Today, in Cordoba, we went to one of the few synagogues left in the region, if my understanding was correct. The song she is singing is Turkish in origin, but because of the common ancestry, that is, Sephardic Jew, the Spanish can still be heard in the song. Its really very neat, the way a culture can transcend so many very different countries.
The Rabbi told us the history of the Sephardi Jews, whom originated in the Iberian peninsula, which includes both Spain and Portugal, and after, sung us several traditional song like the one above. One of the things that surprised me most was what he said about the hams you see everywhere hanging from the ceiling in almost all of the restaurants we've been to so far. The reason for the hanging hams is thanks to the Christians forcing out all the Jews, Arabs, and Muslims out of Spain, and in order to prove that they were Christian, they started to hang pork legs by there window to show that they ate it, since that would prove they were practicing Catholicism because for Jews and Muslims, it is against their religion to eat pork, and now the tradition has stuck. I had been wondering about that, and now that I know, I feel it's less creepy than I did before, which is a good thing because I couldn't stand sitting by the horrible things when I'd go out to eat.
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