Judaeo-Spanish


Judaeo-Spanish or Judeo-Spanish, called Ladino by some in recent times, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish. Originally spoken in Spain and then after the Edict of Expulsion spreading through the then-Ottoman Empire as well as France, Italy, the Netherlands, Morocco and England, it is today spoken mainly by Sephardic minorities in more than 30 countries, with most of the surviving speakers residing in Israel. Although it has no official status in any country, it has been acknowledged as a minority language in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, France and Turkey. It is also formally recognised by the Royal Spanish Academy.
The core vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish is Old Spanish and it has numerous elements from all the old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula: Old Aragonese, Astur-Leonese, Old Catalan, Galician-Portuguese and Mozarabic. The language has been further enriched by Ottoman Turkish and Semitic vocabulary, such as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic — especially in the domains of religion, law and spirituality — and most of the vocabulary for new and modern concepts has been adopted through French and Italian. Furthermore, the language is influenced to a lesser degree by other local languages of the Balkans, such as Greek, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian.
Historically, the Rashi script and its cursive form Solitreo have been the main orthographies for writing Judaeo-Spanish. However, today it is mainly written with the Latin alphabet, though some other alphabets such as Hebrew and Cyrillic are still in use. Judaeo-Spanish is known by many different names, mostly: Español, Judió or Jidió, Judesmo, Sefaradhí or Ḥaketía. In Turkey and formerly in the Ottoman Empire, it has been traditionally called Yahudice in Turkish, meaning the Jewish language. In Israel, Hebrew speakers usually call the language Espanyolit, Spanyolit or Ladino.
Judaeo-Spanish, once the trade language of the Adriatic Sea, the Balkans and the Middle-East and renowned for its rich literature especially in Salonika, today is under serious threat of extinction. Most native speakers are elderly, and the language is not transmitted to their children or grandchildren for various reasons. In some expatriate communities in Latin America and elsewhere, there is a threat of dialect levelling resulting in extinction by assimilation into modern Spanish. It is experiencing, however, a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music.

Name

In recent decades in Israel, the United States and Spain, the language has come to be referred to as Ladino, literally meaning "Latin". However, many of its native speakers consider that term to be incorrect, reserving the term Ladino for the "semi-sacred" language used in word-by-word translations from the Bible, which is distinct from the spoken vernacular. The language is also called Judeo-Espagnol, Judeoespañol, Sefardí, Judío, and Espanyol or Español sefardita; Haquetía refers to the dialect of North Africa, especially Morocco. The scholar Joseph Nehama, author of the famous comprehensive Judeo-Spanish-French dictionary, referred to the language as Judeo-Espagnol.
Judeo-Spanish has also been referred to as Judesmo, considered offensive by some native speakers, or even as widely unknown in the native press. However, in limited parts of Macedonia, its former use in the past as a low-register designation in informal speech by unschooled people has been documented. The dialect of the Oran area of Algeria was called Tetuani, after the Moroccan city of Tétouan since many Orani Jews came from there. In Hebrew, the language is called ספאניולית.
An entry in Ethnologue claims, "The name 'Judesmo' is used by Jewish linguists and Turkish Jews and American Jews; 'Judeo-Spanish' by Romance philologists; 'Ladino' by laymen, especially in Israel; 'Haketia' by Moroccan Jews; 'Spanyol' by some others." That does not reflect the historical usage.
In the Judaeo-Spanish press of the 19th and 20th centuries the native authors referred to the language almost exclusively as Espanyol, which was also the name that its native speakers spontaneously gave to it for as long as it was their primary spoken language. More rarely, the bookish Judeo-Espanyol has also been used since the late 19th century.
The derivation of the name Ladino is complicated. Before the expulsion of Jews from Spain, the word meant literary Spanish, as opposed to other dialects or Romance in general, as distinct from Arabic. Following the Expulsion, Jews spoke of "the Ladino" to mean the word-for-word translation of the Bible into Old Spanish. By extension, it came to mean that style of Spanish generally in the same way that Targum has come to mean Judeo-Aramaic and sharħ has come to mean Judeo-Arabic.
Informally, especially in modern Israel, many speakers use Ladino to mean Judaeo-Spanish as a whole. The language used to be regulated by a body called the Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino in Israel. Elsewhere in the world, however, the term Ladino had been confined to the style used in translation. According to the website of the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki, the cultural center of Sephardic Judaism after the expulsion from Spain,
"Ladino is not spoken, rather, it is the product of a word-for-word translation of Hebrew or Aramaic biblical or liturgical texts made by rabbis in the Jewish schools of Spain. In these translations, a specific Hebrew or Aramaic word always corresponded to the same Spanish word, as long as no exegetical considerations prevented this. In short, Ladino is only Hebrew clothed in Spanish, or Spanish with Hebrew syntax. The famous Ladino translation of the Bible, the Biblia de Ferrara, provided inspiration for the translation of numerous Spanish Christian Bibles."

