Judeo-Spanish Versions of Medieval Hebrew Piyutim. State of the Art

Abstract

A good number of the piyutim of the Hebrew orational proper to the Sephardic rite pertaining to the daily liturgy or the festivities of the liturgical cycle have been translated into Judeo-Spanish. Those Hebrew piyutim were largely written by medieval Spanish-Hebrew poets. We can establish the corpus of piyutim in Judeo-Spanish in more than eighty texts, some of them in a single version and others abundantly repeated; some were originally written in the vernacular, but most have been translated from Hebrew, not being uncommon to find different translations of the same piyut.

So far, there have been hardly any studies on the subject. This article provides information about what has already been done and about how much remains to be done.