The Sephardi Studies Project is an initiative by the Taube Center for Jewish Studies at Stanford in conjunction with the Mediterranean Studies Forum. It focuses on the written production in Ladino of the Judeo-Spanish communities of the Ottoman Empire. The website presents representative samples of Ladino texts over the centuries. Directed by Aron Rodrigue.

At the request of Professor Aron Rodrigue, I am pleased to write this Introduction to the Digitized Ladino Library project initiated by Stanford University. As natives of Istanbul, he and I share the same Eastern Sephardic background of Ladino speakers whose number has been on a steady decline since the end of World War II. The suffering and destruction inflicted on the Jewish people spared no one. Particularly harsh was the situation of East Mediterranean Jewry, whose cultural heritage was severely damaged, with Salonika almost wiped off the map, and its rabbinical academies and libraries decimated. The purpose of this Digitized Ladino Library is to place on the Internet a corpus of Ladino printed books, or even a few manuscripts, for easy access by scholars as well as students of Ladino throughout the world. I had already worked on a number of Ladino books in the past and I was delighted when Professor Rodrigue wished to include these books in this new series. -Isaac Jerusalmi