tf10music -> RE: The moment when a flamenco guitar player (Mar. 25 2021 19:55:16)
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This was thought to have happened in order to let these people “hide out” in a country that was being forced (violently) to assimilate a religious belief that was not originally their own. Leave or die or stay and adapt (convert). The only issue I have had with this theory is that Gypsies are decidedly NOT moors, Jews, nor Arabs. There is no reason to believe they mixed and therefore adapted (strongly) these other peoples cultural things. My experience with Gypsies is they tend to be Christians, evangelical or cult style most often. Yeah, this has been my experience as well -- and there was very little overlap between Jews and Gitanos in Spain, so even if some of the sephardic liturgical melodies found their way into flamenco, the influence would be very indirect, by way of the larger amorphous grab-bag of música andalusí. I do think that there is a sensitivity to or sense of solidarity with the fate of the Jews and Muslims in Spain in the Gitano perspective on flamenco (and in the letras, of course). That sensibility has definitely enriched my personal relationships. The idea that Conversos would have been able to mask their liturgical melodies is ridiculous on a number of levels. First of all, the consequences for judaizing in any way were rather steep -- Jewish conversion and cultural assimilation to Christianity was far more complete than it was in the case of the Muslims, due to the smaller and less powerful Jewish population. Nobody was worried about any Jewish rebellions, whereas that was a real concern for the forcibly baptised Morisco population. Second of all, anyone who knows about Jewish religious practice is aware that the words and the texts hold far more cultural importance than the melodies, so the idea that Jews went to such lengths to protect liturgical melodies rather than, say, central cultural rituals like lighting candles on the sabbath (which did persist in certain Converso households) doesn't make a great deal of sense. In general, as a Jew living in Spain, I've found Spaniards in most contexts to be almost impressively ignorant about Judaism, while simultaneously confident that they are rather knowledgeable about the matter -- not shocking behaviour, when you consider that their society has built itself for five centuries on a couple of foundational instances of ethnic cleansing. I don't really hold it against anyone in particular so long as they're not voting Vox, but it's certainly noticeable. I suppose that there is an argument to be made that there was a certain amount of assimilation between Moriscos and Gitanos after the 1609 expulsion, but there's no real evidence for that beyond some blips in the census data during those years. There's some indication that mozarabic jarchas influenced the verse forms of flamenco's letras, but again, that's the kind of thing that probably happened indirectly, since there was all kinds of cross-fertilization between Arabic, Hebrew, Latin and Spanish poetic form in Spain across the middle ages.
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