Ladino Shouldn't Exist — But It Does
Ladino—
a language that sounds
like someone touched your ancestors
without asking.
It doesn’t bloom.
It bleeds.
It echoes through teeth
that learned to smile in Spanish
while praying in silence.
It wasn’t born in love.
It was born in the cracks
between Catholic law
and Jewish breath.
A language sewn with exile
and stitched with fear.
They didn’t write poems in Ladino
at first.
They wrote warnings.
They wrote recipes they had to carry
because they would never return.
Ladino is not sweet.
It is salted—
with oceans,
with sweat,
with centuries of being told
“Leave, or die.”
And yet—
it lives.
In the hush of a grandmother’s lullaby,
in the cracks of Thessaloniki’s ruins,
in the streets of Istanbul
where no one remembers
how many walked east,
carrying a Spanish they didn’t want
in the mouths of people
Spain never loved.
So don’t romanticize it.
Don’t call it fusion.
Don’t call it rich.
Call it what it is:
A ghost.
A resistance.
A language that should not exist—
but does.
And in that,
like Kurdish,
like Armenian,
like all tongues born from flight—
it becomes holy.