Jews, Gypsies and cliches"

[Judith Cohen <judithrc...>]

Hi, first, I'll be away for a month starting Friday 10th (till Jan7th) so 
will check in only occasionally. (Tamar and I are lecturing and singing in 
the Canary Islands - on Canadian Musical Traditions, so we'll be talking 
about Inuit throat-singing, for example, in a hopefully non-Arctic climate - 
then we'll be back in the colder mountain area sof Spain and Portugal where 
the fieldwork always seems to end up - with no heating most of the time, so 
none of this "hey, lucky you, winter in Spain"!) Re Josh, Francesca and 
Paul's comments:(and by the way, I'm fine using the term "Gypsies" - are we 
tacitly agreeing to use that instead of "Rom"?)
"the other
is Gerhard Steingress, Sevilla, who has written a landmark book on Cante
Flamenco, specifically about the misconception that Cante Flamenco is a
*Gypsy artform* and was in fact a politically manipulated style from the
beginning which was expanded upon by Gypsies. His ideas are very
applicable to the area of klezmer music."

I have to re-read Steingrass but there are some very odd ideas being widely 
circulated about the musical (and other) relationship between Jews and 
Gypsies in Spain: the general idea seems to be that as they were both there 
for about a century (the Gypsies seem to have arrived in the 14th century 
and the Jews were expelled at the end of the 15th) somehow they 
automatically found each other, Gypsies sheltered fleeing Jews and they all 
learned each other's music, and Gypsy music (the same "politically 
manipulated style" Josh quotes Steingrass as discussing) is really ancient 
Jewish music. There is one song, "La petenera" (probably not a very old 
song) whichmentions a Jewish girl and this is often cited as "proof". 
Similar things are claimed about Portuguese fado. I can't say what did or 
didn't happen between Gypsies and Jews in medieval Spain, and imagine that 
at least some of the story of who knew/helped/didn't help whom has to do 
with socio-economic classes. But the cliche has taken off and developed a 
very sturdy life of its own.The only Gypsies I know in Portugal live next 
door to the Crypto-Jews, and have a reasonably cordial relationship with 
them - inasmuch as they do with anyone not Gypsy (I'm welcome in their 
leader's house mostly because my daughter's a friend of their 
grand-daughters, not because I'm a great ethnographer); they both tend to be 
travelling salespeople going from market to market - but to the best of my 
knowledge they don't share any music or, indeed, any social interaction. The 
leader of the fairly new Gypsy association in Cordoba told me he's very 
interested in the question, and believes they had a lot to do with each 
other in the past - but how much that's influenced by the recent cliches, I 
don't know.
Cheers, Judith

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