Modern Ladino Culture

“Combines enlightening analysis with detailed information . . . an innovative approach to the study of Ladino culture and Sephardi history.” ―H-Judaic

Olga Borovaya explores the emergence and expansion of print culture in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish), the mother tongue of the Sephardic Jews of the Ottoman Empire, in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. She provides the first comprehensive study of the three major forms of Ladino literary production—the press, belles lettres, and theater—as a single cultural phenomenon.

The product of meticulous research and innovative methodology, Modern Ladino Culture offers a new perspective on the history of the Ladino press, a novel approach to the study of belles lettres in Ladino and their relationship to their European sources, and a fine-grained critique of Sephardic plays as venues for moral education and politicization.

“A superb literary-historical study of Ladino literature . . . that goes very far in fleshing out, correcting, and innovatively interpreting the history and substance of Ladino literary production.” ―Sarah Abrevaya Stein, author of Making Jews Modern

“Olga Borovaya's brilliant book―the first comprehensive study of modern Ladino print culture―transforms our understanding of the Ottoman Sephardi world in the era of westernisation that preceded its demise. . . [T]his terrific book is a work of prodigious scholarship and arresting insight. It should be required reading not just for modern Jewish historians, but for all those interested in literacy, secularisation and the impact of the West in the Ottoman world.” ―English Historical Review