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Vanessa Paloma Elbaz, an American scholar of Judeo-Spanish music at Cambridge University, has spent the last 15 years collecting and archiving the voices of aging Jews in Morocco.

By the time his grandchildren were adults, in the years after World War II, none could speak his language, the Judeo-Spanish dialect Ladino.

Why did you speak in Judeo-Spanish — and what is it, exactly?

While the casual observer might detect Islamic influences in its painstaking geometric designs, or Christian overtones to its animal illuminations, the Bible itself is the culmination of centuries of Judeo-Spanish tradition.

Applicants had to pass tests on Spain's culture and constitution and show competence in Spanish or the Judeo-Spanish variant, Ladino.