Ladino Romances

A romance is a song that travels with luggage. The words may remember a castle in medieval Castile, a king's faithless wife, a knight riding out at dawn; the woman singing them may be standing over a pot in Salonika, or Istanbul, or Izmir, or Tangier, or Jerusalem, four and a half centuries and two thousand miles from the country the song still thinks it lives in. The tune has crossed an empire's worth of borders. It still knows its old rooms.

That is the quiet astonishment of the Ladino ballad. When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the exiles took what exiles take: the keys, the prayer books, the recipes, and the songs. They settled across the Ottoman world, which received them with a shrewd appreciation of what skilled and literate newcomers are worth, and there, in Judeo-Spanish, they went on singing the ballads of the country that had thrown them out. Spain kept the land. The Jews kept the song. It is not obvious, looking back, who came away with the more durable possession.

The ballad that would not stay in Spain

The romance is an old Iberian form: a narrative ballad, usually in eight-syllable lines with a single running assonance, telling a story of love, war, betrayal or the supernatural in a few vivid, headlong verses. Christian Spain sang romances too, and many of the Sephardi ones share their bones with versions found across the Spanish-speaking world. What the Jewish singers did was keep theirs alive long after the metropolitan tradition had moved on, preserving in the Ottoman east medieval material that scholars later found had faded or vanished in Spain itself.

Over the centuries the songs picked up the accents of their new homes. A romance sung in Salonika might absorb a Greek or Turkish turn of melody; one sung in Morocco kept a different colour again. The language drifted too: Judeo-Spanish held onto fifteenth-century Castilian words that modern Spanish had abandoned, and braided in Hebrew, Turkish, Greek and Arabic as the centuries required. The result was not a fossil but a living tongue carrying a frozen core, like a creature preserved in amber that has, somehow, gone on breathing.

From the kitchen to the concert hall

For most of their history these songs needed no audience beyond the family. Then, in the twentieth century, two things happened at once. The communities that had carried the tradition were scattered and shattered, by emigration, by modernity, and above all by the destruction of Sephardi centres such as Salonika in the Holocaust, which silenced one of the great homes of Ladino song almost overnight. And just as the daily language began to fade, collectors and then performers rushed to save what could be saved.

So the romance moved from the kitchen to the concert hall. Recordings and ensembles brought Ladino song to listeners who had never heard a word of Judeo-Spanish, and a new generation of singers, among them Yasmin Levy, took the inherited melodies and set them blazing on a modern stage. There is loss in this, and no point pretending otherwise: a song meant for a grandmother at a cradle is a different thing under stage lights. But there is also defiance. A language a few demographers had written off keeps being sung, in public, on purpose, by people who refuse to let it go quiet. The exiles of 1492 would, one suspects, have understood the impulse exactly.