Ladino Books in the Library of Congress

Originally compiled by Henry V Besso
Revised by Everette Larson and Ralph Tarica

This online version of the bibliography prepared by Henry V. Besso and published by the Hispanic Foundation of the Library of Congress in 1964, has been updated with approximately 200 additional titles recently identified in the collections of the Hebraic Section and in the general collections of the Library of Congress. In addition the guide contains links to the title pages of the cited resources in the vernacular script, standardized subject and name headings to facilitate searching for related resources in the Library of Congress catalog, and the Ya'ari number for those resources also cited in that seminal work on Ladino publications in the Jewish National and University Library (Jerusalem). In addition, location information for the resources, which are included in several collections in the Library of Congress, is also provided.

This online version was produced under the auspices of the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) of the Library of Congress as part of the BeCites+ Project in 2003-2008.

A note on the Romanization of the Hebrew script: In 2005, the Library of Congress approved a Romanization Table for Ladino which we do not use in this project. Romanization has the task of representing each character from one script to another. This often presents spellings of words which are felt by the Ladino speaking population as strange and unfamiliar. Couple this with the need of search engines in the online world to have a uniform spelling for search purposes and the result is confusion if a system is not universally accepted. For example, the word agua would be Romanized as agwah to represent the individual characters.