Sephardic Tradition Research Articles

Masoretic Note: Its Creation and Chronicles "חזינא" The from the Special Accentuation in Medieval Manuscripts until Minchat Shay

Unusually, the story of Reuben and Bilhah (Genesis 35:22) contains a double set of accentuation. A mysterious comment in Minchat Shay, partly copied from Or Torah, points to an unfamiliar double accentuation of the first part of the verse, as opposed to the familiar double accentuation that starts from the middle of the verse. The surprising origin of the comment in Minchat Shay and Or Torah is meaning that the note writer ,”חזינא” , found to be an exceptional Masoretic note declares that he saw a manuscript with unusual accentuation. Searching for the source of this accentuation that may have led to the special note opens the door to a variety of medieval Bible manuscripts. We investigated 250 such manuscripts, from the 10th to the 16th centuries, and established the argument of the Jewish linguists and Masoretic notes. The unusual accents were found in a considerable proportion of the manuscripts examined – about 15%. The wide variety of manuscripts examined shed light on the distribution, trends, and development of the special accentuation. The dependency of the proportion of manuscripts with this accentuation on the manuscript date and writing style suggests that the special accentuation originated in an old Sephardic tradition. From being included in the biblical text itself in this tradition, the unusual accents notes, and later to the “חזינא” were shifted to the side of the text, in Masoretic writings of Or Torah and Minchat Shay.

Approach to Laura Papo’s Dramatic Work: The Text and Its Meanings

Laura Papo Bohoreta's theater, presented through the analysis of plays of the Sephardic tradition and social dramas, is the central topic of this work. On the one hand, we focus on the process of emancipation of the female characters, on the other, we highlight the need to preserve tradition. Two processes that the author combines in her dramatic work, either through conflicts between generations or through convergences between them. We present some of her texts as an example of her way of considering theater, where we find no gap between the dramatic text and the performance.

El romance de La bastarda y el segador a la luz de sus variantes

El romance de La bastarda y el segador ha conservado una enorme vitalidad en la tradición oral moderna, tanto en la Península Ibérica, incluyendo Portugal, como en Canarias, Hispanoamérica y la tradición sefardí. Este trabajo pretende desarrollar un análisis minucioso de las numerosas variantes discursivas y de la intriga presentes en las cerca de cien versiones recopiladas de las distintas regiones, atendiendo además a su distribución geográfica.

Musico-Poetic Genres in the Sephardic Oral Tradition. An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Romancero, Coplas and Cancionero

This article, based exclusively on examples that the author has recorded from the oral tradition of the Sephardic Jews, presents the three main genres of the Sephardic traditional repertoire, romancero, coplas and cancionero. These three poetic and musical genres show the vitality, the richness and the variety of the Judeo-Spanish repertoire and have received focused attention by literary scholars and musicologists, through intensive fieldwork, recordings, analysis and interviews. This article presents a system of classification of the repertoire according to interdisciplinary parameters. All the examples belong to those the author has collected in work at the Jewish Music Research Center of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The recordings from her own fieldwork (1974–2014), together with those of other scholars, resulted in the world’s richest collection of the Judeo-Spanish repertoire, and is stored and catalogued at the National Sound Archives of the Israel National Library, open to scholars, singers and lovers of the Judeo-Spanish tradition.

From Grandmother to Grandson—Judeo-Spanish Anecdotes in Israel Today: Emigration, Cultural Accommodation and Language Preservation

I examine processes of cultural accommodation and maintenance of the Sephardic tradition as reflected in anecdotes of the generation who immigrated to Israel. The anecdotes reflect traditions and beliefs of Ladino speakers; I study their folkloric and linguistic aspects, while exposing the elements that create humor and reflect dominant social norms. The anecdotes present the obvious and the concealed tensions in Israeli society, yet they have a universal dimension: social conflicts in contacts between cultures, between ethnic groups, between the generation of the parents and that of the children and grandchildren, between next-door neighbors and between diasporas which converge in one social habitat. The article examines elements of performance, including the place of the storyteller in the storytelling situation and the techniques that generate laughter and identification with a marginal group: the group of Ladino speakers in Israel, as they clash with the hegemonic power in the Israeli society.

