Vanessa Paloma, The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute
In this paper I propose to discuss the phenomenon of Judeo-Spanish in Morocco and it's eventual disappearance from most Jewish enclaves. In the Northern communities it remained an important cultural and liguistic link to the Sephardic past, absorbing words and cultural idioms from Arabic. However, in many cities such as Fez and Essaouira, the language the exiles from Spain carried with them with their migration was subsumed and eventually forgotten. There were isolated traces as late as the 1950s in synagogues in Fez of songs sung during the liturgy in Hebrew, Arabic and Spanish. I am interested in exploring the reasons behind these different responses to migration and integration into Moroccan language, music and culture.