The romance in Hispano-Jewish Communities (Tenth to Thirteenth Centuries)

Abstract

Most studies on the languages of the Jews in the tenth to thirteenth centuries in the Iberian Peninsula concentrate on Arabic and Hebrew, leaving the romance aside. It is the purpose of this article to reassess this. It does so by assembling and interpreting evidence of language usage at that time and place. In some cases, the evidence has been relatively known in an isolated manner but is analyzed differently here. In others it has been ignored or is too recent to have been taken into consideration. The conclusion is that the romance was far more central in that culture than imagined before.