Abstract The aim of this article is to use the analysis of surnames to shed light on several major aspects of mass migrations of Jews from medieval Iberia that have received insufficient coverage in historical studies. It shows that migrations that followed the massacres of Iberian Jews in 1391 were mainly directed from the eastern part of the Crown of Aragon to the territory of modern Algeria. Nevertheless, their total number is incomparably smaller than the number of Iberian exiles in the 1490s. These exiles mainly moved to the Ottoman Northeastern Mediterranean (from Aragon, Castile, and Portugal), the Western Maghreb (from Castile and Portugal), and the city of Rome (mainly from Aragon). Statistical figures provided in this article allow us to discover details of these migrations that are invisible in available historical documents.
Abstract This article presents the first comprehensive quantitative mapping of Yiddish scientific and technical literature from its medieval beginnings to the early twenty-first century. Drawing on a corpus of 595 publications, it analyzes chronological, generic, disciplinary, and geographical distributions to reconstruct the dynamics of knowledge production in a non-dominant vernacular. The findings demonstrate that such literature constituted a structurally differentiated component of Yiddish print culture, closely connected with education, professional communication, and linguistic modernization. By shifting attention from individual texts to large-scale publication patterns, the study identifies phases of growth, diversification, and institutional concentration that challenge prevailing assumptions about the marginal or episodic character of Yiddish engagement with science and technology. This analysis reveals marked asymmetries across periods and regions, including interwar expansion, postwar contraction, and selective revival in recent decades. The article also outlines the principles of corpus construction, classification, and proportional analysis within the constraints of bibliographic availability.
This study analyzes sociolinguistic variation through self-reported familiarity with Jewish English lexical items among Jewish and non-Jewish populations in Australia and the United States. Using an online survey of 6ii participants, we examine familiarity with six hypothesized categories of lexical items: four representing increasingly in-group Jewish English terms and two specific to Australian Jewish usage. Jewish participants from both countries were more familiar with the first four categories than non-Jewish participants, and non-Jewish Americans reported greater familiarity than non-Jewish Australians. One Australian category was more familiar to Australians than Americans, regardless of ethnoreligious identity, while the other was uniquely familiar to Jewish Australians. Overall, these results demonstrate how national and ethnoreligious identities shape lexical item familiarity and usage. We argue that socially meaningful lexical variation, especially in assimilatory or diasporic contexts, merits further study as a salient way for people to maintain distinctive identities within broader national and cultural frameworks.
