Before proceeding any further, a clear distinction should be made between the terms Hispano-Jewish and Judeo-Spanish. The former refers to the period before the Decree of Expulsion of the Jews on 31 March 1492, while the latter is used to refer the cultural heritage of the Sephardic Jews of the Diaspora ensuing from that decree, including djudeo-español (Judeo-Spanish), a variety of Old Spanish originating in Castilian territories in the fourteenth-century, known variously as judezmo or ladino among the Jews of the Ottoman empire and haketia among the Jews of Morocco.
Whatever their destination, whether Morocco or the old Ottoman empire (present-day Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Bosnia Herzegovina, Macedonia and Serbia Montenegro), the Jews who were expelled from Spain preserved for many centuries their Arabo-Andalusian heritage. As well as their liturgy and paraliturgical poems in Hebrew, they took with them into exile a wealth of romances, complas, canticas and endechas (laments or dirges) in Judeo-Spanish, which would become the core of the Sephardic repertoire that has survived to our own day, enhanced with the popular melodies of the countries in which the Jews of Iberia have settled since their expulsion. Despite the romantic appeal of legend and the insistence of some musicians and scholars, however, these melodies are unlikely to bear any traces of melodies dating back to the Spanish Middle Ages before the Expulsion.
A background to the musical research
The study of medieval Jewish music faces a problem common to that of all other forms of ancient music: the lack of reliable documentary records. Even in the Christian West, musical notation was in its infancy, and most of the references to musical practice must therefore be sought in literary, philosophical, theological and other sources. Although the Arabo-Andalusian musical heritage has survived in the oral tradition, it has naturally been subject to all the inevitable variations, modifications and transformations that are typical of a musical heritage preserved in this way.
As in other branches of musical research, the opinion of academics (musicologists, historians and Hebrew scholars) is usually diametrically opposed to that of musicians, who endeavour to revive the music of the past in their concert performances. Both groups are driven by natural and healthy motives in their determination to strip away all the elements that have inevitably contaminated the theory and practice of that musical tradition, given its history of more than a thousand years and the fact that during that time the Jews, as in fifteenth-century Spain, have repeatedly lived through difficult and precarious circumstances.
With regard to Hispano-Jewish music, we are fortunate in having access to varied and copious sources of indirect information, penned both by Jewish authors writing in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and Old Spanish, and by Arab and Christian authors who wrote on the musical practice of the Jews from their own first-hand knowledge and experience of Jewish communities. For a better understanding of the information provided by all these sources, we shall first give an overview of Jewish musical culture in general and the history of Jews on the Iberian Peninsula.
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