The world’s first Ladino ulpan was launched in summer 2024. For two-and-a-half weeks, 28 students were immersed in the Judeo-Spanish language of the Sephardic Jews at the inaugural session of the International Ladino Summer School at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The seed was planted five years ago when Dr. Ilil Baum, then a postdoctoral researcher in Jewish studies at the University of Michigan, began noticing a recurring question her students would ask: “Where can we study Ladino?”
“That was a good question!” Baum recalled, but she didn’t then have an answer, as the study of Ladino has traditionally been under-represented in Western academia.
Attended by students at different points in their academic careers, the program offered beginning and advanced tracks, each combining morning language classes with afternoon modules on archive use, research tools and studies in Sephardic culture.
The course was led by Baum, now a lecturer at both the Hebrew University and Bar-Ilan University, and Prof. David Bunis, head of the Ladino program at the Hebrew University.
“It’s a serious program. Many of our students were graduate students at the MA and PhD level. We also had some BA students and two at the postdoc level,” Baum said.
Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish diasporic language, originated in the Golden Age of Medieval Spain and, after the late 15th-century expulsion of the Jews from the Iberian peninsula, became widely spoken across the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans after Jewish exiles from Spain were allowed to settle there.
Spain is known as Sepharad in Hebrew, and the Sephardic Jews of today are the descendants of these exiles, who brought with them to the east, and elsewhere, their Jewish Spanish culture, food and language.
