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Guillén de Castro's cultivation of the Romancero , long apparent in his masterpiece Las mocedades del Cid , may be found even in an early work, El nacimiento de Montesinos. Muchas veces oí decir and Cata Francia, Montesinos , two ballads about Montesinos, were published repeatedly in various romanceros and circulated in the oral tradition. The widespread diffusion of these romances undoubtedly contributed to Castro's decision to dramatize their narrative core. However, the Nacimiento is not merely the re-creation of the tale of Montesinos; it draws from other Carolingian ballads and a secondary plot is apparently based on yet another romance . The two central traditional texts serve as a vehicle for Castro to incorporate modifications which reflect the contemporary social concern with honor.
Guillén de Castro's cultivation of the Romancero , long apparent in his masterpiece Las mocedades del Cid , may be found even in an early work, El nacimiento de Montesinos. Muchas veces oí decir and Cata Francia, Montesinos , two ballads about Montesinos, were published repeatedly in various romanceros and circulated in the oral tradition. The widespread diffusion of these romances undoubtedly contributed to Castro's decision to dramatize their narrative core. However, the Nacimiento is not merely the re-creation of the tale of Montesinos; it draws from other Carolingian ballads and a secondary plot is apparently based on yet another romance . The two central traditional texts serve as a vehicle for Castro to incorporate modifications which reflect the contemporary social concern with honor.
This article presents synthetically the scholarly contributions of four generations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sephardic intellectuals, pioneers of the field of Sephardic Studies, who were born in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman Balkans and Levant. These individuals participated in a world of Judeo-Spanish letters that stretched from Jerusalem to Vienna, Livorno to Cairo, Adrianople to Ruschuk, and Sofia to Sarajevo, but whose center of gravity lay somewhere between the Ottoman port cities of Salonica, Izmir, and Istanbul, cities with the largest and longest-running Ladino printing presses and the three largest Judeo-Spanish communities of the period. In the mid-nineteenth century, this unorganized collection of scholars began pursuing the study of Sephardic communities as they read the works of the German and East European Haskalah, translated Hebrew as well as western literatures and contributed to the flowering of the Ladino press. As the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire contracted, and as they witnessed a series of wars and disasters—most dramatically the near destruction of various Balkan Jewish communities during the Second World War—they began producing serious scholarship on the history and traditions of their own communities, compelled as much by their commitment to scientific studies as by their sense that the world of Judeo-Spanish culture they knew so intimately was poised to disappear. As the authors reconstruct this history, they argue that modern Sephardic intellectual history existed not in the form of a few isolated or marginalized thinkers, but in dynamic engagement with a wide landscape of Jewish and non-Jewish thought.
THE CORPUS AND ITS AUTHORSHIP DUE TO THE EXTREME SECRECY of the Sabbatians who followed their messiah into apostasy, only five manuscripts containing their sacred poetry are available to scholars today. 1 The corpus of songs contained therein amounts to well over a thousand unique titles, and among them are found five poems of a particular type: romances. Four of them are traditional Judeo-Spanish romances that were sanctified by the Sabbatians: "Meliselda," "Delgadina," "Tarquin and Lucretia," and "Armavan gera los Moros." One single romance, "H . akhamim van ayrando," was created by the Sabbatians themselves. 2 This essay explores the Sabbatian 1. Four of them were acquired by the late president of Israel, Izhak Ben-Zvi, and are presently kept in Jerusalem in the institute that bears his name (BZ 2270, BZ 2271, BZ 2272, BZ 2273. The fifth is at Harvard University (Harvard 80).2. In BZ 2272, these are songs 107, 152, 158, 151, and 116, respectively. Throughout this essay, Judeo-Spanish words appearing in my analysis or in my own transliterations of Judeo-Spanish texts (which were originally written in Hebrew script) are written semi-phonetically, following the norm accepted by the Israeli National Authority for Ladino and Its Culture, the overwhelming majority of Sephardic institutions and individuals, and the majority of the research community. At the same time, when quoting Judeo-Spanish texts transliterated into Latin script by other authors, I adhere to the orthography proposed by the quoted authors. This produces inconsistency, especially in the spelling of the names of the historical and pseudohistorical personalities such as Meliselda, Tarquin, and Lucretia. To avoid confusion, I follow a simple rule for names: in my own text, I use the accepted English names above. In Ladino texts transcribed by me, I follow the present-day Ladino norm (i.e., Melizelda, Tarkino, Lukresia), while in texts transcribed by Attias and other researchers of Sephardic romancero the names are cited according to the preferred Spanish norm (i.e.,
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