Judeo-Spanish Ballads from New York

It hardly seems necessary to insist on the crucial importance of the Judeo-Spanish ballad tradition to the study of both Pan-Hispanic and Pan-European balladry. The present-day Spanish-speaking Sephardim of Morocco, the Balkans, and the Near East are the descendants of Jews exiled from Spain at the end of the Middle Ages (in 1492). Their archaic, highly conservative ballad repertoires preserve many features of the Spanish ballad tradition as it existed at the time of their exile from the Iberian Peninsula. Numerous narrative types dating back to medieval times have thus survived among the Sephardic Jews, while they have, in many cases, disappeared from all other branches of the Hispanic ballad tradition. A thorough exploration of the Judeo-Spanish ballad corpus is, then, essential to the task of filling the rather substantial gaps that still exist in our knowledge of late medieval and sixteenth-century Spanish balladry. The Sephardic tradition is also, of course, crucially important to comparative studies of the various other modern branches of Pan-Hispanic balladry: the Spanish, Hispano-American, Portuguese, and Catalan traditions. At the same time, Judeo-Spanish narrative poetry, of all the various Hispanic sub-traditions, is also one of the most significant for comparative Pan-European ballad studies. Because of its conservatism, Sephardic balladry preserves a number of thematic correspondences to other European ballad traditions which are no longer in evidence in most other geographic branches of the Hispanic Romancero. Judeo-Spanish balladry can, then, frequently provide clues to thematic relationships on a Pan-European, as well as on a Pan-Hispanic, scale.[1]

Besides its important conservatism, as an archaic lateral tradition, another previously neglected aspect of the Judeo-Spanish ballad should also be taken into account. This is its eclectic character, its absorption of narrative themes and stylistic features borrowed from the popular poetry of the peoples among whom the Sephardim lived after their exile from Spain: namely from Greek,

Turkish, and Arabic.[2] Although the survival of medieval text-types constitutes one of the important facets of the Sephardic tradition, it should not impede the recognition of other characteristics of Judeo-Spanish balladry. In a fundamental review of recent scholarship, Diego Catalán has pointed out important innovative features coexisting with archaic elements, particularly in Eastern Mediterranean Sephardic balladry.[3] With the publication of Paul Bénichou's pathfinding Creación poética en el romancero tradicional (Madrid: Gredos, 1968)—based in many cases on Judeo-Spanish evidence—the Sephardic romancero emerges also as essential to the study of creativity in Hispanic traditional poetry.[4]

Of all the widely separated areas of the twentieth-century Sephardic diaspora, none has been more explored and none has yielded a greater harvest of Judeo-Spanish folk-poetry than the United States. Israel,[5] Spain,[6] France,[7] England,[8] Holland,[9] Belgium,[10] Canada,[11] Cuba,[12] Mexico,[13] Venezuela,[14] Uruguay,[15] Argentina, Paraguay,[16] Rhodesia, and South Africa,[17] all have Sephardic immigrant communities of relatively recent origin, but none has been explored in such depth or by so many ballad fieldworkers as those of the

United States (and many have not been explored at all). Only the multisecular Sephardic homelands of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa have produced larger collections of ballads than those brought together in the United States.[18] Judeo-Spanish ballad research in America begins with the romances we have annotated in the present edition: 46 texts of Eastern Mediterranean and Moroccan origin, representing 43 different text-types, collected by Professor Maír José Benardete in New York City during the winter of 1922 and spring of 1923.[19] Benardete's pioneering work was to be followed by that of many other collectors. The next attempt to tap the rich and variegated Sephardic ballad resources available in New York[20] was put forward by Federico de Onís who, between 1930 and 1938, made phonograph recordings of North African and Eastern ballads at Columbia University. Starting around 1930, Onís recorded seven romances sung by Suzanne (Simy) Nahón de Toledano from Tangier.[21] The Moroccan recordings were followed by others devoted to ballads sung by Eastern (Rhodian and Salonikan) informants in 1933, 1934, 1935, and 1938. In addition to the texts collected from Mrs. Toledano, Onís recorded a total of 22 Eastern Sephardic romances. Contemporary with Onís's work were the recordings produced at Barnard College in 1930 (or 1931) by Franz Boas and Zarita Nahón, who collected 15 romances (as well as two children's songs, two wedding songs, a lullaby, and an endecha [dirge]) also sung by Mrs. Toledano.[22] The early 1930s also saw another important collecting campaign in the Sephardic community of Seattle (Washington): Between 1931 and 1936, Emma Adatto collected ballads, folk-tales (konsezas [*] ) and proverbs from Turkish and Rhodian informants in Seattle, to form a rich and highly significant body of Judeo-Spanish folk-literature, which, unfortunately, remains largely unedited to this day: 18 romances (representing 15 text-types) are included in her M. A. thesis; 28 more texts (= 19 text-types), some of which overlap, with minor variations, the thesis texts, figure in unedited MSS and typescripts; 31 more texts were recorded on phonograph discs at the University of Washington;

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