A Memoir:

In 1953, while in Madrid pursuing research in Spain, I met a group of Sephardic Jews from newly liberated French Morocco, among them the private secretary of El Glauie, the Sultan of Marrakesh. They had come to explore the possibility of resettling in Spain, the country which had expelled their forefathers in 1492. “If you want to find old Spanish songs,” he said to me, “go to Morocco. The Jews there having been singing medieval Spanish ballads for centuries. It’s one way we remember a big part of our history. After all, Jews lived in Spain for a thousand years. My own family recalled their Spanish past in its own way: in 1907 my father returned the keys of the house we had owned in pre-expulsion years to the mayor of Burgos in Northern Spain...”

Intrigued by the information I hurriedly returned home, succeeded in obtaining a grant from the American Philosophical Society, boarded a Dutch ship and sailed for Europe in the spring of 1956. I arrived in Madrid at a crucial historical moment, just in time to witness the official transfer of Northern Morocco, under Spanish control since the 19th century, to its king, Mohammed V. The Spanish contingent - solemn diplomats, well-groomed government officials and Francisco Franco’s black-shirted Falangists marched down the Gran Via, Madrid's central thoroughfare. But the Moroccan entourage evoked another world. The king; in a black 18th century coach of four, preceded by cavalry mounted on sleek white Arabian horses bedecked with gold and red velvet ornaments, was a reminder of Spain's own Moorish past, sensual and luxuriant.

In spite of warnings about possible political unrest I proceeded to the Mediterranean coast, and from there by ship to Tangier, lugging my heavy tape recorder, microphones, and personal luggage. I couldn’t have come at a worst time. Spanish Jews had lived in the main cities, Tetuán and Tangier, since the expulsion in 1492, and now the end was in sight. The establishment of the State of Israel and the unification of Morocco under native rule had given rise to Arab nationalism, and hostility towards Jews. During my three month stay, I heard their anguished cries, fear of violence, and fervent desire for escape. And escape they did. By the end of 1969, thousands had sold property and household goods for a pittance, abandoned shrines and synagogues, fled to Israel, France, and the Americas, and, for the first time in five hundred years, returned to Spain.

When I went back Morocco in 1983, the Jewish community was a shadow of its former self. Only those too old or sick to flee had remained, cared for by a group of businessmen with commercial ties to the Moroccan regime. I visited the old people's home where they lived and heard the stories of abandonment and hopelessness. With music, however, their despondent mood momentarily changed A few ballads sung by a resident, blind Ben, and piano versions of pasodobles, the Spanish dance of their youth, brought back happy memories of the past.

My visit to Tangier coincided with Moroccan Independence Day. The city was at a standstill that day for King Hassan II's yacht, was moored in the harbor. Like his father Mohammad V before him, the king had cordial relations with Jews and invited the businessmen to join him for the celebration. Tetuán in 1983 had changed almost beyond recognition. The Plaza de España where I had spent so many leisure hours in 1956 was deserted. The tea shop in the shadow of the striking, tiled Moroccan tower where people gathered every day to drink sweet mint tea, eat, and talk was gone. Except for the bazaar, it was a ghost town bereft of people and activity.

The Jewish quarter where I had so often roamed was hardly recognizable, the population reduced to a handful. The health clinic and social center, the labyrinth of buildings surrounding the hidden synagogue were there, but a ghostly relic of the past. Gone also were the fine singers I had known, the pride of the community. Alicia Benassayag, the most prolific , had fled to Israel, and the others, Flora Benamor and Ester Cadosh Israel had died. Gone were the scenes of so much gaiety -- the weddings, family gatherings, bar mitzvahs where I had heard the ballads that connected the Jews to their Spanish past.

Of my old acquaintances only one remained, Ester Benchimol, the Spanish teacher of the Alliance Francais school. Established in the 1880s, it was the first school in Morocco to admit women. Although financed by Jews , Muslims sent their children there because of its high academic standards. One day I climbed the stairs to Ester's tiny apartment. Now 80 years old and blind, she enveloped me in her arms in a warm and tender embrace. The table was filled with pastries and sweet breads she and her daughter had made for my visit We talked for hours about the present Jewish dilemma, and then about the curious circumstances of her youth.when she trained as a teacher in a French Convent supervised by a priest with less than education on his mind.. A fine teacher, she was also a goldmine of information about Jewish culture, leading me to the best singers, and steering me through the maze of Sephardic customs and ceremonies.