Exile and Redemption: Amy Levy's Association with Yehuda Halevi and the Transmission of the Sephardic Tradition of Hebrew Poetry

Exile and Redemption: Amy Levy's Association with Yehuda Halevi and the Transmission of the Sephardic Tradition of Hebrew Poetry

Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New (review)

Reviewed by: Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New Marsha Bryan Edelman Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New, edited by Philip V. Bohlman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 218 pp. plus music CD. $35.00. Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New is the end-result of an endowed series of Jewish Studies lectures presented at the University of Chicago in 1999. Conceived initially as an exploration of the intersection between modern Jewish history and the arts, the offerings took on a somewhat musical cast but never completely surrendered that broader conception. As such, the present volume contains essays that deal with essentially musical concerns, as well as others whose musical content appears peripheral at best. [End Page 193] In his foreword, Sander Gilman notes the Jews' attempts, especially in the nineteenth century, to become truly "modern" by adopting the musical styles of the larger "civilized" European community. Gilman documents the antipathy that greeted composers of "Jewish blood" and points to the similarly negative reception given to more general efforts at Jewish music-making in a Western context. Mitchell Ash asks whether there might actually be "Multiple Modernisms" to be addressed before one can consider the role of music in it. Ash is most interested in the history of science, and his references to music are only tangential. He echoes Gilman's (and others') observation that Jewish prominence in the arts and sciences in the period 1900-1945 is a strategy for acculturation, and admits that most of their work was decidedly secular and unrelated to the accident of their birth. Pamela Potter's essay takes up the earlier question of the "Jewish" identity of the Jews making music in Germany. While she does point to ethnomusicological activity in Russia and Palestine, Potter observes that antisemitism led the German Jews to reject the idea of cataloging their own musical culture. She observes that the Nazis' designation of music by Jewish composers as "degenerate" resolved the question of a "racial" component in Jewish music; the residue of such "scholarship" appears to have left its mark even on contemporary German scholarship regarding Jewish music. In a volume that otherwise focuses entirely on European music, Kay Kaufman Shelemay's essay on the role of music in the transformation of the Beta Israel community is a welcome contribution. She offers a comprehensive history of the musical influences that affected the group's liturgy, documenting the acculturation of the Beta-Israel to the modern world, and the linguistic as well as ritual evolutions in their contacts with Europe, Israel, and America. Most interesting is the observation that this "exotic" community is having an effect on Western cultures as it rewrites its own history in the modern era. Edwin Seroussi's essay on "Sephardic Fins des Siecles" is most clearly related to the notions of both modernism and Jewish music. Seroussi describes the musical response of the Spanish-Portuguese exile community to modernizing pressures from Salomon Sulzer and the Ashkenazic majority of Vienna at the end of the nineteenth century. He acknowledges the community's inevitable acceptance of modernity, but points to its return to Sephardic tradition in the inter-war years as ultimately a rejection of modernism. Seroussi's claim is buttressed by evidence that the historic, Arabic origins of the Sephardic community are making a decided comeback as a new, pan-Sephardic community asserts its cultural identity in twenty-first-century Israel. By contrast, the most curious essay in the volume is by Michael Steinberg, who examines the "Singspiel" of Charlotte Salomon. The artist used the constructs [End Page 194] of musical theater to structure her collection, and incorporated "song lyrics" into some of her paintings, but her "musical" references are to Bach and Wagner rather than to Jewish sources. The many examples of her work that are included as illustrations in the volume (and on its cover) are a welcome addition to what is generally a handsomely produced book, but the essay is about art produced by a young German woman "exiled" to live with her grandparents in France after Kristallnacht, and not really about Jews or music. In his epilogue, Bohlman adopts the Five Books of Moses as the ultimate metaphor with which...

