Judaeo-Spanish

So that's, that's a big, very significant characteristic, I think, of fluidity between the urban and the rural and the marketplace of the urban, the diversity of the goods, the diversity of the people, the heterogeneity of the people, the familiarity of people with other people's customs and rituals.

You know, whether that was friends taking me to the Holy Sepulchre or, you know, going, you know, going to Al-Aqsa sometimes or, you know, people, you know, neighborhood, older Jerusalem neighborhoods that had native Jerusalemites in it who were all, you know, five, six language people, whether it was Kurdish, Arabic, Judeo-Spanish, Yiddish, whatever.

I think I got to live through the end of that era.

And in many ways, the book I was working on after Jews and Arabs, even though it came as a revelation to many, it was an elegy.

I love my community and actually what is unique is that on Shabbat mornings when we come to the synagogue, we have a unique part of the service.

It's the which we sing with unique, beautiful melody, and we sing it also in Ladino, which is, as far as I know, the only place that we still sing it like this.

It was preserved for years, almost 500 years.

Actually, the Jews here were singing this way.

So after the fall of communism, we needed to restart everything from scratch.

Our grandparents here didn't really teach us.

Ladino was almost forgotten.

Most of the elderly members still spoke Ladino, but they never taught their kids.

It's a Sefer printed for use by everyday Jews in the Ottoman Empire, and that's why it was printed in the language spoken by them.

It's printed in Ladino.

He was asked by a nephew of his.

Reb Moshe Hamazino, we've mentioned many times, a very big Darshan, a very important Darshan.

So he made such a sefer.

It's called Hanhagas Achayim.

It also has a Ladino name, Regimiento de la Vida.

That also means the same thing in the regiment for life.

But within modern Israel today, this is almost totally gone extinct outside of explicit religious circles who choose not to speak Hebrew.

So Yiddish itself, it used to be spoken... way, way more in secular Jewish circles in the 20th century, but it's basically died out, similar to Ladino.

People either speak Hebrew or they speak English, and the Yiddish-speaking ones are frankly the religious crazies.

Who are these units or teams within the Mossad at the end of the prologue? Well, from what it seems like, based on the initial case here, what these guys functionally are doing, they're weapons salesmen in the mold of Cold War America.

For instance, we have gablinas in the square for cheese.

This is clearly from the Hebrew word gavina, but what's with that weird S? You guessed it, Petai argues convincingly that it's the Spanish or Ladino plural.

The squares, it seems to me, were generated by a Sephardi Jew with the education mentioned above, and so that makes the Ashkenazi Abraham story seem less tenable, much less the idea that Abraham was in fact the Maharil.

So, what does this all mean? Well, it means that this text needs a lot more attention.

institution, and then the Syrians from Damascus.

So those are kind of the big four Jewish institutions are the Shamis from Damascus or Lebanon, or their ancestries from Damascus and Beirut, the Halabis from Aleppo, Syria, Sfardim, who are mostly Ladino speakers from Turkey and Greece and the Balkans, and then Ashkenazim.

And so

those people really