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  • The Christian Science Monitor

    The rabbi and the rapper: what they see in old Ladino love songs

    Jan 11, 2018 4 minutes
    Rabbi Simon Benzaquen (l.), who grew up in a rabbinical family in Spanish Morocco, and Alex Hernandez, a Mexican-born rapper and convert to Judaism, in Jerusalem. Together they are the musical duo Los Seranos, and they sing and rap in an old Spanish dialect, Ladino.

    The Orthodox rabbi from Seattle and the rapper from Mexico believe they have stumbled upon a secret.

    Romansas, songs of love and other subjects the Jews from Spain and Portugal carried with them and continued to sing for five centuries after their expulsion from Iberia, are not stories of human romance, but are metaphors for the tragedy of forced exile.

    “A whole people who suffered so much after an expulsion, and you are telling me they don’t want to vent a little bit?” fumes Rabbi Simon Benzaquen. “Where did they do that? They put it in the songs.”

    “If you read these  they read like a fight between man and woman who fight

    A painful historyLadino’s roots

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