Free Republic

In April, the language-learning app Duolingo added its 40th language to its program arsenal: Yiddish. A couple of decades ago, it would have been unthinkable for a mainstream non-Jewish language program to offer an expansive, comprehensive course in Yiddish. But Duolingo’s Yiddish addition only serves to reflect the increased global interest in learning a language that once had as many as 12 million speakers. Ladino, a Romance language of Sephardic Jews still spoken by hundreds of thousands worldwide, has also garnered much interest in recent years. Ladino classes, both online and in-person, are widely available to prospective learners. But while...

Some 2,000 Turkish Jews have applied for Portuguese citizenship after Portugal’s government decided to grant nationality through naturalization to the descendants of Sephardic Jews who were expelled from Portugal and Spain in the 15th century, Portuguese Ambassador to Ankara Paula Leal da Silva has said.The ambassador said she believes some 17,000 Sephardic Jews currently live in Turkey. Some of the applicants among the 2,000 have received the citizenship since the law was adopted two years ago, while some others’ acceptance process is still ongoing, da Silva told the Hürriyet Daily News in an interview. “The story is very simple, but...

HOUSTON, Oct. 28 - When she was growing up in a small town in southern Colorado, an area where her ancestors settled centuries ago when it was on the fringes of the northern frontier of New Spain, Bernadette Gonzalez always thought some of the stories about her family were unusual, if not bizarre. Her grandmother, for instance, refused to travel on Saturday and would use a specific porcelain basin to drain blood out of meat before she cooked it. In one tale that particularly puzzled Ms. Gonzalez, 52, her grandfather called for a Jewish doctor to circumcise him while he...