ABSTRACT
While El nacimiento y la vocación de Abraham, a song of the copla genre emanating from the medieval biblical exegesis and the midrash, developed into a major hit of the commercial Judeo-Spanish folksong repertoire of the post-tradition era as a short fragment, other songs belonging to the Judeo-Spanish religious sphere attained a more modest, and yet significant, status. Performances of Bendigamos al altísimo, the last Sephardic sonic ruin of modernity to be examined in this book, have become a staple of modern “hispanidad” among Sephardic communities that bear the name “Spanish-Portuguese.” This terminology memorializes the identity of their founding fathers, the Iberian Jewish conversos who since the mid-sixteenth century returned from Christianity to their ancestral faith or at least attempted such a return.