Hanukkah Moon (review)

Reviewed by: Hanukkah Moon Elizabeth Bush da Costa, Deborah Hanukkah Moon; illus. by Gosia Mosz. Kar-Ben, 2007 [32p] Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-58013-244-2$17.95 Paper ed. ISBN 978-1-58013-245-9$7.95 Reviewed from galleys R 5-8 yrs Little Isobel is to spend the first nights of Hanukkah with Aunt Louisa, whom she scarcely knows, and she's especially unsure if Louisa, newly arrived from Mexico, will even know how to celebrate the holiday properly. The familiar hanukkiah, or menorah (here decorated with myriad birds), and a dreidel-shaped piñata are comforting sights, and Aunt Louisa seems to follow the familiar rites, but she graces them with a Latin twist. When Isobel sings the dreidel song, Aunt Louisa sings along in Spanish; there is a daily gift exchange and a special dinner and blessing shared with friends. The highlight for Isobel, though, is her introduction to Rosh Hadesh, the observance of the new moon that marks the beginning of a new lunar month and celebrates the ancient Israelite women's refusal to help cast a golden idol during their wanderings in the desert. The aunt/niece visit is pretty much a disposable plot; what's useful is the introduction of several rituals and terms from the Sephardic tradition. That's a valuable contribution to the canon of holiday literature, and the focus on the feminist aspect of the new moon celebration is a welcome one. Mosz's mixed-media pictures, in which Isobel's dream vision and Exodus imagery settle gracefully into scenes of contemporary observances, feature a cast of doe-eyed, stylized characters golden as Hanukkah lights against the deep purple of moonless night. A glossary of holiday terms and a pronunciation guide for Spanish words (alas, no pronunciations for the general glossary and no definitions for the Spanish terms) are appended. Copyright © 2007 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

King Solomon and the golden fish: tales from the Sephardic tradition

Orality has been central to the transmission of Sephardic customs, wisdom, and values for centuries. Throughout the Middle Ages, Spanish Jews were known for their linguistic skills, and as translators and storytellers they were the main transmitters of Eastern/Islamic culture to the Christian world. Derived from a distinguished heritage, Judeo-Spanish storytelling has evolved over five hundred years through constant contact with the surrounding societies of the past and with modern Israeli influences, making it more universal than other Sephardic oral genres. Told in order to entertain but also to teach, Judeo-Spanish folktales convey timeless wisdom and a colorful depiction of Sephardic communities up to the first half of the twentieth century. King Solomon and the Golden Fish is a selection of fifty-four folktales taken from Matilda Koen-Sarano's collection of stories recorded in Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and translated by Reginetta Haboucha into fluent and idiomatic English that preserves the flavor and oral nuances of each text. Haboucha provides commentary and annotations to the folktales that enlighten both the academic and the lay reader, making this book at once appealing to s

Memory and acculturation in the late medieval and early modern frontier ballad

In this study the frontier ballads are approached as highly malleable, dynamic cultural forms whose representations of cultural encounter, as suggested by historian Angus MacKay, register ‘a process of acculturation’. Particular emphasis is placed on how differences in extant versions of the ballad of Abenamar record changing attitudes towards cross-cultural contact, encompassing not only Castilian variants but also those in the Sephardic tradition, where the depiction of the exchange between King John II, Abenamar and the personified city of Granada offers a testament to the ballads’ ideological flexibility and their capacity to create a space for diversity within the collective identity. Using the notion of ‘cultural memory’ as a methodological tool, the article studies Abenamar’s evolving reconstructions of the past as a means of coming to terms with the present, valued not because they are historically accurate but because they are meaningful to the specific groups they address.

Teaching "Ladino Language and Culture" and "Aspects of the Sephardic Tradition": Hopes, Fruits, Experiences

