La ermoza istorya de Robinzon o la mizerya: Sephardi Versions of Robinson Crusoe

In the second half of the 19th century the Haskalah, an intellectual movement whose objective was to educate and westernize Eastern European Jews, also reached the Sephardic communities in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, there emerged Sephardic modern secular literature, represented mainly by narrative fiction, theatre plays and press. It should be added that modern Sephardic literature is primarily based on translations or adaptations of Western novels. Among these texts we find Sephardic editions of classics of European literature, such as Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe and Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift. I have found four different versions of Robinson Crusoe that were written in Judeo-Spanish and edited in aljamía. Two of them were published serially in Sephardi press, one in Salonica in 1881 and the other in Constantinople in 1900. The other two editions were prepared by Ben Tsiyon Taragan and published as complete versions, the first one in Jerusalem in 1897 and the second one in Constantinople in 1924. The aim of this paper is to provide a brief analysis of the Sephardic adaptations of Robinson Crusoe by Taragan.