Discovering La muerte ocultada: Exploration on the Evolution of the Romance in the Sephardic Diaspora

Abstract

At the end of the fifteenth century, the Spanish Jews were forced to abandon the country or to convert to the official Catholic faith. As a matter of fact, a multitude of Spanish Jews had already left Spain many decades before because of the socio-political intolerance. The Diaspora was very difficult; a large number of them died and suffered from great agony. The expelled Spanish Jews, also known as Sephardim, preserved the Spanish culture for many centuries; nevertheless, since the beginning of last century, this invaluable living legacy has been coming to an end. It is expected that as long as the Sephardic studies continues, the lessons learnt from the rich Sephardic cultural tradition will remain unforgettable. The purpose of this article is to analyze a well-known ballad ( romance ) of the Sephardic oral tradition in North Africa: La muerte ocultada ( The Concealed Death ), standing out from many other similar but different Spanish versions. Given the Diaspora theme, the exploration on the Morocco’s archaic versions has been concentrated on, because Morocco is the Sephardic area, where we have found more versions of the romance in question, and probably many of them had existed earlier than the time when the Jews were expelled from Spain.