Teaching Language and Culture and Aspects of the Sephardic Tradition: Hopes, Fruits, ExperiencesThis poster, printed on vibrant orange and rose paper as well as on conventional green, blue, and white, proclaimed to the Tufts University community and to neighboring institutions -- to all potential students -- the advent of a very special course.Its title reflects the main hope, the goal of the course: that the language most popularly known as together with the culture embodied in this language will, indeed, be transmitted to my students, who will, in turn, teach others, that the heritage may continue to live. The course title also reflects a problem: the very name of the language! The designation Ladino originally referred to the vernacular Spanish language into which Jewish religious texts were translated, and some scholars contend that this is its only proper meaning. More personally compelling for me is the fact that in my family -- I was born in the Bronx, New York of parents from Izmir, Turkey, who traced their lineage to pre-Expulsion Spain -- the language, language, was called simply Spanyol, or, to distinguish it from regular de mozotros, our Spanish, but never Ladino! Yet the governmental agency established in Israel to further this language and culture is called La Autoridad Nasionala para el i su Kultura, and -- more crucial in present context -- Ladino is the name by which the language is most widely known in this country. Our Spanyol would need explanation, and a footnoted title is far from enticing! The scholarly designation (Djudeo-Espanyol) is just that -- clear and meaningful for scholars. Other designations pose similar problems. So I opted for the popular name in the course title in the interest of clarity and recognition -- I want students to take this course! But my course description already suggests the problematic nature of the name, and I intend to discuss the problems and possibilities of designation, briefly but in detail, during the first class hour. Naming the language continues to be a source of passionate contention among scholars who are also native speakers, as demonstrated at the First International Conference on Writing and Spelling sponsored by the Autoridad Nasionala and held in Jerusalem October 17-19, 1999, which I was privileged to attend. This contention, too, will afford an insight into the culture I wish to transmit, as will the obvious love for and commitment to the language and culture shared by all participants at the Conference in spite of often passionate disagreements.It is this love and commitment that compel me to offer this course. I grew up with the language and consider it my own, though I was discouraged, especially by my mother, from speaking it lest I appear less American. Since childhood I have sung songs and recorded sayings and proverbs, and I have since written on the Sephardic folk tradition and composed poems and songs (words and music) in Spanyol. I have no formal training in this, my language, but I have studied English, French, and German, and taught (and continue to teach) German language, literature, and culture. My activity, commitment, and sense of urgency regarding Judeo-Spanish language and culture were intensified in May 1999 by my meeting Sephardic scholar, teacher, poet, and storyteller Matilda Koen-Sarano, whom I regard as my teacher. (Please note: since my other contribution to this collection was submitted before this crucial meeting, she is not mentioned there.) Though the idea and the responsibility for this course are exclusively mine, it is through her inspiration, encouragement, and example that I have gained both the confidence and the ability to undertake such a venture. And if my hopes for this course are realized, it will be a tribute to this special colleague, teacher, and friend and to the language and culture she exemplifies so vibrantly. …

The Music of the Amsterdam Sephardim: A Musicological Survey

A short introduction describes the historical background of the Sephardic tradition and reviews some facts about Jewish poets and religious poetry during the Golden Age in Spain and Portugal (eleventh-fourteenth centuries). This overview is crucial to a better understanding of the music sung by the Sephardic community that arrived in Amsterdam at the end of the sixteenth century. In the Sephardic tradition, chazzanut is a matter of correctness without improvisation, the keeping of and adherence to the cantorial tradition. However, chazzanim of the Iberian peninsula were also poets of liturgical and semi-liturgical poetry. Finally, the article focuses on the liturgical hymns of the High Holy Days and the art music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Without real borders between them, both liturgical and secular music have had their place in the Sephardic musical life of Amsterdam.

