Interview with Eliezer Papo: Judeo-Spanish from Sarajevo

An Interview with Eliezer Papo, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, who is based in Jerusalem, Israel. The interview was conducted online in January 2023 and it comprises questions concerning Judeo-Spanish, the history of the Jews of the former Yugoslavia, samples of free conversation and word elicitation. This recording is part of the “Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area” project supported by the French National Research Agency [CNRS] (ANR-21-CE27-0020-ABLA) and the Russian Science Foundation (22-48-09003) whose goal is to study the language contacts among spoken Balkan languages.

Eliezer Papo (1969-) is a Sephardic Jew who was born and raised in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Hercegovina, but from 1991 he is settled in Jerusalem, Israel, where he teaches Ladino and its culture at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva. He learned Judeo-Spanish as a child as one of the languages spoken in his home. Eliezer is also an academic, a researcher and a published author. He writes in Judeo-Spanish too.