Oral Literature of the Hispanic World
Samuel G. Armistead, Faculty Research Lecture, 1998, University of California, Davis

Creative Cultural Fusions: "Orientalizing" the Ballad Melody

And as our work went forward, we were to discover something that had never been noticed before. Various ballads sung in the Eastern Sephardic communities--ballads that, in every way, look like authentic medieval survivals--turned out, in fact, to be quite close translations from Modern Greek. In the Eastern communities, the Spanish Jews had, as their close, immediate neighbors, Greeks, Turks, South Slavs, Albanians, and other Balkan peoples. In Morocco, their neighbors spoke Arabic. The influence of these peoples has been crucially important to the development of Sephardic traditional poetry. And this has turned out to be very much the case, not only with texts, but also, as my friend Professor Katz has shown, with the music to which Sephardic ballads are sung. Here is one example of the "Orientalization" of ballad music. This is a Judeo-Spanish version of the ballad of The Husband's Return. It can be traced back to medieval Spanish antecedents and ultimately to a lost Old French archetype. But if we were to disregard the Spanish words and concentrate our attention on the music alone, we could easily be convinced that this is a Near Eastern, a Turkish, or an Arabic song. The singer is playing a stringed instrument, the Turkish ud, as an accompaniment. (This is the Arabic word and the Arabic instrument that entered Western European communities as the lute): (click on the links to hear each segment)

In the light of such texts as this one, the Sephardic tradition emerges, not only as a marvelous treasure trove of multi-secular medieval survivals, but rather as a rich, pluralistic, living, and constantly evolving creative tradition, a synthesis of Hispanic and Near Eastern elements, a tradition which faithfully mirrors all the diverse cultural contacts, the many adventures, experienced by the Sephardic people, during half a millennium, since they were forced to depart from their Spanish homeland.