Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Who is a Sephardi? -- 1 From Expulsion to Revival -- 2 The Meʿam Loʿez: The Masterpiece of Ladino Literature (Eighteenth–Nineteenth Centuries) -- 3 Immigrants in the Land of Their Birth: The Sephardi ­Community in Jerusalem. The Test Case of the Meyuḥas Family -- 4 Beautiful Damsels and Men of Valor: Ladino Literature Giving Us a Peek into the Spiritual World of Sephardi Women in Jerusalem (Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) -- 5 The Spanish Senator Dr. Ángel Pulido Fernández and the “Spaniards without a Homeland”, Speakers of Jewish Spanish -- 6 The Lost Identity of the Sephardim in The Land of Israel and the State of Israel -- Epilogue: History in the Eyes of the Beholder -- Bibliography -- Index Locorum -- Index Rerum -- Index Personarum.

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Sephardim are the descendants of the Jews expelled from the lands of the Iberian Peninsula in the years 1492-1498, who settled down in the Mediterranean basin. The identifying sign of the Sephardim has been, until the middle of the twentieth century, the language known as Jewish-Spanish. The history, identity and memory of the Sephardim in their Mediterranean dispersal are analysed by the author with a special reference to the Sephardi community of Jerusalem and to the cultural and social changes that characterized the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. However, because of the crucial changes related to modernization and the political circumstances that came into being at the turn of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, the Sephardim lost their unique identity.