That Judaeo-Spanish ladino should not be confused with the ladino or Ladin language spoken in part of Northeastern Italy and has nothing to do with either Jews or Spanish beyond being a Romance language, a property that they share with French, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian.

Origins

At the time of the expulsion from Spain, the day-to-day language of the Jews of different regions of the peninsula was hardly, if at all, different from that of their Christian neighbours, but there may have been some dialect mixing to form a sort of Jewish lingua franca. There was however, a special style of Spanish used for purposes of study or translation, featuring a more archaic dialect, a large number of Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords and a tendency to render Hebrew word order literally. As mentioned above, some authorities would confine the term "Ladino" to that style.
Following the Expulsion, the process of dialect mixing continued, but Castilian Spanish remained by far the largest contributor. The daily language was increasingly influenced both by the language of study and by the local non-Jewish vernaculars, such as Greek and Turkish. It came to be known as Judesmo and, in that respect, the development is parallel to that of Yiddish. However, many speakers, especially among the community leaders, also had command of a more formal style, castellano, which was nearer to the Spanish at the time of the Expulsion.

Spanish

The grammar, the phonology and about 60% of the vocabulary of Judaeo-Spanish are basically Spanish but, in some respects, it resembles the dialects in southern Spain and South America, rather than the dialects of Central Spain. For example, it has yeísmo as well as seseo.
In many respects, it reproduces the Spanish of the time of the Expulsion, rather than the modern variety, as it retains some archaic features such as the following:
However, the phonology of both the consonants and part of the lexicon is, in some respects, closer to Galician-Portuguese and Catalan than to modern Spanish. That is explained by direct influence but also because all three languages retained some of the characteristics of medieval Ibero-Romance languages that Spanish later lost.
There was a mutual influence with the Judaeo-Portuguese of the Portuguese Jews.
Contrast Judaeo-Spanish ' with Portuguese ' and Spanish ' or the initial consonants in Judaeo-Spanish ', ', Portuguese ', ', Spanish ', '. It sometimes varied with dialect, as in Judaeo-Spanish popular songs, both ' and are found.
The Judaeo-Spanish pronunciation of s as "" before a "k" sound or at the end of certain words is shared with Portuguese but not with Spanish.

Hebrew and Aramaic

Like other Jewish vernaculars, Judaeo-Spanish incorporates many Hebrew and Aramaic words, mostly for religious concepts and institutions. Examples are haham/ḥaḥam and kal, kahal/cal, cahal.

Other languages

Judaeo-Spanish has absorbed some words from the local languages but sometimes Hispanicised their form: bilbilico, from Persian bülbül. It may be compared to the Slavic elements in Yiddish. It is not always clear whether some of these words were introduced before the Expulsion because of the large number of Arabic words in Spanish generally; modern Spanish replaced some of these loans with Latinisms after the Reconquista, where Judaeo-Spanish-speakers had no motivation to do so.

Phonology

Judaeo-Spanish phonology consists of 27 phonemes: 22 consonants and 5 vowels.

Consonants

Vowels

Phonological differences from Spanish

As exemplified in the Sources section above, much of the phonology of Judaeo-Spanish is similar to that of standard modern Spanish. Here are some exceptions:
Judaeo-Spanish is distinguished from other Spanish dialects by the presence of the following features:
Regular conjugation for the present tense:
Regular conjugation in the preterite:
Regular conjugation in the imperfect:

Syntax

Judaeo-Spanish follows Spanish for most of its syntax. Like Spanish, it generally follows a subject–verb–object word order, has a nominative-accusative alignment, and is considered a fusional or inflected language.

