The Judezmo/Ḥaketía Phonological Divide as Reflected in Two Editions of Sefer Dat Yĕhudit (Livorno 1827 / Jerusalem 1878) David M. Bunis 1. Introductory Remarks Most of the classical works on Jewish law were composed in Hebrew or Aramaic – languages which, for centuries, have not been fully mastered by the average members of most Jewish communities throughout the world. To make the requirements of Jewish law accessible to everyday Jews, rabbinical scholars in many communities published abridged halakhic compilations in the local Jewish vernacular. The rabbis responsible for the education of the Sephardim, whose ancestors had been expelled from Spain in 1492, were no exception. Into the modern era, two Sephardic subgroups continued to speak distinctive varieties of an Ibero-Romance Jewish language which had arisen in pre-Expulsion Christian Spain. The larger group resided in the Ottoman Empire, where they tended to refer to their language as 'Jewish' (e.g., el djud ezmo). A smaller group lived mostly in Northern Morocco, where they popularly called their language ḥaketía (perhaps meaning the language of story telling [cf. Benoliel 1977: 3-4]). During the centuries following the Expulsion, Judezmo and Ḥaketía speakers grew linguistically distant from one another, primarily as a result of the independent development of the Hispanic component in each of the varieties, the incorporation of elements originating in different local languages spoken by the two groups' disparate neighbors (Turks and Balkan peoples in the Ottoman regions, Arabs and Berbers in Morocco), and the impact of the Hebrew-Aramaic tradition of the neighboring Judeo-Arabic speakers on the language of the Sephardim in Morocco but no significant post-Expulsion Judeo-Arabic influence on most varieties of Ottoman Judezmo. Especially from the nineteenth century, Ḥaketía was profoundly influenced by Modern Castilian, veritably supplanting it in the twentieth century; 1 whereas Modern Judezmo was strongly impacted by 1 See Bentolila 2003.