In the many lands of their dispersion, Jews have often developed their own distinctive dialects, the most famous of them being Yiddish and Ladino. Much less well known is the peculiar Jewish variation of Papiamento—a creole spoken in Curaçao that blends Portuguese, Dutch, and some Spanish and that seems to have originated with the island’s African slave population. The Jews of this Dutch-ruled territory constitute one of the oldest Jewish communities in the New World. Dor Shabashewitz writes:

Sephardi Jews came [to Curaçao] from other Dutch, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies in the region to trade and work as interpreters on the island. These Jews quickly learned the language of the island’s majority, the enslaved Africans, and after a while Papiamento became their own home language. Today virtually all Curaçaoans, including white Dutch people, speak Papiamento, but that has not always been the case. According to the historians, Curaçao’s Sephardim were the first non-African group to pick up the local creole.

Just like all other Jewish communities in various countries, the Curaçao Jews began changing the local language, adding loanwords from Hebrew and creating a new dialect or ethnolect. As the linguist Neil G. Jacobs writes, the phonetic appearance of Hebrew and Aramaic words used in Curaçao demonstrates their Sephardi origin.

The Hebrew words that are mostly used in religious contexts are not the only difference between the speech of the Curaçao Jews and the “general Papiamento” spoken by everyone else on the island. . . . In many cases, the Jewish forms are closer to the European source languages. The word for dignitary is dignitario in Spanish and Portuguese and sounds exactly the same in Judeo-Papiamento, whereas non-Jewish Curaçaoans say dignatario—with a different vowel in the middle.

One more example is the word that the Curaçao Jews pronounce as granmersi and their non-Jewish neighbors as gremesi. It comes from French where it means “many thanks” but has a completely different meaning in both versions of Papiamento: it is a verb that means “to live on another’s expense.”

Ron Ben-Yishai explains Hamas’s current calculations:

Strategically speaking, Hamas is hoping to add more and more days to the pause currently in effect, setting a new reality in stone, one which will convince the United States to get Israel to end the war. At the same time, they still have most of the hostages hidden in every underground crevice they could find, and hope to exchange those with as many Hamas and Islamic Jihad prisoners currently in Israeli prisons, planning on “revitalizing” their terrorist inclinations to even the odds against the seemingly unstoppable Israeli war machine.

Chances are that if pressured to do so by Qatar and Egypt, they will release men over 60 with the same “three-for-one” deal they’ve had in place so far, but when Israeli soldiers are all they have left to exchange, they are unlikely to extend the arrangement, instead insisting that for every IDF soldier released, thousands of their people would be set free.

In one of his last speeches prior to October 7, the Gaza-based Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar said, “remember the number one, one, one, one.” While he did not elaborate, it is believed he meant he wants 1,111 Hamas terrorists held in Israel released for every Israeli soldier, and those words came out of his mouth before he could even believe he would be able to abduct Israelis in the hundreds. This added leverage is likely to get him to aim for the release for all prisoners from Israeli facilities, not just some or even most.