A Change of Scene, a Change of Fortune: Cinematic Visions of the Sephardic Jew

Cinematic Visions of the SephardicJew A CHANGE OF SCENE, A CHANGE OF FORTUNE: CINEMATIC VISIONS OF THE SEPHARDIC JEW "Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal"l by linda C. Ehrlich linda C. Ehrlich, associate professor at' Case Western Reserve University, has published articles and reviews about cinema in East-West Film Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Post Script, Literature/Film Quarterly, Cinemaya , Japan Forum CinemaJournal, and Film Quarterly, among others. She has co-edited CinematicLandscapes, an anthology of articles on the interface between the visual arts and the cinemas of China and Japan (University of Texas Press, 1994). In addition to her publications on Asian cinema, she has written on the films of Spanish directors Victor Erice and Carlos Saura. 1 The term "Jewish film" has tended to be associated with Yiddish films or with contemporary productions from the state of Israel. Only recently have special film exhibitions revealed another kind ofJewish film-feature films and documentaries about the Sephardic Jew.2 What better way to explore this rich historical and cultural tradition than through the subtlety lA Ladino saying which can be translated as "A change of scene, a change of fortune" (from Moshe Lazar, The Sephardic Tradition: Ladino and Spanish-jeUJish Literature [New York: Norton, 1972], p. 145). 2Note, for example, the exhibition by The Film Society of Lincoln Center entitled "The Other Jews: Sephardim in the Cinema" (December 1992), and "Cultural Identities in Transition: A Sephardic Film Festival" (April 1995), both co-sponsored by the Sephardic House and the Yeshiva University Museum. The National Center for Jewish Film has also organized a travelling film series entitled "A Modem Lens on Sephardic Jewry." 2 SHOFAR Winter 1997 Vol. 15, No.2 and intensity of the cinema? As anthropologist Harvey E. Goldberg notes: "Today, Sephardi Jewry constitutes less than 20 percent of world Jewry, but the importance of Sephardi communities within the modern Jewish world outweighs their numerical value.,,3 The story of the Sephardic Jew is one of dramatic ascents to positions of political and economic strength, often followed by crises. This large group ofJews, expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century, subsequently made their homes throughout the Mediterranean region, farther north to Holland and England, and even over to the New World.4 Once the ascendent force in world Jewry, their influence lessened by the midseventeenth century. During World War II, whole communities were wiped out by the Nazis. Israel's subsequent rise to power led to a rise in antiSemitism among the non-Jewish populations in various.lands where the Sephardim had established communities. The story of the Sephardic Jew reveals a strong inner core of continued , if often hidden, tradition. The act of hiding has at once diffused and intensified their sense of identity. Known for their deep religiosity and yet flexibility in the face of surrounding cultures, the Sephardim have preserved a powerful sense of communal memory. These exiles carried with them a distinctive language. and set of religious traditions which carried over to the details of their daily life and their music. How can a filmmaker depict such a world in which the past colors so many present encounters? Many of the documentary films on this topic focus on a Sephardic woman as the unique carrier of tradition, and as a unique spokesperson for a rich past. Another common element is that many of the films open with a montage of still photos, as haunting faces gaze down at us from the wall. We are privileged by a view of the private life of families, with the world of memory repeatedly coming to the fore. As film critic J. Hoberman has pointed out: "... nostalgia for a vanished world is in itself a Jewish trait. Modern Jewish history is full of lost, sacred sites.,,5 The documentary films present attempts to preserve, or revive, or merely recall lives and traditions in transition. 'Sephardi and Middle Eastemjewries: History and Culture in the Modern Era, ed. Harvey E. Goldberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 2. 'The word "Sepharad" is mentioned in Obadiah 1:20, and is connected with the Latin name for Spain, Hispania. sJ. Hoberman, "Diaspora: Artists Invent a NewJewish Tradition," Village Voice (April 18...

Aspectos del <em>Sefer ha-galuy</em> de Yosef Qimḥi

El Sefer ha-galuy, escrito por Yosef Qimḥi hacia 1165, es en cierto modo una continuación de la polémica filológica que comenzara en el s. X en Córdoba, y una muestra del eco que ésta tuvo en la Europa del s. XII. El nombre de la obra indica que el autor trata de "descubrir o desvelar" dónde está la verdad en cada cuestión debatida por Dunaš y Měnaḥem, y, en su caso, por Rabbenu Tam. En este trabajo se analiza el único manuscrito en el que se conserva la obra y el procedimiento seguido por Yosef Qimḥi en su toma de postura ante la disputa clásica, y en sus críticas personales al Maḥbereṯ de Měnaḥem ben Saruq. Enlazando con la más pura tradición sefardí, ofrece una aportación muy positiva a la discusión filológica desde un análisis lingüístico riguroso y el dominio de los avances logrados por los filólogos andalusies del s. XI.