Troubadourism and Contemporaneity: A Medieval Literary Expression in the Popular Songs of The Sephardic Jews

Abstract

The adjective “sephardic” concerns the jews that came from Spain and Portugal, evicted from their homelands, respectively, in 1492 and 1496. During the time of the persecutions of the Holy Inquisition, the destination of these evicted Jews has varied widely: North of Africa, Italy, Holand, South of France and the Ottoman Empire. As a result, this sephardic Jews community has brought with them a tradition represented by their language, the Judeo-Spanish dialect, with a strong iberian component, initiated sixteen centuries ago, as musical and literary expressions, passed down from generation to generation. In this sense, the present essay aims to identify, in the sephardic folk songs, elements of a literary tradition quite troubadour-like. For this purpose, the subject of this paper analysis consists of songs, consecrated in the voices of singers, among them, Yehoram Gaon, Fortuna and Yasmin Levy. It has been concluded that, due to the isolation of these Jewish communities in comparison to those of the Iberian Peninsula, the Sephardic oral texts maintain a strong medieval literary and philosophical conservatism. Among the consulted bibliographies, Scliar-Cabral (1990), Moisés (1970, 1972) and Saraiva e Lopes (1989) stand out.