The exiles of 1492 carried medieval Spanish with them, and in Ottoman lands it grew into Ladino, Judeo-Spanish, written in Hebrew letters and sung in a ballad tradition that preserved medieval Iberian romances for five centuries. Alongside it lived Judeo-Arabic, the older vernacular of the Sephardic and Eastern communities of North Africa and the Middle East. The Sephardic liturgical rite, minhag Sefarad, kept its own melodies, poetry and order of prayer, and Sephardic legal practice was codified by Joseph Karo, child of the expulsion, whose Shulchan Aruch, written in Safed, became the standard code of Jewish law everywhere, read in Ashkenaz through the glosses of Moses Isserles.
Sepharad also gave Judaism its central mystical text. The Zohar appeared in late thirteenth century Castile, and Gershom Scholem's scholarship traced the Kabbalah's origins through Provence and Gerona into that Castilian flowering. After the expulsion, the mystics of Safed, most of them of Sephardic descent, made Kabbalah a world inheritance.
The twentieth century broke the old centers: the Holocaust destroyed Salonica almost entirely, and the departure of Jews from the Arab world after 1948 moved the communities of Morocco, Iraq and Egypt largely to Israel and France. Sephardic Judaism today has its own chief rabbinate in Israel, living musical and liturgical traditions, and a Ladino heritage kept alive by scholars and singers, while Spain and Portugal have offered nationality to the expulsion's descendants.