ABSTRACT
The Judezmo journalist David Fresco was born in Constantinople in 1853. Fresco translated two non-fictional works into Judezmo, and published five of his own, in Judezmo and French. He knew Hebrew from a young age and loved to read its sacred texts, as well as the Modern Hebrew literature being produced by the maskilim. He also published Hebrew writings in his own Judezmo periodicals and in others. Fresco was known in the speech community as an anti-espanyolista, or "anti-Judezmist." But the arguments of Fresco's anti-Judezmist predecessors seem to have had little if any impact on the Judezmo speech community at large. In particular, Fresco internalized the attitudes toward language which predominated among the maskilic writers. To the end of his life, David Fresco was of the firm belief that the road to success for the Jews of Turkey lay in their full integration within broader Turkish society.
