Pirke Avot, Haggadah and Bible:

Ladino Translations of Crypto Jews in Italy

by Ora (Rodrigue) Schwarzwald, PhD

The crypto-Jewish community in Italy published a number of Ladino translations of traditional Jewish texts, the earliest of which is the Ferrara Libro de Oracyones de todo el año (the prayer book for the entire year) printed by Yom Tov Atias in 1552. A year later, the same print shop in Ferrara published the complete Old Testament in Ladino. Both books were published in Latin characters and do not contain the original Hebrew texts.  Beginning about 1540 in Constantinople and Salonika, printers began publishing Ladino translations of the Old Testament in Hebrew characters, placing the original Hebrew alongside the translation.

Although several famous print shops existed in Italy such as Soncino, no other Ladino translations were published until the beginning of the seventeenth century. From that time forward, various Ladino translations of Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and the Passover Haggadah were published in Italy. These translations were printed in either Hebrew or Latin characters, and were placed beside the original Hebrew texts. The first Ladino translation of Pirke Avot (other than the version  in the aforementioned prayer book) was published in Venice by Giovanni di Gara in 1601in Hebrew letters; eight years later, in 1609, the Passover Haggadah was published.

The two translations of Pirke Avot (1601) and the Haggadah (1609) are linguistically unique and were clearly intended for Jews and not conversos (Crypto Jews), unlike the early prayer book (Ma*zor) and the Old Testament (from here on: the Bible). Later versions of Pirke Avot and the Haggadah from Italy were published for conversos. (A list of the translations of Pirke Avot can be found in my book The Ladino Translation of Pirke Avot, Jerusalem: Magnes 1989, Chapter 2. A list of the Ladino translations can be found in Yudlov's The