Judeo-Italian Languages - The Term "Judaeo-Italian"

The Term "Judaeo-Italian"

The glossonym type giudeo-italiano is of academic and relatively late coinage. In English, Judæo-Italian was first used by Lazaro Belleli in 1904 for his article Judæo-Greek and Judæo-Italian in the Jewish Encyclopedia (vol. 7, 310-313), describing the languages of the Jews of Corfu. In Italian, Giuseppe Cammeo referred to a Gergo giudaico-italiano in his 1909 article Studj dialettali (Vessillo Israelitico 57 (1909); the term first appears on p. 169). That same year, Umberto Cassuto used the term giudeo-italiano, in the following:

Actually, while the existence of a Judaeo-German dialect is universally known, almost nobody beyond the Alps suspects that the Italian Jews have, or at least had, not to say a dialect of their own, but at least a way of speaking with peculiar features. True, in practice its importance, limited to the everyday use of some thousand people, is almost nothing versus that of Judaeo-German, spoken by millions of individuals that often do not know any other language, and has its own literature, its own journalism, its own theater, and thus, almost the importance of a real language... It is almost nothing, if you will, even compared with other Jewish dialects, Judaeo-Spanish for instance, that are more or less used literarily; all this is true, but from the linguistic point of view, Judaeo-German is worth as much as Judaeo-Italian, to name it so, since for the glottological science the different forms of human speech are important in themselves and not by its number of speakers or the artistic forms they are used in. Moreover, a remarkable difference between Judaeo-German and Judaeo-Italian, that is also valuable from the scientific point of view, is that while the former is so different from German as to constitute an independent dialect, the latter by contrast is not essentially a different thing from the language of Italy, or from the individual dialects of the different provinces of Italy...

256:

...It was natural that the Judaeo-Italian jargon would disappear in a short while.

(Umberto Cassuto “Parlata ebraica.” Vessillo Israelitico 57 (1909): 255-256)