The word Sephardim comes from סְפָרַד (Sepharad), the Hebrew name for Spain — found in the book of Obadiah, verse 20: "the exiles of Jerusalem who are in Sepharad shall possess the cities of the Negev." Jewish communities had lived in the Iberian Peninsula since at least the Roman period and possibly earlier — some Sephardic traditions hold that their ancestors arrived after the Babylonian exile, carried to Spain by Nebuchadnezzar's conquests. By the medieval period, the Jewish communities of Spain were among the most flourishing in the world, producing scholars, physicians, philosophers, and poets whose works shaped Jewish thought permanently.
Then came 1492. On March 31 of that year — the same year Columbus sailed west — Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering the expulsion of every Jewish person from Spain within four months. An estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people were driven out: they could not take their homes, their land, or most of their property. They carried what they could: Torah scrolls, prayer books, their language, and their memory. Communities that had existed for over a thousand years were dissolved in a single decree.
Those expelled were the Sephardim — and they carried the name of their lost homeland with them wherever they went. To this day, Sephardic families trace their ancestry to specific Spanish cities: the Toledanos of Toledo, the Cordoberos of Córdoba, the Benevistes of Benveniste. Five centuries of exile have not erased the memory of where they were sent away from.
The Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 found refuge primarily in the Ottoman Empire — Sultan Bayezid II reportedly welcomed them, saying that Ferdinand had "impoverished his country and enriched mine." They settled in cities across the Ottoman world: Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Izmir, Sarajevo, Sofia. In these new homes, they did not assimilate into the surrounding Turkish, Greek, or Arabic languages. Instead, they preserved the medieval Castilian Spanish they had carried from Spain — along with the Hebrew and Aramaic already woven into their daily speech.
Over centuries, the language absorbed Turkish, Greek, and Italian words while retaining its medieval Spanish structure. The result was Ladino — also called Judezmo ("Jewishness"), Spanyol, or Djudeo-Espanyol. It was written in Hebrew characters — specifically Rashi script, the semi-cursive form used for rabbinic commentary — and it served as the everyday tongue of Sephardic communities for over 500 years. The Ferrara Bible of 1553, printed in Ottoman lands, translated the Hebrew scriptures into Ladino for Sephardic readers — one of the earliest Jewish translations of the Bible into a European language.
Ladino preserved medieval Spanish so faithfully that some modern Spanish speakers can partially understand it. Words like ojo (eye), mano (hand), noche (night), and agua (water) are immediately recognizable. But Ladino also contains Hebrew roots that have no Spanish equivalent: words like mazal (luck/fate), hesed (loving-kindness), Dyo (God, from Hebrew roots via Spanish Dios). It is a language that speaks in two tongues at once.
Deuteronomy 28 contains prophecies of both blessing and curse for Israel — and the curses for disobedience include scattering among the nations: "The LORD will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other." Many Sephardic Jews understood their 1492 expulsion through this prophetic lens. The theme of exile and the hope of return runs through Sephardic culture: in their music (the romances, ancient ballads tracing back to medieval Spain), in their proverbs, in the way they named their synagogues after the cities they had left — Señora de Castilla, Kehilat Aragón.
Ladino today is critically endangered. The Holocaust devastated the Sephardic heartland in Europe — Thessaloniki, which had been a majority-Jewish city since 1492, lost over 90% of its Jewish population in 1943. The Sephardic communities of Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the Netherlands were largely destroyed. Today perhaps 60,000–200,000 speakers remain, most elderly. The language is disappearing faster than it can be recorded.
This course is a small act of preservation. The Sephardic connection to Biblical Hebrew is direct and unbroken — the Sephardim maintained Torah study and Hebrew literacy through every century of their diaspora. When you learn a Ladino phrase, you are touching a thread that connects to Sepharad, to the Ottoman Empire, to the expulsion, to the covenant — and to the same Hebrew scriptures that the Sephardic teachers have studied in every exile they have ever endured.