Reprinted in Los romances de America (Buenos Aires, 1948), 101–83.
During the past decade or so, the Judeo-Spanish romance has enjoyed a rise in popularity. Throughout this period there have been discrepancies between the approaches of performers and scholars, an occurrence by no means peculiar to Judeo-Spanish song, but one that is potentially instructive.
Hebrew title: זר של שירי עם מפי יהודי ספרד
A comparative study of Spanish romances (extant in 16th-c. Spanish polyphonic sources) and Sephardic romances. Textual and musical concordances are provided for romances from the two repertoires. This study represents the first discovery of melodic similarities between the two repertoires.
The Present study deals with (i) the performance of the Judeo-Spanish repertoire maintained until today by the Sephardi Jews from two main areas of their Diaspora - the eastern Mediterranean (the Ottoman area, later Turkey, Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia), and the western Mediterranean (Morocco), (ii) the performance of the secular and paraliturgical Sephardi repertoire sung in Judeo-Spanish.
The corpus of Judeo-Spanish ballads presents a unique case study of stability and change in oral tradition. On the one hand it is a living testimony to the jews' preservation of the Spanish Romance tradition after their expulsion from Spain in 1942; on the other, by absorbing since then so many new stylistic features, it has evolved into a genuine repertoire quite distinct from that of the late Medieval Spanish Romancero, its ancestral counterpart.