Judeo-Spanish Ballads from Oral Tradition IV: Carolingian Ballads (3): Gaiferos. Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews, Vol. V (review)

It is hardly necessary to rehearse for the readers of this journal the history or importance of the Sephardic tradition, but I reproduce here, by way of introduction, the poignant words of Zarita Nahón, whose fieldwork in Tangier in the late 1920s documented more than sixty Judeo-Spanish ballads:

For the most part, those who contributed to this collection came from the old first families of Tangier - descendants of the aristocratic Jews who lived in Spain under the Caliphate and the Catholic Kings until they were driven out by the Inquisition. From Castile, they took to Tangier the culture, the learning, and the ancient traditions of their past. They entrusted to me the ballads that are no longer heard, in a tongue no longer spoken. Their legacy lives again in these pages.

(9)

Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman, with the musicological commentary of Israel J. Katz, edited Nahón's collection in the mid-1970s and confirmed the situation of the Sephardic enclave in Tangier: "no reunía últimamente condiciones tan propicias para la conservación de los romances" (21). The preservation of cultural heritage and traditional languages in an urban setting is accomplished only with great difficulty. Nahón reminisced in her 1974 prologue, "It was from the octogenarians that I was able to gather the greatest number of old romances" (8); but the Judeo-Spanish dialect itself was in danger of extinction even in 1929: "The attitude of the young at the time was to disassociate themselves good-naturedly from this speech, and eventually Haketía [Judeo-Spanish] became the property of the old people, slowly disappearing as they died" (7). Ten years after the publication of Nahón's collection, Armistead and Silverman would write of the global Sephardic tradition, "clearly in the final stages of a critical decline", that "the most recent fieldwork . . . reveals a steadily decreasing repertoire, in which in general only the more common themes continue to be sung by an increasingly aged and diminishing group of singers"; they conclude with a sense of urgency: "time is running out and all efforts must be bent to saving for future study the surviving vestiges of this venerable tradition" ("The Judeo-Spanish Ballad Tradition" 642).

No individual or team has done more in the last half century to rescue these "surviving vestiges" from oblivion than Armistead, Silverman, and Katz. The book under review here is the fifth volume in a series that began in 1971, Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews (FLSJ), and the fourth of those volumes dedicated to the Judeo-Spanish ballads collected by the editors themselves in fieldwork that dates back to the late 1950s (for a summary of that early fieldwork, see FLSJ II: 4-7). By 1986, when the editors published their first volume in the series, Judeo-Spanish Ballads from the Oral Tradition, they had interviewed 241 informants of North African or Eastern Mediterranean origin and had collected nearly 1,500 ballad texts or fragments (FLSJ II: 7). The often fragmentary, even disappointing, ballad texts gathered in this series, nonetheless, "live again in these pages" (as Nahón might say) because they are so fully accompanied by the critical apparata, musical transcriptions, and erudite commentary of the editors. The current volume, for example, is buttressed by an eighty-seven-page bibliography, nine indices, and a glossary, in addition to abundant notes. Moreover, as the editors announce in their introduction, the series is now supplemented by a "digitized archive of all field tapes pertaining to the current project" (FLSJ V: v), which can be consulted online as Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews: A Multimedia Archive of Ballads and Other Oral Literature in Judeo-Spanish, <http:// www.sephardifolklit.org/flsj>. The importance of this material not only...