Scope and content:

Sephardic studies refers specifically to the Jewish community which originated on the Iberian Peninsula at the start of the second millennium. More broadly, Sephardim includes the traditionally Eastern Jewish communities of West Asia and beyond who, although not having genealogical roots in the Jewish communities of Iberia, have adopted a Sephardic style of liturgy and Sephardic law and customs imparted to them by the Iberian Jewish exiles over the course of the last few centuries. The original community of Iberian Jews was decimated in the 15th century when the Catholic Monarchs in Spain issued an edict that decreed that Jews either 1) convert to Catholicism to remain in Spain, 2) remain Jews but be expelled by a certain deadline, or 3) be subjected to death without trial for any Jew who did not convert or leave by the deadline. The series is divided loosely into four subseries, though there is much overlap between them as well as overlap into other series. Much of the Sephardic Studies series relates to four particular topics: Haggadah (the order of the Passover Seder), Ladino literature, the Spanish Inquisition, and general ephemera. (Ladino was a Romance language derived from Old Spanish, incorporating elements from all the old Romance languages of the Iberian peninsula, Hebrew, Aramaic, and in the lands receiving those who were exiled: Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian vocabulary.) As with most of Lazar's papers, the files in this series contain notes, articles, treatises, and literary works in several languages—notably English, French, Spanish, and Hebrew.

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