Hebrew words here are spelled the way Rabbi Gaguine and his own congregation spelled them — which is not the way you will see them spelled almost anywhere else today. You will read Yom Tob rather than Yom Tov, Abóth rather than Avot, Sepher rather than Sefer. These are not misprints. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews of London, Amsterdam and Livorno came to English by way of Spain and Portugal, and wrote Hebrew in Iberian spelling rather than the German-influenced spelling that produced the forms most readers know now. The author’s own name shows it: he signed himself Shem Tob Gaguine.

The spellings follow the London prayer book of de Sola and Gaster, revised under Ḥachám Solomon Gaon — the book he would have had in front of him. Four habits are worth knowing before you begin: b where you might expect v (Tob, Lulab, Ereb); th at the end of many words (Succóth, Abóth, Shaḥaríth); ph where you might expect f (Sepher, Tephilah); and ng for the letter ayin, which these communities pronounced as a nasal (Shemang, Ta-ngamim).

Hard kaf divides on the vowel that follows it — c before a, o and u (Cohen, Ḥanuccáh, Succóth, Ashcabah), and k before e and i (Keter, Ketubah, Malkenu). It is the spelling of Spanish and Portuguese, where this rite’s books were printed.

Two letters carry a dot so the Hebrew can be recovered from the English. The prayer book writes ḥet and khaf alike as a plain h, and qof and hard kaf alike as a plain k; here ḥet is ḥ and qof is ḳ. The ḳ follows the romanization libraries use to catalogue Hebrew books, where every consonant maps to one letter. Without it Ḳidush (קידוש) and Kipur (כפור) would begin alike.

For ḥet the prayer book itself has no settled practice. Sometimes it prints a doubled hh, sometimes a plain h, and the choice follows neither the position of the letter nor any rule we could find — the same volume gives all four of these:

The same Hebrew letter, four spellings in one volume. We use one. The other throat letter, khaf, is left exactly as the book prints it — ch, as in Zachór and Hechál.

The acute marks the stressed syllable throughout — Malchutó, Sépher, Minḥáh, Shaḥaríth — and a stressed i is simply í: Sepharadím, ’Arbíth. A doubled consonant marks a dagesh in the Hebrew and shortens the vowel before it, as English does in later against latter: Ḳaddéesh, Ḳiddúsh, Ḥanuccáh, Tephilléen. The stress is taken from the pointed Hebrew, word by word, never guessed from the spelling. The accent belongs to this spelling only: the other systems you can choose in Reading (Modern London, Ḥabura, Amsterdam) leave it out, as their own books do.

One word can be spelled two ways, and on purpose. When a Hebrew word is said — a blessing, a prayer, a custom — it is spelled as this rite says it. When the same word is the name of a book or a reference you might look up, it keeps the spelling libraries and Sefaria use, so the reference can be found: the Berachóth are the blessings, Berachot is the tractate; a Ḳidushín is a betrothal, Kiddushin the tractate about it. Which one you meet depends on what the sentence is doing. The rabbis of the Talmud likewise keep the spelling of the references (R. Yochanan, R. Hisda), so that a name can be followed into the sources.

Minhág or “custom”. Hebrew has one word, מנהג, for both. It stays Minhág when a community is named — the Minhág of London, the Minhág of Amsterdam, the Minhág of Erets Yisrael — because that is the settled practice of a community, and the subject of the book. Everywhere else it is translated “custom”: an old custom, the custom of the Ari, and also our custom or their custom when the sentence does not name the community.

Five words keep an older London spelling, and they are the whole list. Each is printed that way in the prayer book, and each is among the words a reader meets most often; the ée is an older way of writing the same long i the rule now writes í, not a different sound.

The book is a comparison, and it names the communities it compares. Rabbi Gaguine wrote them as Hebrew initials and gave his own key at the back of volume I. In this translation they are always written out, so you never meet a bare siglum — but the groups are worth knowing, because nearly every paragraph turns on a difference between them.

Togarmah is the old Hebrew name for Turkey, which is why סת"ם ends in a mem and not a tav. The same three letters also spell the scribal setam — scrolls, tephilléen and mezuzoth — and the author uses them in that sense too; only the subject of the sentence tells them apart. אסמ"ת is the widest of these labels: the Eastern rite taken as a single witness, set against London and Amsterdam.

One Hebrew word is kept rather than translated: Minhág (מִנְהָג, plural Minhagím). It means a custom, but in this book it usually means something narrower — the settled body of practice a particular community follows. “The Minhág of London” names a rite, in the way “the Use of Sarum” names one; it is not a remark that Londoners happen to do something. Since comparing those bodies of practice is the whole subject of the book — its Hebrew title is Ṭa’améi HaMinhagím, the reasons for the Minhagím — the word is left standing wherever it carries that sense.

Where the Hebrew means an ordinary custom, it is simply translated: it became the custom to say…, our custom is…, the custom of our fathers is in our hands. So the rule is about sense, not about the word: Minhág followed by the name of a community, custom everywhere else. Both are the same Hebrew word, and neither is more correct than the other — the distinction is there to show you which of the two things the author is doing.

Minhág is also easy to confuse with Minḥáh, the afternoon prayer. They differ by one Hebrew letter: מִנְהָג has a plain he and keeps its h, while מִנְחָה has ḥet and takes the dot — ḥ.

One word breaks the rule: Shabbat. By the rules above it would be Shabbath, with the th of a final tav, and that is how the translation was first written. But we noticed that it is almost always written Shabbat, whatever the rules suggest. It is also a hard word to find in print at all, because the London books usually translate it as Sabbath; where the 2020 London siddur does transliterate it, it prints Shabbat, the Habura writes Shabbat, and even the prayer book this spelling follows prints SHABBAT in its headings. So it is Shabbat here, in every spelling the site offers, with one exception: the Esnoga’s Dutch spelling writes it Sjabbat. Search finds it whichever way you type it.

Words in italics follow different rules. Tractates, books and rabbis — Moed Katan, Sefer HaManhig, Shulchan Aruch, Akiva — keep their ordinary scholarly spelling, because every reference here is meant to be looked up and a reference can only be followed if it is spelled the way the libraries spell it. The prose follows the rules above; the references follow the convention of the shelf; the italics tell you which you are reading.