The Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English with its translations in Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ladino.

This is De Rechten van den Menschen van den Burger (“The Rights of Man and of the Citizen” 1795) and its Hebrew translation, דברי הברית החקים והמשפטים אשר בין אדם לאדם (1798), upon the establishment of the Batavian Republic and the ensuing emancipation of Dutch Jewry in the Netherlands. The text of the Declaration, with nineteen articles, follows after the French Republic’s much expanded Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du citoyen de 1793 written by Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles. (The French Declaration, ratified by popular vote in July 1793, was a revision of the initial Declaration from 1789 written by the commission that included Hérault de Séchelles and Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just during the period of the French Revolution.) Declarations such as these enshrined the liberal values of the Enlightenment which changed the situation and status of Jews under their aegis. Ultimately, these values were largely enshrined under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by member states of the nascent United Nations in 1945.

There are various traditions as to the numbering of the commandments, as well as the enumeration of verses of the Decalogue, the Ten Commandment. In this transcription of the Ladino text we are following the numeration of verses according to the Constantinople Codex of 1547 C.E., as edited by the great scholar Professor Moshe Lazar (z”l) of the University of Southern California in 1988. This newly typeset text is an original transcription by Reb Shmuel Gonzales, of the Boyle Heights Chavurah – of the grassroots Jewish community of East Los Angeles, California; transcriber and editor of Sephardic texts for the Open Siddur Project; in celebration of Shavuot of 5783, and published in May of 2023.