This study will address the problematic relationship between Judeo-Spanish populations of the Ottoman Empire and nationalist culture and expression. Through a comparative analysis of primary literary and visual source materials that include satirical series' in the Judeo-Spanish press, early photographs and memoirs as well as relevant scholarly studies, I will explore how the particular experiences of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews shed new light on conceptions of language, ethnicity, religiosity and national identity in the Middle East. These people straddled many cultures, and were an example of a 'creolized' ethnicity in the Ottoman Empire. Their language, which was central to their ethnic identification, is nearly extinct in the modern world despite the ancestral presence of these communities in the United States, Israel and elsewhere. Considering Sephardic culture's vitality during the advent of Zionism, the Judeo-Spanish language may be considered one of the great casualties of Jewish nationalism - specifically its most potent form, Zionism. This essay will provide a historical sketch of the Ottoman Sephardic community from roughly 1890-1940. I will analyze of the valuable existing work concerning the establishment of the Alliance Israelite Universelle, the primary organ of Jewish community association in this period. Selections of the Judeo-Spanish satirical series Tio Ezra i Su Mujer Benuta and Tio Bohor i Su Mujer Djamila will then be analyzed as they address concepts of Zionism, the Holy Land and perceptions of language, ethnicity, religiosity and nationalism. I will then address photographs taken of Mizrahi communities in Israel, to construct the sort of visceral expressions of identity that photography eloquently allows us. In consideration of the broad study of non-Ashkenazic communities that has been done, I will employ comparative methods to establish a better picture of Sephardic and Mizrahi communities in Israel and the United States. This study will further complicate a perceived unity amongst the Zionist community. Currently, the perception of homogeneity amongst the Israeli populace is borne out by some sort of unity amongst the current population. In the process of elaborating on the diversity of the early Zionist formations, the question that most comes to mind is whither the Judeo-Spanish language? The formation of a nation-state and a coherent national culture in Israel did not come without a cultural price tag. Understanding the communities that lost themselves in the process of nationalism is the first step to a better understanding of the cultural, ethnic and linguistic atrophies of the modern nation.