The Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews Digital Library

The Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews Digital Library contains over 200 digitized reel-to-reel audiotapes that record the fieldwork of two of America’s foremost Romance medievalists, Samuel Armistead (University of California, Davis) and Joseph Silverman (University of California, Santa Cruz), who gathered ballads and other folk literature in the Hispanic tradition as preserved by Sephardic Jews. Their fieldwork extended over several decades in the latter half of the twentieth century and spanned three continents and many dozens of informants. The audio recordings can be heard in their entirety or they can be searched for specific ballads across a number of different tapes. The transcriptions of the ballads and other folk material can also be searched for words and phrases. The digital library is now permanently hosted by the University of Illinois library and can be accessed at http://sephardifolklit.illinois.edu.

Fig 1.

Homepage for The Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews Digital Library at http://sephardifolklit.illinois.edu/.

Part One: Background and Goals of the Digital Library (Bruce Rosenstock)

It is with a heavy heart that I compose these lines about my friend, Sam Armistead. Samuel Gordon Armistead passed away at the age of 85 on August 7, 2013. He had retired only two years earlier from the University of California, Davis, where he taught in the Department of Spanish for 28 years. Those who knew him understand that “retirement” was perhaps the only word in his immense repertoire of languages that held no allure for him.

I was a Lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Davis in the fall of 1998 when I attended a public lecture delivered by Sam. He described the fieldwork that he and the late Joseph Silverman (his former colleague at UCLA) had conducted for over two decades in the United States, Europe, North Africa, and Israel among the descendants of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain in 1492. These Jews, who called themselves Sephardim (from “Sepharad,” their name for the Iberian peninsula), preserved a tradition of oral Hispanic folk literature that, even at the time of the expulsion, had already a centuries-long history, at least in some of its genres. Sam approached this material as a medievalist, seeking to trace the complicated lineage of often fragmentary, orally transmitted Hispanic ballads to their Carolingian and, in some cases, Germanic oral epic ancestry. His scholarly interest in Sephardic (and other Hispanic) folk literature quickly came to include far more than the ballad fragments of the pan-European epic tradition. As Armistead explains (2003:154):

The Hispanic oral tradition comprises not only the “classic” genres of folk literature: narrative poetry (ballads, corridos), lyric poetry, orally improvised poetry (décimas, puntos, bertsoak), children’s rhymes, riddles, proverbs, folktales, and folk theater, but also local legends, memorates, jokes, folk prayers and incantations (ensalmos), cumulative songs, counting-out rhymes, curses and blessings, folk comparisons, calls to animals, tongue-twisters, formulaic phrases, baby talk, thieves’ jargon, microtoponymy, folk beliefs, and, indeed, language itself, in all its diversity, as a constantly changing and consistently creative manifestation of folk culture.

The epic that Sam’s work uncovered was, one might say without too much exaggeration, the epic of the human experience itself. Listening to Sam describe his fieldwork, I imagined that I sat in the presence of the Shekhinah, the indwelling of the divine Person in the world according to Kabbalistic theosophy, a figure whom Sam invoked at the start of the talk, perhaps not entirely in jest, as the power watching over him until he completed all the projected volumes of his Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews.¹ I had, in fact, come to the talk precisely because I was interested in the development of the Lurianic Kabbalah that arose in large part as a response to the trauma of the Jewish expulsion from Spain. I had no idea that a collector of shards of song might be an agent of tikkun olam. Little did I know.

In that public lecture, Sam explained how...