preface

Yahudije, the name used for the Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) language of the Jewish population in the Ottoman times, reflected a simple reality: most Jewish people in the Ottoman Empire were of Spanish origin and spoke Ladino. By the same logic Rumja (and not Yunanja) was the language of the Ottoman Greeks, and Ermenije was the language of the Armenians.

This album presents Ladino repertoire from a different perspective. It deals with urban music from Istanbul, Izmir, Thessalonika, and Jerusalem. Its difference is embodied in a combination of three main characteristics: the song repertoire, the musical interpretation and the importance given to the documentation of those songs. I give this album as a gift to lovers of traditional music, to people interested in a less familiar but very beautiful repertoire and to those who want to know more about the stories behind the songs – to see through them the world those songs once represented.

Over a long period, I collected these songs from Sephardic informants, which I was lucky to meet, and through access to several archives of field recordings. The fruits of long hours of listening are given in the lists of recorded sources provided for each song.

A note about the musical arrangement: since most of the songs emerged in the former Ottoman Empire and since all the recordings I heard revealed makamic influence, it was only natural for me to choose traditional Ottoman instruments and musical arrangements that would help expose the original character of each song. This is the reason why we did not use any tempered instruments. It is true we cannot define the makam of each song, but in most there is a seyir (makam’s melodic progression) that implies heavy dependence on the Turkish makam system.

Ladino music is a world which has come alive for me during the time I’ve spend in each of those traditional Sepharadic music centers: I have lived in Jerusalem for seven years, traveled many times to Thessalonika, made field recordings there, was strongly affected by the Izmirian informants Jozeppo Burgana and Palomba Aroch and am deeply involved in Istanbul, which I chose to settle during the last three years. I do not think of my attachment to this music as devotion to my research, and long ago I stopped looking for a logical explanation: I can only say it is a passion, and I pray it will never diminish.


Introduction

Historical Background

The Spanish Jews, known as the Sephardim, were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. After they were sent away from Spain and Portugal by King Fernando and Queen Isabella of the Aragones dynasty, they dispersed mainly to the eastern and southern Mediterranean. There were also communities, most of them of Portuguese origin, who came to Europe: mainly to London, Amsterdam and Vienna. In the eastern Mediterranean, they established their communities under the protective wings of the Ottoman Empire, later to become Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia. And in the south they settled in Spanish Morocco (For more information about the history of the Sephardic Jews see Díaz-Mas, Sepharadim ).

Their communities prospered culturally and economically. Thanks to the Ottoman law allowing ethnic minorities to continue their life as an independent ethnic unit, the Jewish community was enabled to preserve its religion and tradition, hence; language and all the rituals connected to their cultural heritage. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Jewish community was exposed to European influences, especially from France and Italy. European oriented education pushed young people away from Ladino language and French took a prominent place among the bourgeoisie. The Paris-based schools of Alliance Israelite Universelle became the main education vehicle for Jewish youngsters.

The three largest Sephardic communities in the 19th and 20th century were Istanbul, Thessalonika, and Izmir. In Thessalonika there were approximately 75,000 Jewish people, in Istanbul 50, 000 and in Izmir 20,000.


Ladino language

Ladino is known under many names such as: Djudezmo, Yahudije, Judeo-Espagnol, Espagnol, Ispanyolca, Ladino and others. I will use the term Ladino. Ladino language, used among the Sepharadic Jews, is actually a melting language. Its syntax is derived from medieval Spanish but its vocabulary is a mixture of Spanish, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Greek and Turkish and other local sources. The percentage of foreign vocabulary depends on the local linguistic influences. For example, we will find more Castilian words in North Moroccan Ladino (called Hakitia), and more Arabic words in the Ladino of Jerusalem. Together with the European influence in the beginning of the 20th century, Ladino slowly assumed secondary status. Even nowadays I still hear people call it jargon or the balıkcı dil [The language of the fishermen]. In Turkey this descent speeded up with the advent of Turkish nationalism. In the early 30’s the saying “vatandaş Türkçe konuş!” [Citizen, speak Turkish!] and its sanctions encouraged Jewish people as well as other minorities to neglect their ethnic language and to replace in with Turkish. Children who were raised by their grandmothers could still hear Ladino but they were ashamed to speak from fear that they would have a Jewish accent in Turkish thereby revealing their linguistic “inferiority”. Today Ladino hardly functions as a daily life language, but I can still hear it in Büyük Ada and the streets of Kurtuluş and Şişli in Istanbul. In some neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Bat-Yam in Israel it is also still in use.


