Intangible Cultural Heritage of Israel Center

Sephardic Jews have a repertoire from the Mediterranean basin region. In the secular tradition, material is usually sung in dialects of Judeo-Spanish of the Sephardic diaspora. Tambourines and other percussion instruments are sometimes used, especially in wedding songs. Oud and qanún are also used in some instrumentations of Sephardic music, and more modern performers incorporate countless other imported instruments.

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Sephardic music has its roots in the musical traditions of the Jewish communities in medieval Spain and medieval Portugal. Since then, it has picked up influences from Morocco, Argentina, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, and other places that Spanish and Portuguese Jews settled after their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1496.

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Lyrics were preserved by communities formed by the Jews expelled from the Iberian Peninsula. These Sephardic communities share many of the same lyrics and poems.

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The song traditions were studied and transcribed in the early twentieth century by a number of ethnomusicologists and scholars of medieval Hispanic literature. From around 1957 until quite recently, Samuel Armistead (UC Davis), with colleagues Joseph Silverman and Israel Katz, collected Judeo-Spanish songs from informants in North America, Turkey, the Balkans, Greece, North Africa, and Israel. The digitized recordings, with transcriptions and information about song type, are available on the website Folk Literature of the Sephardic Jews, now permanently hosted by the University of Illinois Library.

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The early 20th century saw some popular commercial recordings of Sephardic music come out of Greece and Turkey, followed by recordings from Jerusalem and other parts of the Eastern Tradition. The first performers were mostly men, including the "Turks" Jack Mayesh, Haim Efendi, and Yitzhak Algazi. Later, a new generation of singers arose, many of whom were not themselves Sephardic. Gloria Levy, Pasharos Sefardíes, Flory Jagoda, the Parvarim, and Janet & Jak Esim Ensemble are popular Eastern Tradition performers of this period. 

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Gerard Edery, Savina Yannatou, Stefani Valadez, Françoise Atlan, Marlene Samoun, Yasmin Levy and Mara Aranda are among the new generation of singers bringing a new interpretation to the Ladino/Judeo-Spanish heritage and, in the case of Yasmin Levy and Gerard Edery, mixing it with Andalusian Flamenco.

 

Opera singer and actor David Serero sings Ladino and Sephardic songs, which he often includes in theater classics such as The Merchant of Venice and Othello.

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The Jewish Community of Thessaloniki Choir was founded in 1995 by members of the community. The choir was founded in the hope that the musical tradition that their ancestors took with them when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula 500 years ago would be preserved and revived. The research of its conductor, Kostis Papazoglou, on Sephardic music from the medieval tradition (songs like "Tres Ermanikas") and later, as the music evolved, resulted in a CD, produced by Minos EMI, with the participation of the Codex Ensemble, under the title " En la mar ay una torre." Today, this choir has 25 - 30 members of different ages. Its conductor, Kostis Papazoglou, is an experienced and distinguished music teacher, soloist, and orchestra conductor, who has given concerts all over Greece as well as in Israel (Tel Aviv), Skopje, Vienna, Salzburg, Bulgaria (Sofia), Russia (St. Petersburg), Egypt (Cairo at the inauguration of the rebuilt Ben Ezra Synagogue), Turkey (Istanbul in the Ashkenaz Synagogue on the occasion of Jewish Culture Week), and Hungary (in the Great Budapest Synagogue).