My mind wanders back to 1956. How fortunate I was to have arrived just before the mass exodus from Morocco when the songs and stories were still meaningful.. Each day I hurried through the narrow alleys of the judería the Jewish quarter, on my daily visits to the singers. The streets were lined with stalls of silver-makers, shoemakers and craftsmen of all kinds. Black-robed men, the Jewish Elders, men and women shoppers, and children in their school uniforms thronged the streets. Arriving at the poor tenement buildings where the singers lived I climbed endless stairways to reach humble and crowded flats.

When they sang, the troublesome present was momentarily forgotten. In my first encounter with Alicia, she exclaimed, "How can you expect me to sing in these terrible times!" But sing she did. In her cramped dining room, she sang holding her feverish and whimpering baby in her arms, clearly heard in my recordings of that session. Singing these ancient songs took on a wrenching poignancy for the life they celebrated was soon to end. Once more the Jews would be uprooted, once more scattered around the world like the wandering Jew of Biblical times, in search of peace and security.

While women sang the ballads and wedding songs at home, men sang another repertory in the synagogue. Often on Fridays nights, I would go to the Tangier temple to hear their gifted cantor, Solomon Siboni, sing ancient Hebrew poems, pivvutim, a two thousand-year tradition of interpolating poems into the Sabbath and Holy Day services. During my stay I recorded more than thirty poems by this fine singer from his repertory of 600 learned from a master cantor (hazzan) in Fez. He sang works by the great medieval Sephardic poets among them Judah HaLevy and Shlomo Aben Gabirol , poems still sung in Sephardic synagogues. Every day Siboni came to my hotel to record his songs, and always added astute comments about the poetry and the music. He followed the texts from small well-worn booklets bought in the book-stalls of Fez years ago, and now out-of-print. The melodies, however, came from several sources. I suspect many were his own improvizations. He would identify them: “This one is a Spanish dance tune, but it sounds different because I sing it at half-tempo”, or, “ This one is a Moroccan melody”, etc. I know he was paid for his services by Abraham Laredo, a rich tea merchant, dedicated scholar and owner of the synagogue. Siboni died many years ago in Guatemala.

Most of my time was spent with the women. The Tetuán Jews, of Orthodox faith, were different from the liberal, Ashkenazy reform Judaism from which I came. At first, I was regarded with suspicion. My first hurdle was to prove that I was really a Jew; Americans with their liberal ideas were considered borderline Jews. Soon after my arrival I tilted swords with a sharp 80 year old patrician Yes, I assured her, my family in America celebrated Yom Kippur, Rosh Hashanah, Purim, and ate matzohs during Pesach. "I believe you," she said, graciously nodding her head, "you must be Jewish because you speak Spanish so well." (I never bothered to tell her that Ashkenazy Jews of Eastern Europe spoke no Spanish, only Yiddish). I don't think she trusted me entirely, but accepted me, imperfect as I was, and took me into her confidence, "I'm so sorry that you come so late in my life. When I was young, I knew the ballads of El Cid but I can't sing them now because my teeth are gone." What a loss, I thought, maybe someone else remembers them. But I never found anyone who knew the ballads about Spain's legendary hero of the Reconquest, and regret to this day that I did not record them just as she did them, half-chanting and half-speaking the texts.

My next hurdle was proving that I was a decent woman. After all, what kind of woman was I to abandon husband and child just to collect songs in a country so far away? In their view, two kinds of women traveled alone -- respectable ladies who visit relatives on occasions like weddings and burials, and ladies of easy virtue. I was once propositioned by a total stranger who offered to set me up in an apartment and pay my expenses in return for an occasional visit Generously, he said he wouldn't mind if I "entertained" myself by working now and then. After all, he said, I hadn't come to Morocco just to work, had I? When I turned him down, and although I passed him on the street many times, he never acknowledged my presence again. Even the administration of my modest pension in Tetuán assumed that I was a loose woman. One day, I opened the door of my room to face a total stranger, sent by the hotel management. I disillusioned the man. After delivering a tongue lashing to the desk clerk, I was never bothered again.

To the women I had to prove that I was a "real” woman. Singing the old ballads was a woman's job, but she also had to be a good cook, keep a clean house, and take care of husband and children. To settle their doubts, I did token jobs. In the late afternoons when household chores were done, Alicia's neighbors would assemble in the sunless, cement-floored patio of their tenement building to make sweetmeats for the holidays. I helped them prepare the tiny eggplants and depetal the jasmine blossoms which they candied with honey and spices - all the while pretending I didn't see their quizzical glances in my direction.