Orthography

The following systems of writing Judaeo-Spanish have been used or proposed.
Aki Yerushalayim magazine, owned by Autoridad Nasionala del Ladino, promotes the following orthography:
LetterA aB bCh chD dDj djE eF fG gH hI iJ jK kL lM mN nNy nyO oP pR rS sSh shT tU uV vX xY yZ z
IPA

Judaeo-Spanish is traditionally written in a Hebrew-based script, specially in Rashi script and its Solitreo cursive variant. The Hebrew orthography is not regulated, but sounds are generally represented by the following letters:
Square letterאבב׳גג׳דהוזז׳חטיייכ/-ךלמ/-םנ/-ןנייסעפ/-ףפ׳/-ף׳צ/-ץקרשת
Rashi letter׳׳׳/-/-/-/-׳/-׳/-
AY equivalent lettera, Ø, e, obvgdj, chda, eu, o, vzjhti, e, yyk, hlmnnysØ, e, apfskrsh, st

History

In the medieval Iberian peninsula, now Spain and Portugal, Jews spoke a variety of Romance dialects. Following the 1490s expulsion from Spain and Portugal, most the Iberian Jews resettled in the Ottoman Empire. Jews in the Ottoman Balkans, Turkey, Middle East, and North Africa developed their own Romance dialects, with some influence from Hebrew and other languages, which became what is now known as Judaeo-Spanish. Later on, many Portuguese Jews also escaped to France, Italy, the Netherlands and England, establishing small groups in those nations as well, but these spoke early modern Spanish or Portuguese rather than Judaeo-Spanish.
Jews in the Middle Ages were instrumental in the development of Spanish into a prestige language. Erudite Jews translated Arabic and Hebrew works, often translated earlier from Greek, into Spanish. Christians translated them again into Latin for transmission to Europe.
Until recent times, the language was widely spoken throughout the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, as Judaeo-Spanish had been brought there by the Jewish refugees.
The contact among Jews of different regions and languages, including Catalan, Leonese and Portuguese developed a unified dialect, differing in some aspects from the Spanish norm that was forming simultaneously in Spain, but some of the mixing may have already occurred in exile rather than in the Iberian Peninsula. The language was known as Yahudice in the Ottoman Empire. In the late 18th century, Ottoman poet Enderunlu Fazıl wrote in his Zenanname: "Castilians speak the Jewish language but they are not Jews."
The closeness and mutual comprehensibility between Judaeo-Spanish and Spanish favoured trade among Sephardim, often relatives, from the Ottoman Empire to the Netherlands and the conversos of the Iberian Peninsula.
Over time, a corpus of literature, both liturgical and secular, developed. Early literature was limited to translations from Hebrew. At the end of the 17th century, Hebrew was disappearing as the vehicle for rabbinic instruction. Thus, a literature appeared in the 18th century, such as Me'am Lo'ez and poetry collections. By the end of the 19th century, the Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire studied in schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle. French became the language for foreign relations, as it did for Maronites, and Judaeo-Spanish drew from French for neologisms. New. secular genres appeared, with more than 300 journals, history, theatre, biographies.
Given the relative isolation of many communities, a number of regional dialects of Judaeo-Spanish appeared, many with only limited mutual comprehensibility, largely because of the adoption of large numbers of loanwords from the surrounding populations, including, depending on the location of the community, from Greek, Turkish, Arabic and, in the Balkans, Slavic languages, especially Bosnian, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian. The borrowing in many Judaeo-Spanish dialects is so heavy that up to 30% of their vocabulary is of non-Spanish origin. Some words also passed from Judaeo-Spanish into neighbouring languages. For example, the word palavra "word", passed into Turkish, Greek and Romanian with the meaning "bunk, hokum, humbug, bullshit" in Turkish and Romanian and "big talk, boastful talk" in Greek.
Judaeo-Spanish was the common language of Salonika during the Ottoman period. The city became part of Greece in 1912 and was subsequently renamed Thessaloniki. Despite the Great Fire of Thessaloniki, economic oppression by Greek authorities and mass settlement of Christian refugees, the language remained widely spoken in Salonika until the deportation of 50,000 Salonikan Jews in the Holocaust during the Second World War. According to the 1928 census, the language had 62,999 native speakers in Greece. The figure drops down to 53,094 native speakers in 1940, but 21,094 citizens "usually" spoke the language.
Judaeo-Spanish was also a language used in Donmeh rites. An example is Sabbatai Tsevi esperamos a ti. Today, the religious practices and the ritual use of Judaeo-Spanish seems confined to elderly generations.
The Castilian colonisation of Northern Africa favoured the role of polyglot Sephards, who bridged between Spanish -colonizers and Arab and Berber speakers.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, Judaeo-Spanish was the predominant Jewish language in the Holy Land, but its dialect was different in some respects from the one in Greece and Turkey. Some families have lived in Jerusalem for centuries and preserve Judaeo-Spanish for cultural and folklore purposes although they now use Hebrew in everyday life.
An often-told Sephardic anecdote from Bosnia-Herzegovina has it that as a Spanish consulate was opened in Sarajevo in the interwar period, two Sephardic women passed by. Upon hearing a Catholic priest who was speaking Spanish, they thought that his language meant that he was Jewish.
In the 20th century, the number of speakers declined sharply: entire communities were murdered in the Holocaust, and the remaining speakers, many of whom emigrated to Israel, adopted Hebrew. The governments of the new nation-states encouraged instruction in the official languages. At the same time, Judaeo-Spanish aroused the interest of philologists, as it conserved language and literature from before the standardisation of Spanish.
Judaeo-Spanish is in a serious danger of extinction because many native speakers today are elderly olim, who have not transmitted the language to their children or grandchildren. Nevertheless, it is experiencing a minor revival among Sephardic communities, especially in music. In addition, Sephardic communities in several Latin American countries still use Judaeo-Spanish. There, an additional danger is assimilation to modern Spanish.
Kol Yisrael and Radio Nacional de España hold regular radio broadcasts in Judaeo-Spanish. showed an episode, titled "A Murderer Among Us", with references to the language. Films partially or totally in Judaeo-Spanish include Mexican film Novia que te vea, The House on Chelouche Street, and Every Time We Say Goodbye.
Efforts have been made to gather and publish modern Judaeo-Spanish fables and folktales. In 2001, the Jewish Publication Society published the first English translation of Judaeo-Spanish folktales, collected by Matilda Koén-Sarano, Folktales of Joha, Jewish Trickster: The Misadventures of the Guileful Sephardic Prankster. A survivor of Auschwitz, Moshe Ha-Elion, issued his translation into Ladino of the ancient Greek epic The Odyssey in 2012, in his 87th year, and he is now translating the sister epic, the Iliad, into his mother tongue.
The language was initially spoken by the Sephardic Jewish community in India, but was later replaced with Judeo-Malayalam.

