El manuscrito perdido de la obra Usos y Costumbres de los sefardíes de Salónica, de Michael Molho

Since its publication in 1950, Michael Molho’s Usos y costumbres de los sefardíes de Salónica (CSIC, Madrid) is considered one of the fundamentals that support the Sephardic culture research, especially from Salonica. The original version of this work was written in French and translated into Spanish by Prof. Federico Pérez Castro of the Arias Montano Institute. For many years the manuscript was considered a lost text. In February 2015 the authors of this article examined Molho’s Archive and Prof. Pérez Castro’s legacy in the Tomás Navarro Tomás Library (CCHS-CSIC, Madrid) The manuscript was miraculously detected among Pérez Castro’s belongings, scanned by the library and graciously placed at our exclusive disposal. This article describes the collation and the comparison of the two texts, the original and its translation, showing the metamorphosis of the work through the assembly of fragments, the configuration of the chapters, notes and omissions, including certain interventions of the translator-editor discovered through the correspondence between Molho and Pérez Castro prior to the edition of the book.