The Ends of Ladino

Abstract

This chapter assesses al-Andalus as a focus for Jewish identification, noting Jacques Derrida's comparison of al-Andalus to Yiddish as a portable home. By way of Gil Anidjar's Our Place in al-Andalus, it explores the experience of place, showing how al-Andalus can refer to a spatiotemporal context not defined on a map of European Spain. This experience of al-Andalus comes from a place already located as past centuries ago, and the chapter highlights this pluperfect in parallel to Derrida's sense of loss in an urban Algeria where Ladino was no longer commonly spoken years before his birth. This received language of sadness and loss produces a version of mourning and utopia different from the spatial notions of home advocated by either Zionists or assimilationists in the Weimar Jewish Renaissance, pointing instead to a time and place whose boundaries are uncertain by conception, embodying a language that embraces such uncertainty without discomfort.