European Judaism

Having devoted an entire issue of the journal (and some overflow into the following one) to the current state of Yiddish, there was an obvious logic in attempting to do the same for the state of Ladino. But whereas the sound of Yiddish, albeit in a vulgarized form, is familiar, and access to texts and scholars working in the field is relatively easy, Ladino presents an entirely different set of problems. It has no obvious speakers to promote it today in Anglo-Saxon countries, and the subject belongs more to the realm of specialized studies. So the Editorial Board was delighted when Hilary Pomeroy agreed to help us in suggesting possible contributors. Hilary Pomeroy teaches courses on the culture and history of Sephardi Jewry in the Department of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, University College London, and has chaired the British Conference on Judeo-Spanish Studies, an international scholarly resource, since 1995. Once the list began to come together, it became obvious that it needed particular expertise to edit the issue effectively, and Hilary generously accepted the invitation to take on this task.

On behalf of all those of us working to promote the diffusion of Ladino studies, I would like to express our gratitude to Jonathan Magonet and the board of European Judaism for this opportunity to bring to a wider public the language and literature of those other Jews, the Sephardim.

This article deals with a famous work on philosophy written by Alonso de la Torre and its fate in the Western Sephardi diaspora. Torre most probably was a converted Jew; he wrote his book half a century after Spanish Jewry underwent a dramatic transformation due to the terrible massacres of 1390 and 1391 in the major cities of Spain and the ensuing conversions of many persecuted Jews. The intolerance that would ultimately lead to the Edict of Expulsion of the Jews of 1492 – and so to the origin of the Judeo-Spanish speaking communities in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire – profoundly changed Spain's cultural landscape, ending a centuries-long period of mutual cultural interaction. Yet, paradoxically, with the massive influx of the so-called Conversos into Spanish society, Christian culture also underwent changes, absorbing new experiences and influences. The Visión deleitable y sumario de todas las ciencias by Torre is a didactical work on philosophy and religion that had enormous success in Christian Spain, in spite of its large debt to the Guide of the Perplexed by the Jewish sage Maimonides. Reprinted many times in Catholic Spain, this work was also published in Italy and the Dutch Low Countries, in the communities of those Iberian Conversos who returned to Judaism. There has been huge speculation as to how the Visión deleitable was interpreted by both Christian and Jewish readers. Through a hitherto unstudied report by the Spanish Inquisition and an examination of the editions printed in the Western Sephardi diaspora (Ferrara and Amsterdam) I will offer some fresh reflections on the fascinating reception of this text in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The article presents a recently identified and studied manuscript, Ms. Pal. 2666 from the Palatine library of Parma which contains a miscellaneous collection of philosophical and literary texts in aljamiado script or Spanish but written in Hebrew characters. The collection of texts, dating from the middle of the fifteenth century including renderings of some important works of Medieval Spanish literature adds to our knowledge of Sephardic reading and writing on the eve of the expulsion. After providing a description of the manuscript, of its contents and organization, the article presents a case for a Sephardic readership and literature culture conversant with the literary trends in vogue in Spain at the time of the compilation of the collection.

Two Ladino prayer books for women dating from the sixteenth century are compared in this article. The first of these (S1) is a manuscript and the second one (S2) is a printed book from Thessalonica. The comparison shows that although both include daily prayers as well as prayers for the Jewish year cycle, S1 includes many psalms that S2 lacks, whereas S2 includes the Passover Haggadah, Birkhot Hanehenim, and many other prayers that pertain to woman's Jewish life that are missing in S1. S1 might have been used at home as well as in the synagogue, whereas S2 has been restricted to domestic use. S2 is very informative and instructs the woman in detail how to perform Jewish law, whereas S1 has very few instructions and they all relate to the prayers. It is clear that S1 has been written by a non-professional writer in a non-standard way, whereas S2 has been written by a learned rabbi who followed the Jewish law about requirements women need to fulfil. These prayer books had no continuation in Sephardi tradition in spite of their importance.

Among the descendants of the Jews who had been exiled from Spain in 1492 and had reached the Ottoman Empire, the tradition of writing and reading serious religious material in their spoken language, often known as Ladino, began in the eighteenth century with the massive scriptural commentary Me'am Lo'ez. In the later nineteenth century there was a surge in the publication of newspapers in Ladino, accompanied by the serialization of novels in the press or their weekly publication in parts. The Ladino novel and novelette, mostly of adventure or family conflict, reached its peak in the first decade of the twentieth century and again in the 1920s, after which it began to decline. The estimated 300 to 500 novels were translations and adaptations of foreign, largely French, originals, but there were also many original works, of which the two best known authors were Elia Karmona and Alexandre Ben-Ghiat.

