Azam Ali - La Serena!

"A woman sits in the window of a tower in the sea and sings melancholically to the sailors going by."
The songs of the Sephardim (Spanish Jews), handed down orally from generation to generation, tell the stories of their lives, their history, and their culture during their settlement in the Iberian Peninsula until their exile in 1492. The Sephardic language is known as Judezmo or Judeo-Spanish, which is the Spanish language of the middle ages.
As a result of the Jewish Diaspora, Sephardic communities were established throughout the Mediterranean, North Africa, Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Palestine, Syria and the Balkan states. Although they managed to preserve their culture by maintaining their Hispanic traditions wherever they lived, their music became greatly influenced by the cultures they inhabited, hence creating the immensely diverse repertoire of Sephardic songs we hear today.
The one thing that intrigues me most is that during the Islamic conquest of Spain, the Muslims and the Jews lived in peaceful co-existence. Their communities were strongly linked until the 14th century when the Catholic re-conquest and the Inquisition brought the peace between them to a bitter end.

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