Clearing up Ladino, Judeo-Spanish,

Sephardic Music 

By Judith Cohen

from HaLapid, Winter 2001

Over the past couple of decades, this music has enjoyed a timely and much-deserved renaissance. But there is a good deal of confusion about what it is called, how old it is, who sings it and how it should be sung. For Halapid readers, here is a general outline to try to clear this up.

The three terms in the title can be taken in order. Ladino is one aspect of Judeo-Spanish, which is one linguistic component of Sephardic culture. If we take all the terms literally, Sephardic, as most of you know, refers to the Jewish culture of the Iberian Peninsula, Sefarad, but over time has come to mean, basically non-Ashkenazi. This is, of course, inaccurate, but has become so widespread one has to accept it. Judeo-Spanish is a term coined as an umbrella term for all varieties of the spoken language of the descendants of the Jews of Sefarad, whether written, liturgical, or vernacular. Technically, the written, literal translation word-for-word from Hebrew, variant is the one called Ladino (e.g. “the night the this,” “la noche la esta” for “ha-laila ha-zeh,” as in the Haggadah, instead of “esta noche”). The spoken languages have different names: in Morocco, Khaketía and in the former Ottoman lands, Spaniol, Dzhidio, Dzhudezmo or Spaniol Muestro. Many people in their sixties and over will tell you that when they were young their families didn’t say they spoke Ladino, but rather Spaniol or one of the other terms. Like Sephardic, Ladino has become so popular and widespread that it’s probably the most common and most widely understood term for the language which is a lively and unique amalgam of early Castilian, Galician, Catalan, Portuguese, and variants from all over the Peninsula, with elements of Hebrew, Greek, Turkish, South Slavic languages, Moroccan Arabic, and more recently Italian, French, and even English and Yiddish. Please note that it’s not used for the vernacular language among Moroccan Sephardim and most scholars agree it’s incorrect. Also it has entirely different connotations in Central America.

Judeo-Spanish (as I will refer to it) has no one correct pronunciation. It’s pronounced differently, and has variants.The same goes for the songs, which can be heard with different tunes and different performance styles, depending where they’re sung and what generation is singing them.

How old are the songs? Well, it’s always a disappointment when people ask me about medieval Sephardic songs and I have to say, “Sorry, we don’t have any.” But that’s the way it is. The Jews and the Muslims chose not to write down their music for various reasons in the Middle Ages, so we simply do not have any medieval manuscript music notation of either Jewish or Arabic music (with the exception of a piyyut and a couple of fragments notated in the early twelfth century by a Norman priest who converted to Judaism; my daughter and I sing it on our new album, due out soon). Many of the songs in the Judeo-Spanish repertoire were composed after – often long after – the expulsions from Andalusia, Leon-Castile, Portugal, Aragón and Navarra. And for those which did exist before the expulsion – we just don’t know what tunes they were sung to. With music of oral tradition, one simply cannot make assumptions about dating melodies. So, this is not medieval music, it has a few traces here and there of Renaissance tunes, but for the most part one can’t say much about dating the melodies until the eighteenth century and for more certain dating not until the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jews have always been skilled at adapting the melodies and musical styles of their cultural surroundings, and Judeo-Spanish songs are no exception, whether the melody is from an eighteenth century Turkish tune, a nineteenth century Spanish ballad emigrating to Morocco, an Argentinian tango or a melody composed for the specific song. Presenting Judeo-Spanish songs as early music is by and large anachronistic.

There are different ways to classify the songs, depending on whether one goes by poetic structure, music, or function and context. The first classification systems usually gave the romance (narrative ballad) a category of its own, and then organized the rest according to context and function: calendar cycle, life cycle, love, recreation/topical songs. Lately, it is more common to see a very general classification by poetic structure: romances, coplas and canticas, with a small additional category of Ladino prayers. If we follow this system, each poetic structure can still be divided into function/context groups. The romance is usually sung, or at least was usually sung, in domestic contexts: lulling a child to sleep, embroidering, preparing meals, or in Morocco, sung by young girls on the swing (