Judezmo — the language also known as Ladino, Spanyolit, and Judeo-Spanish — is a Jewish language composed of Romance, Hebrew-Aramaic and Arabic, and Balkan elements, which arose in medieval Spain and evolved after the Expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, primarily in the Ottoman Empire. The present book is a comprehensive, university-level Hebrew-language introduction to Judezmo, as written in the traditional Rashi alphabet. It includes a structural and sociolinguistic overview of the language and the literature created in it from the Middle Ages through the modern era, a rich anthology of reading selections, linguistic analysis, exercises to reinforce the active acquisition of the language, a detailed chart of the verbal system, and a bilingual dictionary. The reading selections, presented in order of difficulty, were taken from the modern Judezmo literature and press of the past 200 years, and from the rich Judezmo oral literature — including proverbs and sayings, folk songs and ballads, stories, jokes and riddles. The reading selections introduce the reader to the captivating cultural and social world of the Judezmo-speaking Sephardim in the modern era. The linguistic analysis includes a description of the Judezmo sound system, the Hebrew-letter and Roman-letter writing systems used to transcribe it, and a morphological and syntactic analysis of the linguistic structures appearing in the reading selections, designed to provide the reader with a thorough introduction to modern Judezmo in its diverse regional and stylistic forms. The book is meant for individual study as well as group use, and assumes no prior knowledge of any language except Hebrew.

This is the first comprehensive dictionary of the Hebrew and Aramaic component of Modern Ottoman Judezmo – the traditional language of the Turkish and Balkan Sephardim, descendants of the Jews exiled from Spain in 1492. Its over 5000 entries and subentries reveal popular pronunciations of the words as well as the creative grammatical constructions, imaginative semantic innovations, and idiomatic expressions, proverbs and sayings incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic elements, which form a part of the unique Jewish subculture created by the Ottoman Sephardim. The dictionary is preceded by an overview of the Judezmo (also known as Judeo-Spanish, Ladino) language in its historical development, and an analysis of the Hebrew and Aramaic elements used by Judezmo speakers before the modern period covered by the dictionary