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While Yiddish expressions pepper American English and great Yiddish novels are still celebrated today, comparatively little is known about Ladino and the cultural, religious, and political worlds it shaped from 1492 until World War II. While currently spoken by relatively few individuals in the United States, Europe, and Israel, Ladino (also known as Judezmo and Judeo-Spanish) was once the language that permeated every aspect of Jewish life in many parts of the Ottoman Empire such as present-day Greece, Turkey and the Balkans. This lecture explores key features of Ladino language, culture, and literature over the past half millenium.

Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic Studies and associate professor of Jewish studies and history at the University of Washington in Seattle. As the founder and director of his university’s Sephardic Studies Program, Naar oversees the Sephardic Studies Digital Collection, one the largest repositories of digitized Ladino texts in the world. Naar received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University and served as a Fulbright Scholar in Greece. His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece, won a National Jewish Book Award and the prize for the best book from the Modern Greek Studies Association. He is working on a new book about Sephardic studies in the United States as well as a study on the history of Ladino culture.