{"id":133128,"date":"2026-05-24T12:04:05","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T10:04:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.iemj.org\/le-chant-judeo-espagnol-entre-tradition-orale-et-composition-savante\/"},"modified":"2026-05-24T13:59:14","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T11:59:14","slug":"le-chant-judeo-espagnol-entre-tradition-orale-et-composition-savante","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iemj.org\/en\/le-chant-judeo-espagnol-entre-tradition-orale-et-composition-savante\/","title":{"rendered":"Judeo-Spanish Song: Between Oral Tradition and Artistic Composition"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n

<\/a>On June 25, 2026, the National Archives in Paris will host a concert by Bass-Baritone Ian Pomerantz, accompanied by Juliette Sabbah (piano), Renato Kamhi (violin), and Nicolas Chabot (oud), that places two worlds side by side: the intimate, orally-transmitted folk songs of the Sephardic Jewish communities, and the polished arrangements of those very same melodies by 20th<\/sup>-century composers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Organized by the European Institute of Jewish Music, Aki Estamos and the FSJU, the program will feature works by composers such as Alberto Hemsi, L\u00e9on Algazi, Joaqu\u00edn Rodrigo, and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who found in the Judeo-Spanish folk tradition something worth elevating, preserving, and sharing with Western classical concert audiences around the world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How did these songs travel from homes and gathering places of Sephardim into the world of classical music? The journey spans five centuries, multiple continents, and one of the most remarkable stories of cultural survival in Jewish history. Sephardic Art Song represents a modern artistic preservation and transformation of Sephardic diasporic identity, language, and cultural memory within the Western classical tradition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Traditional Repertoire of Sephardic Songs<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The word Sephardim comes from Sepharad, which means \u2018Spain\u2019 in medieval Hebrew. The Sephardim are the descendants of Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492, when King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gave Spain\u2019s Jewish population a stark choice: convert to Christianity or leave. As a result, around 300,000 Jews went into exile, scattering across the Mediterranean world, into the Ottoman Empire, North Africa, the Balkans, the Netherlands, and beyond. They carried little with them in the way of material possessions; what they carried above all was their language and their songs.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Known variously as Ladino, Judeo-Espa\u00f1ol, or Djudezmo, the language of Sephardim is at its core a form of 15th<\/sup>-century Castilian Spanish, preserved and transformed through five centuries of contact with the languages of the communities among which the Sephardim lived. The linguistic composition of Ladino reflects the full itinerary of the Sephardic diaspora, enriched over centuries through contact with Turkish, Greek, Italian, French, Arabic, and Balkan languages. Today, Ladino is classified by UNESCO as an endangered language. The urgency surrounding its documentation and celebration has intensified in recent decades, as the generation of native speakers grows smaller, and the Sephardic song repertoire\u2014one of Ladino\u2019s primary vehicles of transmission\u2014becomes ever more precious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As ethnomusicologist Susana Weich-Shahak mentions in her article, The Performance of the Judeo-Spanish Repertoire<\/em>, the traditional, secular Sephardic song repertoire can be organized into three main genres: romances<\/em>, coplas<\/em>, and cantigas<\/em>, each of which reflects a different dimension of Sephardic communal life. Romances <\/em>are narrative ballads rooted in the world of medieval Spain, comprising tales of knights and prisoners, faithful and unfaithful lovers, queens and exiles. Remarkable, communities that had not set foot in Spain for centuries continued to sing these stories in Ladino, keeping alive a cultural memory of a world that had vanished. These songs are among the most extraordinary artifacts of Jewish oral tradition. Coplas<\/em>, on the other hand, are strophic poems linked to the Jewish calendar and communal life, focusing on holidays, moral themes, stories of biblical figures, and significant community events. This genre flourished especially in the 17th<\/sup> and 18th<\/sup> centuries and reflects the musical influence of the surrounding cultures where each Sephardic community had settled. Meanwhile, cantigas<\/em> are the most eclectic of the three, freely absorbing whatever musical world surrounded them at a given moment, whether it may be Ottoman melodies, Balkan dance rhythms, operetta, foxtrot, or tango. Their subject matter tends to be largely lyrical: love, longing, courtship, mourning, etc. Cantigas <\/em>demonstrate successfully that the Sephardic musical tradition was never frozen in 1492, but it continued to evolve, absorb, and create across every century of its diaspora experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What all three genres share is the centrality of oral transmission. These songs were rarely written down; they were learned by ear, reshaped by individual singers, and often varied considerably from one community to the next. Therefore, the \u2018same\u2019 song might sound quite different in Istanbul, Thessaloniki, or Amsterdam, each version bearing the musical imprint of the environment in which it had lived and grown.<\/p>\n\n\n\n