This article discusses the emergence of the first Ladino periodical in the Ottoman Empire, Sha'arei Mizrach (Gates of the Orient), which came out in Izmir in 1845-1846. Based on the analysis of this newspaper and the contemporaneous European Jewish press, the essay clarifies the common misconception about the name and the background of the periodical's editor, and claims that it was published by a Jew of Italian extraction and a resident of Izmir in association with two Italian Jews from Trieste connected with Moses Montefiore. Sha'arei Mizrach lasted only a few months because it failed to receive enough subscriptions.

This article examines the characteristics of women's Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) poetry of the Holocaust. We will try to answer several questions, such as the subjects addressed by women's poetry, the generational circles to which Sephardi women belong, the explanation for the high percentage of writing among Sephardi women on the Holocaust, and above all, the existence of unique gender characteristics in Judeo-Spanish women's Holocaust poetry.

This article is an overview of the Judeo-Spanish dramatic literature in the Balkans. I take a look at the history of this Sephardi adopted literary genre and review some of its main aspects such as authors, themes, and other elements involved in theatrical expression.

This article deals with one of the most productive manifestations of Sephardi letters of the second third of the 19th century: The Judeo Spanish press. The contribution is divided into two parts. In the first, we will offer a broad view of the Judeo Spanish press, indicating its origins, its development and periodization and its importance for the modernization process of the Sephardi community of the Ottoman Empire. In the second part, the undeniable influence of the Judeo-Spanish press on different manifestations of Sephardi life will be illustrated, starting from the two newspapers La Época and El Avenir, published in Thessaloniki – the centre of the Sephardi print production, especially as far as the press is concerned. At a socio-historical level, the press functions as a medium, which forms public opinion; at the level of letters and linguistics, and as a new textual and discursive reality, the press genres play a fundamental role in the development of the modern Judeo Spanish.

The eighteenth century was a turning point in the cultural history of the Judeo-Spanish community in the Ottoman Empire. This turning point evolves the use of Ladino for rabbinical literature, until then mostly and regularly written in Hebrew. It was the initiative of Rabbi Ya'akov Khulí (Jerusalem, 1689-Kushta-Constantinople-Istanbul, 1732) to publish his commentary on the Bible entitled: Me'am Lo'ez (1st edition: Kushta-Istanbul, 1730) in Ladino, that inaugurated a new era for Ladino culture. Rabbi Ya'akov Khulí decided to take such a revolutionary step in view of the cultural gap existing, in his time and place, between the Hebrew-writing rabbinical élite on the one hand, and the rank and file of Judeo-Spanish speaking and Ladino-reading Sephardi public on the other hand. The author of the Me'am Lo'ez explained his intentions in the two introductions preceding his work: the first one in Hebrew, addressed to his fellow rabbinical sages and the second one in Ladino, addressed to the general public of readers in that language. Soon after its publication, the Me'am Lo'ez gained an unprecedented popularity that was to last for the next two hundred years. Even after the premature demise of Rabbi Ya'akov Khulí, other rabbinical scholars continued his project and published their commentaries on more books of the Hebrew Bible, following Rabbi Khulí's guidelines. Thanks to its Ladino language, the Me'am Lo'ez became known among Sephardi women as well. Although most of them could not read or write, they could understand what was being read aloud to them in Ladino. For Sephardi women, the Me'am Lo'ez thus became the gateway to Jewish tradition. The Me'am Lo'ez turned out to be the guiding authority for everyday life of the Sephardi communities in the Mediterranean basin. The teachings of the Me'am Lo'ez were the backbone of their cultural heritage with which they were to face the new trends of modernity arriving in the Ottoman Empire in the course of the nineteenth century.

The end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth saw the emergence of the detective novel in Europe and in the United States and it soon became a social phenomenon. In the countries pertaining to the Ottoman Empire the Sephardim were no exception; they, too, were avid readers of these detective novels. As was true of much of the literature published in Ladino at this time, these novels were translated from other languages. They were aljamiados, that is to say written in Hebrew script and published in Salonica. In most cases each novel was about forty pages long and generally published as a separate book, although some novels were published in instalments in the Ladino newspapers of the time.

Among the rich Hebrew holdings of the British Library there exists a small cluster of thirty-eight Judeo-Spanish handwritten texts, the majority of which date from between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. To the best of our knowledge, none of these manuscripts, except one, has been the topic of scholarly investigation or in-depth research. Intended at raising scholars' and specialists' awareness of this important, yet barely known literary resource, this article outlines the manuscripts' principal characteristics, such as subject matter and authorship, as well as origins (i.e. place of completion) and provenance. An inventory of all the relevant manuscripts is appended to the article.

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transcript, Heimrad Bäcker, edited and with an afterword by Friedrich Achleitner, translated by Patrick Greaney and Vincent Kling, afterword to the English edition by Patrick Greaney. Dalkey Archive Press, $16.95.