Abraham Assa (Asa) was born around 1710 in Istanbul and died around 1780. He was one of the leading figures in the “golden age” of Judeo-Spanish Literature in the eighteenth century. Together with Jacob Culi, the author of the encyclopedic Bible commentary Meʿam Loʿez , Assa belonged to a generation of authors who set out to create a popular rabbinic literature in the vernacular language of the Sephardim of the Ottoman Empire.

Arguably Assa’s most significant contribution was his Judeo-Spanish translation of the Bible, beginning with the Pentateuch (1739), followed by the …