The author uses linguistic, ethnographic, and historical evidence to support his theory that the origins of Sephardic Jews are predominantly Berber and Arab.

This book is the result of two scientific encounters hosted by the University of Évora in 2012, with the theme “Muslims and Jews in Portugal and the Diaspora. Identities and Memories (16th–17th centuries)”, and co-financed by the Foundation for Science and Technology, and by FEDER, through “Eixo I” of the “Programa Operacional Fatores de Competitividade” (POFC) of QREN (COMPETE). Beginning with an analysis of the forced conversion of Iberian Jews and Muslims, this volume examines the effects of this on their respective diasporas, focusing on a variety of approaches, from language and culture to identity discourses and interchanges between those communities.

The present volume brings together 34 articles that were published between 1964 and 2003 on Judaized forms of Arabic, Chinese, German, Greek, Persian, Portuguese, Slavic (including Modern Hebrew and Yiddish, two Slavic languages "relexified" to Hebrew and German, respectively), Spanish and Semitic Hebrew (including Ladino - the Ibero-Romance relexification of Biblical Hebrew) and Karaite. The motivations for reissuing these articles are the convenience of having thematically similar topics appear together in the same venue and the need to update the interpretations, many of which have radically changed over the years. As explained in a lengthy new preface and in notes added to the articles themselves, the impetus to create strikingly unique Jewish ethnolects comes not so much from the creativity of the Jews but rather from non- Jewish converts to Judaism, in search (often via relexification) of a unique linguistic analogue to their new ethnoreligious identity. The volume should be of interest to students of relexification, of the Judaization of non-Jewish languages, and of these specific languages.