Literature

The earliest Judaeo-Spanish books were religious in nature, mostly created to maintain religious knowledge for exiles who could not read Hebrew; the first of the known texts is ''Dinim de shehitah i bedikah. Texts continued to be focussed on philosophical and religious themes, including a large body of rabbinic writings, until the first half of the 19th century. The largest output of secular Judaeo-Spanish literature occurred during the latter half of the 19th and the early 20th centuries in the Ottoman Empire. The earliest and most abundant form of secular text was the periodical press: between 1845 and 1939, Ottoman Sephardim published around 300 individual periodical titles. The proliferation of periodicals gave rise to serialised novels: many of them were rewrites of existing foreign novels into Judaeo-Spanish. Unlike the previous scholarly literature, they were intended for a broader audience of educated men and less-educated women alike. They covered a wider range of less weighty content, at times censored to be appropriate for family readings. Popular literature expanded to include love stories and adventure stories, both of which had been absent from Judaeo-Spanish literary canon. The literary corpus meanwhile also expanded to include theatrical plays, poems and other minor genres.
Multiple documents made by the Ottoman government were translated into Ladino; usually translators used terms from Ottoman Turkish.

Religious use

The Jewish communities of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Belgrade, Serbia, still chant part of the Sabbath Prayers in Judaeo-Spanish. The Sephardic Synagogue Ezra Bessaroth in Seattle, Washington, United States, was formed by Jews from Turkey and the Greek island of Rhodes, and it uses the language in some portions of its Shabbat services. The Siddur is called Zehut Yosef and was written by Hazzan Isaac Azose.
At Congregation Etz Ahaim of Highland Park, New Jersey, a congregation founded by Sephardic Jews from Salonika, a reader chants the Aramaic prayer B'rikh Shemay in Judaeo-Spanish before he takes out the Torah on Shabbat. That is known as Bendichu su Nombre in Judaeo-Spanish. Additionally, at the end of Shabbat services, the entire congregation sings the well-known Hebrew hymn Ein Keloheinu, which is Non Como Muestro Dio in Judaeo-Spanish.
Non Como Muestro Dio is also included, alongside Ein Keloheinu, in Mishkan T'filah, the 2007 Reform prayerbook.
Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan translated some scholarly religious texts, including Me'am Loez into Hebrew, English or both.
Izmir's grand rabbis Haim Palachi, Abraham Palacci, and Rahamim Nissim Palacci all wrote in the language and in Hebrew.

