Constructing a Spanish Jewish festival: Music and the appropriation of tradition

Over the past decades, a phenomenon of discovering hidden, or Crypto, Jewish communities in Spain and Portugal has developed. While in a few cases, this has resulted in newly functioning Jewish groups, it has also led to the formation of imagined Jewish communities, celebrated by tourist itineraries and festivals, in others. The use of music as an appropriation and an identity marker in two imagined Iberian Jewish communities in Spain, and their festivals, is the main focus of this paper. It touches as well on some general issues: the anthropology of tourism, appropriation, authenticity, representation, and ownership. Underlying these issues is the ongoing question of whether considering representations such as those described here a cultural expression in their own right, is really respectful to the cultural practitioners themselves. In this paper, the use of Jewish and other music in two of these towns, Ribadavia and Hervas, and their festivals, will be examined. First, it seems helpful to take a brief look at recent developments in scholarly approaches to tourism's impact on both traditional arts and perceptions of authenticity and of history. One scholarly trend reflects a growing aversion to any anthropological statement which resembles a value judgment: changes, even outright inventions are not negative, they are transformations, or new cultural expressions. A different approach, much less apparent in anthropology and its related disciplines, deplores anything identifiable as a falsification of known facts, refusing it any new creative status (see, for example, de Hervas 1997). Thus, harnessing and reshaping memory may be seen in neutral, implicitly positive, terms by one group of scholars, and as reprehensible by another.