The Benmayor Collection of Eastern Sephardic Ballads & Other Lore

The Benmayor Collection of Eastern Sephardic Ballads and Other Lore is a collection of over 140 audio recordings gathered by Dr. Rina Benmayor in Seattle and Los Angeles during the 1970s. Dr. Benmayor writes:

“For 42 years, my cassettes of Sephardic elders singing medieval Spanish ballads, or romances, sat in a shoebox. They traveled with me from Seattle and Los Angeles to Berkeley to New York and back to California. Now, thanks to the Sephardic Studies Digital Library and Museum, the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies, and the University of Washington Library and Archives, the voices that were encased for so long will once again be heard. I am immensely excited and gratified that at long last, these ballads can return to the communities from whence they came and be disseminated across the globe.

In 1972 and 1973, I traveled to the Sephardic communities of Los Angeles and Seattle to collect these precious Spanish ballads (romansas), preserved in family oral traditions for over 500 years. My visits became occasions for family memory, as these lovely and generous elders sang the songs they learned in childhood from their parents and grandparents in Turkey or Greece. 

This field collection became the basis for my doctoral dissertation, and was eventually published in Spain. Romances judeo-españoles de Oriente: Nueva recolección (Eastern Judeo Spanish Ballads: A New Collection) made available the poetry and musical transcriptions of the almost 150 ballad texts I was able to collect. Yet, the book was written in Spanish and while largely known to Romancero scholars, it did not circulate among Sephardic communities. With their digitization and online dissemination, these romansas can finally be heard in their original oral/aural form.

Sephardic romances/romansas have a long and rich trajectory from the villages and cities of medieval Spain into exile in the Ottoman Empire. There they flourished thanks to a system that granted cultural, social, and educational autonomy to ethnic communities. In the final leg of their journey –to America–, they became virtually extinct. The cultural and community practices that kept these ballads alive for centuries are now a thing of the past, making collections like this one a last vestige of the Sephardic ballad oral tradition.”

—Visit the Benmayor Collection of Sephardic Ballads, part of the digital Sephardic Studies Collection—

About Romansas

The romansas in the Benmayor Collection retain the medieval romance form: a dramatic story sung in eight-syllable verse with ‘assonant’ (vowel) rhyme. The themes include historical events, tales of kings and queens, reunited lovers or unrequited love, murders, absences and returns, trickery, and social taboos.

Each of these ballads can be traced back to medieval origins, but the Sephardim gave their versions special twists, making them relevant to their lives in exile. For example, the murder of the Duque de Gandía, brother of the infamous Caesar Borgia, is remembered in faithful historical detail, but more as a lament at the loss of a son. In some versions of Tarquino y Lucrecia, a classical tale of Roman origins, the adulterous queen prefers to die by the sword than to sleep with a Christian!

In The Idolater of María, the Christian captain of a storm-tossed ship drowns because he invokes the Virgin Mary, while the Jewish crew prays to el Dio Alto, and is saved! The collection also includes uniquely Sephardic creations like El Paso del Mar Rojo (Crossing the Red Sea), which recounts the story of the Exodus.

Listen to recordings of these and other highlights from the collection below, accompanied by commentary from Dr. Rina Benmayor.

The Benmayor Collection of Sephardic Ballads and Other Lore

Over 140 recordings of Sephardic Jews who were born and raised in the former Ottoman Empire and who immigrated to the United States at the beginning of the 20th century, collected by Professor Rina Benmayor beginning in 1972.

– Ballads of Classical Antiquity »

Ballads that derive from cassical Roman and Greek hisotry and legends.

– Biblical Ballads »

Ballads that tell a story from the Bible, using the romance form.

– Carolingian Ballads »

Ballads that derive from French medieval epic poems and legends of the rein of Charlemagne.

– Coplas »

Traditional Spanish four-verse poems.

– Folkcures & Traditions »

Traditional rituals for trauma and warding off the evil eye.

– Folktales »

Consejikas de Johá, or humorous trickster tales derived from the Turkish Nasreddin Hodja, who in Ladino became known as Johá.

– Historical Ballads »

Ballads that narrate historical events of national significance, including epics of the Reconquest and border conflicts between Christians and Moors.

– Lyric Songs »

Popular love songs that express human emotions but are not ballads in structure or form, and do not narrate a story.

Novelesque Ballads

Ballads that narrate fictional stories about love, murder, incest and other misfortunes, often with women in leading roles. Also includes fantastical stories of animals and humans.

1. Adulteress »
2. Faithful Love »
3. Female Killers »
4. Husband’s Return »
5. Incest »
6. Prisoners and Captives »
7. Rape and Abduction »
8. Seduced Women »
9. Seductive Women »
10. Unfortunate Wife »
11. Unhappy Love »
12. Various Subjects »

– Religious Songs »

Songs with religious themes that are not in ballad form.

Fuente: This article originally appeared on jewishstudies.washington.edu, the website of the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Reprinted here with permission.