal, referencing the shape of a hole. 

It is not particularly surprising that Ladino adopted these euphemistic ways of referring to queer sex. In fact, Ladino scholar Marie-Christine Varol Bornes, says that the Sephardic language exhibits a general avoidance of sexual terminology through euphemisms. Almost all of these words are Greek, Turkish, or Hispanic in origin. This observation led one native speaker to the conclusion that since queerness was perceived as “undesirable” among mainstream Sephardim, they might have avoided using Hebrew— the lashon hakodesh (sacred tongue) – to describe it. I find this unlikely as Ladino has numerous other insults and “improper” sayings sourced from Hebrew. It might simply be that Ladino speakers found the Turkish terms funnier or more en vogue. 

A final important fact to note is that all of the terms I recorded are reserved exclusively for men. Despite my repetitive questions, every speaker insisted that there simply was no term to describe queerness in women. This might simply result from taboos surrounding feminine sexuality writ large, queer or otherwise. However, I did come across one word that describes girls who are perceived to be overly masculine. Like the English “tomboy” or the Turkish erkek fatma, Ladino has ijoghlan. This word is a combination of ija and oğlan, a Spanish word for girl and a Turkish one for boy. Thus, while Ladino may appear mum on female (homo)sexuality, it does have the terminology to describe failures in performing “proper” femininity.

After learning all this, you might ask: why does this matter? In addition to the historical value of understanding our own past through the rich archive that is our language, excavating these terms also has a practical benefit. There is now a concerted global effort to teach and use Ladino, to make sure this language retains its vitality long after its native speakers—most of whom are now elderly— pass away. If we want to have a language that is expansive, that can describe anything and be used to discuss any subject, we need to look to its past and understand it thoroughly. In revivifying (not reviving) Ladino, we get to choose what to keep and what to change; the language belongs to its speakers, so we get to make the rules. To make those crucial choices, we first need to know what our options are. Perhaps a reclaimed kulo alegre will be a fun way for queer Ladineros to self-identify.