Jewish, Spanish (Israel)

Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews in Israel, about 48,000 people who still carry the language, descend from the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who found refuge in the Ottoman Empire. Old Sephardi families have lived in Jerusalem since Ottoman times, but most came after 1948 from Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece and the former Yugoslavia, settling in Jaffa, Tel Aviv's Florentin quarter, Bat Yam, Holon and Haifa, where Salonika dockworkers had come in the 1930s. Their medieval Spanish ballads, burekas and slow-cooked brown eggs are woven into Israeli life, yet fluent speakers of Judeo-Spanish are now mostly elderly. Israel has the largest Ladino-speaking population in the world and a state authority working to keep the language alive.