Mizmor Le-David: Studies in Jewish Languages brings togethertwenty-six essays by leading scholars in Jewish and Hispanic studiesfrom the most prestigious universities and research centers of Israel, Europe and the United States. Their contributions focus on thelanguages, literatures, cultures, and history of the major ethnicsub-communities of the Jewish people in their rich diversity. Topicsin the Hebrew language and Jewish Diaspora languages, such as JewishAramaic, Judezmo/Judeo-Spanish, Haketia, Yiddish, Judeo-Arabic andJudeo-Italian, receive detailed treatment.

Fourteen of thestudies are in English and cover a wide variety of linguistic topics,such as the synchrony and diachrony of Judeo-Spanish from thesixteenth through twenty-first centuries, the Hebrew and Aramaiccomponent in Jewish Languages, and the influence of Biblical Hebrew on Palestinian Amoraic Hebrew. Literary studies examine numerous genrescultivated by Jewish language speakers: proverbs and sayings,rabbinical writing, journalism, the memoir, historical writing,liturgical composition and music, ballads, travelogues, andcontemporary drama. Most of the essays are devoted to Judeo-Spanishand its literature, but other Jewish languages, spoken in diverseJewish communities throughout the vast Sephardic diaspora (Salonika,Vienna, Belgrade, Tetuan, and others) are also represented.

The book includes six contributions in Spanish by distinguishedexperts in Sephardic studies, who offer linguistic analyses ofJudeo-Spanish verbal periphrasis and adverbial forms, literary studies of Sephardic Purim coplas of historical-biblical content,Judeo-Spanish chronicles about the city of Constantinople, a chronical from a Spanish Africanist review that presents us with an account ofthe languages and schools of the Sephardim of Morocco, a controversial polemic on the differences between Sephardim and Ashkenazim as wagedon the pages of Ladino and Yiddish newspapers, and a depiction ofSephardic translators based on a close analysis of introductoryparatexts in Ladino books from the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies.

Six of the contributions are in Hebrew. Written by some of Israel's leading Jewish language specialists, several of them assume a comparative, Jewish intralinguistic approach, examining theinfluence of languages in contact in the case of Hebrew andJudeo-Arabic in North Africa. Other studies focus on the use of thelinguonym ®Haketia ¯ to denote the language of the Sephardim inMorocco, the types of variation encountered in Judeo-Arabic, foreignwords appearing in two books composed in Hebrew and Yiddish, theLadino used in a statute of a Jewish association inmid-nineteenth-century Edirne, and the importance of the Jewishprinting houses in Salonika.

The contributions are broughttogether to honor Professor David M. Bunis of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a leading, world-renowned scholar of Judezmo/Ladino,Yiddish and other Jewish languages, on the occasion of his seventiethbirthday.