The journey begins in childhood, where stories about Djoha and his mother reflect patterns of socialization, his difficulty in interpreting verbal and non-verbal communicative cues, and his attempts to acquire practical skills, including earning a living and engaging in commerce. It then moves to married life, where his wife is portrayed in sharply contrasting ways, from negative stereotypes to the rarer figure of a woman of valor who repeatedly rescues her husband from trouble.

The lecture does not overlook the animals that accompanied Sephardic urban life. The donkey, in particular, opens a window onto the economic world of the Ottoman city. From there, the journey reaches the most severe forms of poverty and the social criticism expressed through Djoha tales. This stop also shows that, in criticizing Ottoman institutions, Sephardic storytellers enlisted the outsider figure of Nasreddin.

A final return to married life offers a different perspective, comparing Ladino and Hebrew versions of the same tale to highlight differences between female and male speech. The lecture concludes by proposing folklore research as an “archaeology of consciousness.” Separately, it suggests that the methodology of attending to absences and silences in the corpus is as important as attending to what the stories state explicitly.

*Short Biography*

Hanita studied Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jewish Literature at Bar-Ilan University, and later completed her PhD at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her research offers an in-depth exploration of the Sephardic figure of Djoha, whose stories serve as a mirror of Sephardi Jewish society. Her work examines the intersections between folkloric narratives, socio-economic realities, and processes of language attrition. Her article on the ways in which animal tales within the Djoha tradition reflect the decline of Ladino has been accepted for publication and will appear in the forthcoming issue of *El Presente*, under the title “Djoha Regardeth the Life of His Beast: Animals and Language Attrition in Djoha’s Folk Stories.”

Participants will receive a PDF from Tamar Alexander-Frizer’s *The Heart Is a Mirror*. Please read the section “The Humorous Tale” up to “B. Gullibility and the Absurd in Tales of Makeda.”

*To receive the Zoom link and the reading, please contact: erol.muzaffer@gmail.com*