Yiddish is most similar to German, but it was developed primarily in Slavic lands, starting around 1000 C.E. Like the Yiddish language of their Ashkenazi brethren, Ladino was not based on the language of the countries in which its speakers lived at the time of its development, but rather on their ancestral homeland. This is most evident in their language, Ladino, which can be described as a fusion of Hebrew and Spanish. Despite forced exile, Spanish language and customs remained a crucial presence in the lives of Sephardim. Sephardic Jews' descent from these exiled Spanish Jews differentiates them from the considerably larger population of Ashkenazi Jews, who are descendants of German, French, and Eastern European Jews. The remaining Sephardim who had emigrated from Spain "carried with them the Spanish tongue, Spanish dignity, and distinction" together with their Judaism (Adatto, 5). Unfortunately for them, the Jews who fled to Portugal were also "forcibly converted to Catholicism" in 1497 (Ben-Ur, 13). Forced to convert to Catholicism or leave, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who wanted to maintain their religious traditions and way of life departed to Portugal, Holland, and England, as well as Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere throughout Mediterranean. This exile from Spain undoubtedly impacted their collective psyche, especially since the centuries of living in Muslim Spain were a relatively prosperous time, sometimes referred to as a "Golden Age" in Jewish history. "Sepharad" is a Hebrew word for "the Iberian Peninsula." After centuries of co-existing with Christians and Muslims under Muslim rule in Spain, Jews, as well as Muslims, were expelled from Spain and the lands it controlled by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella in 1492. However, Sephardic Jews ultimately trace their ancestry to Spain. The first Sephardic immigrants to Seattle came from Marmara, an island in present-day Turkey, and Rhodes, an island that is now part of Greece. Those who consider themselves Sephardic Jews in Seattle came primarily from cities and islands in the Ottoman Empire, but their origins are more far-reaching than the lands they arrived from. In the century since the first Sephardim settled in Seattle, Washington's Sephardic Jewish community has maintained a strong cultural presence and contributed to the growth of the state's economy and Seattle's diverse artistic development. For a variety of reasons, a significant proportion of those immigrants settled in Washington, ultimately giving Seattle one of the largest populations of Sephardic Jews in the United States, so that "ince World War I, Seattle has had the largest percentage of Sephardim compared to the total Jewish population of any U.S. Around the turn of the twentieth century, with the empire declining and increasingly unstable, a large wave of Sephardic Jews began immigrating to the United States. For generations after the expulsion, Sephardim lived throughout the Mediterranean lands of the Ottoman Empire, where they were able to preserve their religion and cultural traditions, and even developed a language, Ladino, based on the Spanish of their former homeland. Sephardic Jews, descendants of Jews expelled from Spain in 1492, first settled in Seattle in 1902.
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