If there’s one thing Dora Beraha regrets in her twilight years, it is not passing on the 500-year-old language of Istanbul’s Jews, Ladino, now on the point of extinction. “After us, will there still be people who speak this language?” says 90-year-old Beraha. Ladino is a unique mix of medieval Castilian and Hebrew, with sprinklings of Turkish, Arabic and Greek, that emerged when Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, with many ending up in the Ottoman empire.
