When Sephardic music scholar Hadass Pal-Yarden moved from Israel to Turkey six years ago, she broke a long-standing local Jewish tradition: She hung her mezuzah on the outside of her door.
“The custom here is to put it inside the house so people would not see you are a Jewish family,” says Pal-Yarden by phone from her Istanbul home. “But I hardly feel any anti-Semitism here, and the long history of tolerance that started in Ottoman times still exists. It’s in the veins of the people.”
Her love for the music of Turkey’s indigenous Jewish community will be on display when Pal-Yarden and her band, Yahudice, make their California concert debut at the Jewish Music Festival on Sunday, March 19, in a show titled “From Istanbul to Jerusalem.”
Pal-Yarden is both scholar and performer, singing with passion the music she studies. At the same time she wraps up her Ph.D. in musicology, she’s also made several recordings and goes on tour when time (and her doctoral dissertation adviser) permits.
For the Jewish Music Festival, Pal-Yarden will bring along some of Turkey’s top musicians, including master oud player Yurdal Tokcan. The songs they play are traditional Sephardic tunes, sung in Ladino and painstakingly arranged to sound as they might have in the days of the Ottoman Empire.
“I try to recreate the same feeling of how it was in the coffee houses where this music was first played,” she says. “Maybe through me, people who want to know better what is Judeo-Spanish music can have a window onto this culture.”
It’s a good thing someone is doing it because, according to Pal-Yarden, young Turkish Jews are not so clued in to this remnant of their cultural past.
“The older generation probably knows it from their parents,” she adds. “The torch was given to the older generation, but I’m not so sure youngsters have access to this repertoire.”
Pal-Yarden’s obsession with the music of Sephardic Jewry began in her childhood in Israel.
“I’ve loved it since I was 12,” she says. “There was a radio program every Friday I was addicted to. When all my friends listened to pop music, I was listening to this not-cool radio program. And I started to collect records.”
Of Turkish and Syrian extraction, Pal-Yarden may have inherited a feel for the music, which she says evolved out of “Turkish classical and pop music and Mediterranean music generally. There’s a constant connection between the cultures, and this is what’s so beautiful about it.”
She went on to study music and culture at the university level, even learning Ladino, the language of Sephardic Jews that evolved out of ancient Spanish and Hebrew. These days, she has ample opportunity to practice the language as she travels about Turkey, meeting with members of the 20,000-strong Jewish community there.
In fact, the language of Turkish Jews became the source of her band’s name, Yahudice, which literally means in Turkish “language of the Jews.”
“In every diaspora,” she says, “that’s the way local people call the language of the Jews. For example, ‘Yiddish’ means ‘language of the Jews’ in German. The Turks used to call the Jewish language ‘Yahudice,’ but they changed it to ‘the language of a person who observes the religion of Moses.’ I wanted to bring back the old word because I don’t want to hide.”
Given that Turkish tradition of tolerance, she hasn’t had to. Pal-Yarden shares space in her apartment building with another Jewish family, a devout Muslim family and one that is Italian Catholic.
Her own family is growing as well. Pal-Yarden gave birth to a daughter nine months ago, and one thing is certain: Her baby will grow up with the sound of music ringing in her ears.
After the Jewish Music Festival, Pal-Yarden returns to Istanbul. But as close as she has grown to the country, its people and culture, she remains an Israeli through and through.
“I miss Israel,” she says. “I miss reading the newspapers, I miss the sun, I miss feeling at home. I do believe I will go back someday.”
But before that, she has to make sure she discovers and catalogs every last ancient song of the Turkish Jews. Says Pal-Yarden, “I need to complete this mission.”
Hadass Pal-Yarden with the Yahudice ensemble perform at the Jewish Music Festival 7:30 p.m. Sunday, March 19 on the Thrust Stage/Berkeley Repertory Theatre, 2025 Addison St., Berkeley. Tickets: $26. Information: (415) 276-1511.