Modern education and use

As with Yiddish, Judaeo-Spanish is seeing a minor resurgence in educational interest in colleges across the United States and in Israel. Almost all American Jews are Ashkenazi, with a tradition based on Yiddish, rather than Judaeo-Spanish, and so institutions that offer Yiddish are more common. the University of Pennsylvania and Tufts University offered Judaeo-Spanish courses among colleges in the United States. In Israel, Moshe David Gaon Center for Ladino Culture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is leading the way in education and research. Hebrew University also offers courses. The Complutense University of Madrid also used to have courses. Prof. David Bunis taught Ladino at the University of Washington, in Seattle during the 2013–14 academic year.
In Spain, the Spanish Royal Academy in 2017 announced plans to create a Judaeo-Spanish branch in Israel in addition to 23 existing academies, in various Spanish-speaking countries, that are associated in the Association of Spanish Language Academies. Its stated purpose is to preserve Judaeo-Spanish. The move was seen as another step to make up for the Expulsion, following the offer of Spanish citizenship to Sephardim who had some connection with Spain.
Melis Alphan wrote in Hürriyet in 2017 that the use in Turkey was declining.

Samples

Comparison with other languages

Judaeo-Spanishאיל גﬞודיאו־איספאנײול איס לה לינואה פﬞאבﬞלאדה די לוס גﬞודיוס ספﬞרדים ארונגﬞאדוס די לה איספאנײה איניל 1492. איס אונה לינגואה דיריבﬞאדה דיל איספאנײול אי פﬞאבﬞלאדה די 150,000 פירסונאס אין קומוניטאס אין ישראל, לה טורקײה, אנטיקה יוגוסלאבﬞײה, לה גריסײה, איל מארואיקוס מאיורקה, לאס אמיריקאס, אינטרי מונגﬞוס אוטרוס לוגאריס.
El djudeo-espanyol es la lingua favlada de los djudios sefardim arondjados de la Espanya enel 1492. Es una lingua derivada del espanyol i favlada de 150.000 personas en komunitas en Israel, la Turkia, antika Yugoslavia, la Gresia, el Maruekos, Mayorka, las Amerikas, entre munchos otros lugares.
SpanishEl judeo-español es la lengua hablada por los judíos sefardíes expulsados de España en 1492. Es una lengua derivada del español y hablada por 150.000 personas en comunidades en Israel, Turquía, la antigua Yugoslavia, Grecia, Marruecos, Mallorca, las Américas, entre muchos otros lugares.
AsturianEl xudeoespañol ye la llingua falada polos xudíos sefardinos espulsaos d'España en 1492. Ye una llingua derivada del español y falada por 150.000 persones en comunidaes n'Israel, Turquía, na antigua Yugoslavia, Grecia, Marruecos, Mallorca, nes Amériques, ente munchos otros llugares.
GalicianO xudeo-español é a lingua falada polos xudeus sefardís expulsados de España en 1492. É unha lingua derivada do español e falada por 150.000 persoas en comunidades en Israel, en Turquía, na antiga Iugoslavia, Grecia, Marrocos, Maiorca, nas Américas, entre moitos outros lugares.
PortugueseO judeu-espanhol é a língua falada pelos judeus sefarditas expulsos da Espanha em 1492. É uma língua derivada do castelhano e falada por 150.000 pessoas em comunidades em Israel, na Turquia, ex-Jugoslávia, Grécia, Marrocos, Maiorca, nas Américas, entre muitos outros locais.
AragoneseO chodigo-espanyol ye la luenga parlata por os chodigos sefardís expulsats d'Espanya en 1492. Ye una luenga derivata de l'espanyol i parlata por 150.000 personas en comunitatz en Israel, Turquía, l'antiga Yugoslavia, Grecia, Marruecos, Mallorca, las Américas, entre muitos atros lugares.
CatalanEl judeocastellà és la llengua parlada pels jueus sefardites expulsats d'Espanya al 1492. És una llengua derivada de l'espanyol i parlada per 150.000 persones en comunitats a Israel, Turquia, antiga Iugoslàvia, Grècia, el Marroc, Mallorca, les Amèriques, entre molts altres llocs.
Occitan Lo judeocastelhan es la lenga parlada pels jusieus sefarditas expulsats d’Espanha en 1492. Es una lenga venent del castelhan que 150 000 personas la parlan dins de comunautats en Israèl, Turquia, èx-Iogoslavia, Grècia, Marròc, Malhòrca, las Americas, entre fòrça autres luòcs.
EnglishJudaeo-Spanish is the language spoken by Sephardi Jews expelled from Spain in 1492. It is a language derived from Spanish and spoken by 150,000 people in communities in Israel, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Greece, Morocco, Majorca, the Americas, among many other places.

