Author Description

Spanish Jews once constituted one of the largest and most prosperous Jewish communities in the world. This period ended definitively with the Alhambra decree of 1492, as a result of which they were forced to convert to Catholicism, go into exile, or be killed. The Castilian Muslims suffered the same fate in 1500, and a generation later those of Aragon and Valencia. An estimated 13,000 to 40,000 Jews live in Spain today. The remnants of the Spanish (and Portuguese) Jews, the Sephardic Jews, though the worldwide figure is extremely hard to attain specifically for Jews coming from countries where there was a monetary and social disincentive for having a Jewish background (see Marranos for one example), and for various other reasons, on the other end because there are those who just choose the Sephardic set of customs or Hebrew pronunciation. The number of Jews of Sephardic lineage in Israel was put just over 60% of the overall Israeli Jewish and non-Jewish populations in 1990 and Sephardi Jews tend to have a much higher birth-rate than the more secular oriented Ashkenazi classification of Jews.The Jews of Spain spoke Ladino, a Romance language derived mainly from Old Castilian, Judeo-Catalan and Hebrew. The relationship of Ladino to Castilian Spanish is comparable to that of Yiddish to German. Nowadays, Jews in Spain speak Spanish, while Ladino is still used in Israel This volume is a reprint of newspaper reports of a series of lectures delivered by the author from the pulpit of Congregation B'nai Jehudah, Kansas City, Mo., during the Fall and Winter of 1885-1886. The lectures were prepared to fulfill the requirements of popular discourses, and designed to convey information upon a highly important epoch of the world's history, that is almost neglected in English literature. The thought of publishing these lectures in book form was utterly foreign to the author throughout their preparation, until an urgent solicitation from very many persons, both Jews and Gentiles, in