Ladino music also changed its role in the Jewish community from the beginning of the 20th century: Little by little it lost its function inside the community in the traditional rituals of the life cycle and the year cycle and moved into other contexts such as commercial recordings and performances. The new medium of music distribution: commercial recordings, exposed people in the Ottoman Empire to Turkish, Greek, Arabic and European music and Jewish artists were inseparable part of this industry. A relatively large number of Ladino recordings were released and also non-Jewish artists recorded this repertoire in Thessalonika (see Bresler, Old recordings). Rabbi Isaac Algazi and Haim Effendi were the main Sephardic music representatives on the Gramophone/ Zonophone, Orfeon, Colombia and Odeon labels at the beginning of the century and after. In the 50’s Victoria Hazan and Jack Mayesh were the up and coming stars and were recorded in Metropolitan and Me-Re record companies. All of them were of Turkish origin. The more that local and European music became available and accessible the more we could find Ladino songs borrowed from Smyrnaica, Rebetika, Turkish Şarkılar, Kantolar and folklore music, Tangos, Foxtrots, French songs and Italian operettas repertoire. The famous popular tunes of the time were performed, not in the original language, but with new texts in Ladino. This phenomenon is called contrafacta (About contrafacta see Dragoumis, Greek; Havassy, Sadik y Gazoz; Kats, Contrafacta; Seroussi, Turkish Music; Seroussi and Weich-Shahak, Contrafacta; Weich-Shahak, Adaptations) and is well demonstrated in the case of Sadik i Gazoz (see information in songs nos. 2,14, 11).

This album contains various song types from the four main Jewish centers in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman era. All of them maintained prosperous Sephardic community life that enabled rich cultural and musical means of expressions. In Thessalonika we have a vast documentation from numerous Jewish newspapers and other sources about the distribution of Sephardic music in cafés, Theaters, LP recordings and the press. Izmir is known for its rich female oral tradition well demonstrated by the list of archival-recorded sources for the songs in this album. The unique geographical and demographic situation of this city, multicultural in all aspects including musical is reflected in the many Ladino songs of Turkish and Greek origin. Istanbul had developed a rich and broad Sephardic religious repertoire based on Ottoman instrumental and vocal music. This tradition is still alive now and one of the strong evidences is the existence of the old tradition of the maftirim. Jerusalem also has it own unique style of Sephardic music because of the cultural influence of Ottoman music and the local influence of Arabic music. In addition, the music in Jerusalem reflects its main cultural origins of Sephardic population from the Balkans (especially Bulgaria and Yugoslavia).

The song repertoire in this album reflects the binary situation between the traditional indoor life and the outdoor life of the Ottoman Sephardic minority at the turn of the former century. Songs like Mi Chika Flor; Ven Chika Nazlia; Kante Katife and Mansevo Dobro show a strong bond to modern Turkish and Greek cultures of the 20’s and 30’s and are evidence of how open and liberal the Sephardic communities were in accepting new styles and musical fashions. On the other hand, songs like Landarico; Ir me kero Madre a Yerushalayim; Triste esta el Rey David; Nani Nani; D’en Dia en Dia show the internal Jewish world which kept alive the old romansas from Spain, maintaining a special repertoire for weddings and for funerals and lived with a strong sense of tradition and connection to the community’s medieval Spanish roots. Songs like Al Dio Alto; Adon Haselihot show the makam influence of Ottoman music upon religious life in synagogues and in Jewish religious rituals.


Thanks

There are a few people you know will change your life the minute you meet them. I was lucky to meet three: Yehoram Gaon who connected me, sight unsecn, through his songs to the Ladino world and to Jerusalem; Habib Hassan Touma, my dear special hoca who strongly believed I should choose music as my way of life and who I know is watching me from heaven; and Yurdal Tokcan, who spent days and nights taking care of everything in this album with a profound sense of personal generosity. I thank all the people who helped to translate texts and lyrics and gave their lime and knowledge: Habib Gerez, Eli Perahya, Nivi Gomel, Rivka Havassy, Engül Atamert, Yusuf Altintas, and Prof. David Bunis; all the informants, for teaching me the beautiful melodies, and especially Berta Aguado; Cihat Askin who turned this project from a vague dream into a reality by helping me start my musical life in Istanbul and by introducing me to Kalan: Robert Schild, who has continued to assist me from the time of my arrival in Istanbul; Judith Frangos and Robert Reigle tor working hand in hand with me on all the texts; and all the people who helped in various ways throughout the process of the project: Verda Habib, Ruth Frid, Stelyo Berber, Tuna Pase, David Klein, Pieter Snapper, Naim Güleryüz, The Museum of the Turkish Jews, The Jewish Museum of Thessalonica, and Salom Archivesi. And finally, my beloved husband Amit Pal, tor the ultimate support he give