Songs

Folklorists have been collecting romances and other folk songs, some dating from before the expulsion. Many religious songs in Judeo-Spanish are translations of Hebrew, usually with a different tune. For example, here is Ein Keloheinu in Judeo-Spanish:
Other songs relate to secular themes such as love:
Anachronistically, Abraham—who in the Bible is an Aramean and the very first Hebrew and the ancestor of all who followed, hence his appellation "Avinu" —is in the Judeo-Spanish song born already in the "djudería", the Jewish quarter. This makes Terach and his wife into Hebrews, as are the parents of other babies killed by Nimrod. In essence, unlike its Biblical model, the song is about a Hebrew community persecuted by a cruel king and witnessing the birth of a miraculous saviour—a subject of obvious interest and attraction to the Jewish people who composed and sang it in Medieval Spain.
The song attributes to Abraham elements that are from the story of Moses's birth, the cruel king killing innocent babies, with the midwives ordered to kill them, the 'holy light' in the Jewish area, as well as from the careers of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who emerged unscathed from the fiery furnace, and Jesus of Nazareth. Nimrod is thus made to conflate the role and attributes of three archetypal cruel and persecuting kings:Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh and Herod

Selected words by origin

Words derived from Arabic:
Words derived from Hebrew:
Words derived from Persian:
Words derived from Portuguese:
Words derived from Turkish:
and Oren Bloedow from the New York-based band Elysian Fields released a CD in 2001 called La Mar Enfortuna, which featured modern versions of traditional Sephardic songs, many sung by Charles in Judeo-Spanish. The American singer Tanja Solnik has released several award-winning albums that feature songs in the languages: From Generation to Generation: A Legacy of Lullabies and Lullabies and Love Songs. There are a number of groups in Turkey that sing in Judeo-Spanish, notably Janet – Jak Esim Ensemble, Sefarad, Los Pasharos Sefaradis and the children's chorus Las Estreyikas d'Estambol. There is a Brazilian-born singer of Sephardic origins, Fortuna, who researches and plays Judeo-Spanish music.
Israeli folk-duo Esther & Abi Ofarim recorded the song 'Yo M'enamori d'un Aire' for their 1968 album Up To Date. Esther Ofarim recorded several Ladino songs as a solo artist. These included 'Povereta Muchachica', 'Noches Noches', El Rey Nimrod', 'Adio Querida' & 'Pampaparapam'.
The Jewish Bosnian-American musician Flory Jagoda recorded two CDs of music taught to her by her grandmother, a Sephardic folk singer, among a larger discography.
The cantor , who learned Judeo-Spanish at his grandmother's knee in Buenos Aires, has recorded many songs in the language, with three of his CDs focusing primarily on that music.
The Israeli singer Yasmin Levy has also brought a new interpretation to the traditional songs by incorporating more "modern" sounds of Andalusian Flamenco. Her work revitalising Sephardi music has earned Levy the Anna Lindh Euro-Mediterranean Foundation Award for promoting cross-cultural dialogue between musicians from three cultures: In Yasmin Levy's own words:
I am proud to combine the two cultures of Ladino and flamenco, while mixing in Middle Eastern influences. I am embarking on a 500 years old musical journey, taking Ladino to Andalusia and mixing it with flamenco, the style that still bears the musical memories of the old Moorish and Jewish-Spanish world with the sound of the Arab world. In a way it is a ‘musical reconciliation’ of history.

Notable music groups performing in Judeo-Spanish include Voice of the Turtle, Oren Bloedow and Jennifer Charles' La Mar Enfortuna and Vanya Green, who was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship for her research and performance of this music. She was recently selected as one of the top ten world music artists by the We are Listening International World of Music Awards for her interpretations of the music.
Robin Greenstein, a New York-based musician, received a federal CETA grant in the 1980s to collect and perform Sephardic Ladino Music under the guidance of the American Jewish Congress. Her mentor was Joe Elias, noted Sephardic singer from Brooklyn. She recorded residents of the Sephardic Home for the Aged, a nursing home in Coney Island, New York, singing songs from their childhood. The voices recorded included Victoria Hazan, a well known Sephardic singer who recorded many 78's in Judaeo-Spanish and Turkish from the 1930s and 1940s. Two Judaeo-Spanish songs can be found on her Songs of the Season holiday CD, released in 2010 on Windy Records.
German band In Extremo also recorded a version of the above-mentioned song Avram Avinu.