Sephardi Jews
Sephardi Jews, also known as Sephardic Jews or simply Sephardim (Hebrew: סְפָרַדִּי, Modern Hebrew: Sfaraddi, Tiberian: Səp̄āraddî, lit. "The Jews of Spain"), are a Jewish ethnic division whose ethnogenesis and emergence as a distinct community of Jews coalesced in the Iberian Peninsula around the start of the 2nd millennium (i.e., about the year 1000). They established communities throughout Spain and Portugal, where they traditionally resided, evolving what would become their distinctive characteristics and diasporic identity. Their millennial residence as an open and organised Jewish community in Iberia was brought to an end starting with the Alhambra Decree by Spain's Catholic Monarchs in the late 15th century, which resulted in a combination of internal and external migrations, mass conversions and executions.
Historically, the vernacular languages of Sephardim and their descendants have been:
Judaeo-Spanish, sometimes called "Ladino Oriental" (Eastern Ladino), a Romance language derived from Old Spanish, incorporating elements from all the old Romance languages of the Iberian Peninsula, Hebrew and Aramaic. Spoken by Sephardim in the Eastern Mediterranean. Taken with them in the 15th century after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, this dialect was further influenced by Ottoman Turkish, Levantine Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian vocabulary in the differing lands of their exile.
