"An Edition and Study of the Secular Ballads in the Sephardic Ballad Notebook of Halia Isaac Cohen," by Hilary Pomeroy

An Edition and Study of the Secular Ballads in the Sephardic Ballad Notebook of Halia Isaac Cohen by Hilary Pomeroy.  A chance encounter with a retired Moroccan lawyer led Hilary Pomeroy to a notebook containing a unique collection of Sephardic ballads belonging to the lawyer’s grandmother, Halia Isaac Cohen († Tangier, 1948). Like others of her generation—for it was a popular practice among the Sephardic women of late 19th and early 20th century Morocco to write down a family’s ballad repertoires—Halia Cohen had set out a series of ballads. Some of these collections were made because their scribes were aware that ballad singing was fast dying out in the Sephardic communities of Tetuán, Tangier, Alcazarquivir and Larache. An analysis of the individual ballads suggests that the collection dates from the late nineteenth century and that it may be a copy of an earlier manuscript. In her introduction, Pomeroy sets the ballads in their social and historical context, discusses previous studi