The Judeo-Spanish folk literature of the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia, and with it their uncommonly rich balladry, has remained largely unknown to Western scholars. Since their move to Sarajevo in the sixteenth century, Serob-Croatian has displaced their original Spanish, and the entire culture is rapidly approaching extinction. This book preserved for posterity three fundamentally important groups of these rare ballads: Kalmi Baruch's Spanski romanse; ballads collected from the readers of the Sarajevo newspaper Jevrejski Glas; and five previously unedited eighteenth-century Bosnian ballads from a manuscript in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Notes, abstracts in English, reproductions of the music itself, and other scholarly aids serve to make this colorful and strangely modern literature fully accessible to Hispanists, folklorists, and all students of comparative literature and Judaic culture.

The Judeo-Spanish folk literature of the Sephardic Jews of Bosnia, and with it their uncommonly rich balladry, has remained largely unknown to Western scholars. Since their move to Sarajevo in the sixteenth century, Serob-Croatian has displaced their original Spanish, and the entire culture is rapidly approaching extinction. This book preserved for posterity three fundamentally important groups of these rare ballads: Kalmi Baruch's Spanski romanse; ballads collected from the readers of the Sarajevo newspaper Jevrejski Glas; and five previously unedited eighteenth-century Bosnian ballads from a manuscript in the Jewish National and University Library in Jerusalem. Notes, abstracts in English, reproductions of the music itself, and other scholarly aids serve to make this colorful and strangely modern literature fully accessible to Hispanists, folklorists, and all students of comparative literature and Judaic culture.

In New York City during the winter of 1922 and the spring of 1923, Mair Jose Benardete recorded the texts of the thirty-nine traditional ballads published in this volume. His collection, the beginning of Judeo-Spanish ballad research in America, was assembled when the oral tradition was still rich and vigorous among immigrants to New York from the Sephardic settlements of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Among the ballads are a number of rare text types, some never again recorded in the Sephardic communities of the United States, In addition, many of the texts provide new insights into the origins of the thematic traditions they represent. Samuel G. Armistead and Joseph H. Silverman have edited the ballads collected by Benardete, offering an English abstract and exhaustive bibliography for each ballad. In addition to placing each ballad within the context of its Sephardic variants, the bibliographies refer to the most important collections in the modern Castilian, Portuguese, Catalan, and Hispano-American traditions, to earlier (fifteenth- to seventeenth-century) evidence, and to any known analogs in other European traditions. The volume also includes a general bibliography, a thematic classification of the ballads, several indexes, and a glossary of exotic lexical elements. In an introduction, professors Armistead and Silverman present a documented survey of Judeo-Spanish ballad scholarship with particular attention to fieldwork in teh United States and elsewhere. Benardete himself attributed the decline of ballad singing among the Sephardim to a growing preference for phonographic recordings over traditional family singers. The need for further field-work increases as "Sephardic folkspeech and folklore retreat before the irresistible onslaught of the English language and modern American mass-media culture" (from the Introduction). This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1981.

This multicultural reference work on Jewish folklore, legends, customs, and other elements of folklife is the first of its kind.

This Handbook of Jewish Languages is an introduction to the many languages used by Jews throughout history, including Yiddish, Judezmo (Ladino) , and Jewish varieties of Amharic, Arabic, Aramaic, Berber, English, French, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Iranian, Italian, Latin American Spanish, Malayalam, Occitan (Provençal), Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Syriac, Turkic (Karaim and Krymchak), Turkish, and more. Chapters include historical and linguistic descriptions of each language, an overview of primary and secondary literature, and comprehensive bibliographies to aid further research. Many chapters also contain sample texts and images. This book is an unparalleled resource for anyone interested in Jewish languages, and will also be very useful for historical linguists, dialectologists, and scholars and students of minority or endangered languages. This paperback edition has been updated to include dozens of additional bibliographic references.