My thoughts turn to the singers who so generously shared their songs with me. Flora Benamor, Easter Cadoch Israel, and Alicia Benassayag, whom I was to meet again, years later in Israel. Flora was a lovely , delicate little woman, as gentle in her singing as in her person. Dreadfully poor, she never accepted any money (a pittance, for sure) from me for the recordings. It was with sadness that I heard about her early death.

The most colorful singer was rotund, dark skinned Ester Cadoch Israel. In her passionate renditions of the ballads, characters and their twisted and convoluted circumstances came to life. She sang them as if the terrible events had happened just the night before, and she had witnessed them with her own eyes. Constantly interrupting her singing, she would comment on the wayward conduct of the ballad characters. The tragic fate of these medieval women became her own personal reality. But, she always assured me, everything would be resolved by the time the ballad ended. Villains would be punished, the innocents vindicated, and the world set on its proper course again.

Ester, part of a large singing family, was a divorced woman who earned a living in the market selling churros, the Spanish version of the American cruller, eaten with hot chocolate at breakfast. When I met her she was living with her family and I passed many lively musical hours with them. The entire family, seated around the dining table, sang ballads, holiday and wedding songs. and joyously clapped out the rhythm. What a strange mixture they were, a motley crew so unlike each other that they seemed to have been born of different sets of parents.

Life for the Jewish women of Tetuán changed drastically. between my first and second visit In 1956, although all the women were literate in Spanish and spoke Arabic, and a few were social workers and teachers, most were homebodies living secluded in the judería, hardly in touch with the outside world.

A generation later, the majority had fled to foreign lands. In 1983, on route to Morocco, I spent several weeks in Spain. To my surprise, I discovered that Spanish Jews had returned in droves, establishing 14 new communities, the first since the expulsion in 1492! I spent several weeks in Malaga, the beautiful Mediterranean city, where Moroccan Jews were enjoying a new sense of freedom. Most of the girls were now serious university students with aspirations for a life combining marriage and career. Like their peers elsewhere in the Western world, they had freedom of movement, could travel, dressed in the latest fashion, went to parties, and danced the latest dances.

Some of the older generation, however, still clung to traditional attitudes towards women. When I told Rabbi Cohen of the Malaga temple that I wanted to speak with the women of the congregation, the shamash, the synagogue caretaker , who had secretly listened to our conservation, said to me, "Why talk to them, they only gossip?” “Precisely”, I said, “that's why”. A meeting was arranged at the synagogue social center. As we consumed tea and cake, the conversation finally became animated as they recalled stories about their lives in a Muslim country. "My family was very friendly with the king," said one of them, "and often had dinner with him in his palace. Since we ate only kosher, it was understood that we would not eat his food. My mother would bring her own dishes and tableware, and our cook would prepare dinner in his kitchen. And then we would eat together. We had no trouble with that arrangement." Perhaps, they looked back on the Moroccan past with nostalgia but I sensed they appreciated living in modern Spain where their children and, women in particular, were offered opportunities denied them in Morocco.

The struggle between tradition and change is as old as the human race. Progress follows, at best, a zig-zag course, sometimes two steps forward and one step backward. Nowhere was this more observable than in Israel. When I was told that Alicia Benassayag, whom I mentioned earlier, was living in Israel I was determined to see her again. We left Tangier for Madrid, and a few days later flew to Tel Aviv. It was easy to locate Alicia, her reputation as a singer had followed her. Although she never performed in public, she was well known for the many songs she recorded for the Fonoteca of the Hebrew University under the direction of Susana Weich Shanah.

Susana led us to Alicia’s little apartment in the Biblical city of Ashkelon where we were greeted by Alicia and her daughter, the same little baby who had whimpered as her mother sang the old ballads in Tetuán, now grown up. It was an unforgettable meeting. Her voice trembling with emotion, Alicia described the dangerous journey to Israel, bribing government agents and police, embarking on hazardous journeys by sea and land, and Herculean efforts to unite her far flung family in their escape from Morocco.

The most memorable part of the visit was an unexpected tilting of swords between Alicia and her daughter, a heated exchange about women’s rights: her daughter, who had grown up in the liberal atmosphere of modern Israel on one side, and her old-fashioned mother on the other. First, Alicia stated that men were superior to women, had better judgment, and should be obeyed and respected. When she insisted that women should stay home, work only to assist her husband, and that respectable woman did not perform in public, the argument with her daughter became a shouting match. I have not seen Alicia since my last visit, and know little about her.

The Sephardic Jews are scattered all over the world, making new lives for themselves in a modern world. Will the old songs and stories survive the clash of old and new? Only time will tell Meanwhile, live concerts, archival collections, and recordings of their songs keep them alive wherever Spanish Jews live today.

--Henrietta Yurchenco