Kol Dodi - Sephardic Song

Oud by Oğüzhan Özkılıç, vocals by Kelareh Kabiri and Farya Faraji, arrangement by Farya Faraji. This is another song from the Sephardic musical repertoire, the community of Jews expelled from Iberia at the end of the Reconquista and who settled around the Mediterranean, principally in the Ottoman Empire.

The first challenge in providing an ethnomusicologically informed rendition is of Sephardic songs is determining what context the rendition should exemplify. Indeed, Sephardic music is a repertoire, not a style, which means it's a collection of shared songs, but the playing style is geographically determined: Serbian Sephardic Jews would have Serbian sounding music, those in Rhodes would have music sounding like Rhodes', etc. I decided my rendition would have the typological features of West Anatolian and Aegean music of circa the previous two centuries. Therefore, I used an oud, a saz, qanun, kaval, and percussions of the area. It's important to note that I'm unsure whether the song was actually performed in that region or not, as some songs were historically more localised and very few songs of the Sephardis actually date back to their common Iberian roots pre-dispersion.

Unlike most Sephardi songs, this one is not in the Ladino language, but instead in Hebrew, a language that was long dead, or rather dormant for much of Jewish history, and only survived has a liturgical and prestige language before being fully revived recently. The lyrics come from the Book of Songs.

Hebrew lyrics:
Kol dodi, kol dodi
Kol dodi hineh ze ba
M’kaltez al heharim
M’daleg al hagva’ot

English translation:
My lover's voice, my lover's voice,
My lover comes!
Leaping on the mountains,
Skipping on the valleys.

[faryafaraji]

Oud by Oğüzhan Özkılıç, vocals by Kelareh Kabiri and Farya Faraji, arrangement by Farya Faraji. This is another song from the Sephardic musical repertoire, the community of Jews expelled from Iberia at the end of the Reconquista and who settled around the Mediterranean, principally in the Ottoman Empire.

The first challenge in providing an ethnomusicologically informed rendition is of Sephardic songs is determining what context the rendition should exemplify. Indeed, Sephardic music is a repertoire, not a style, which means it's a collection of shared songs, but the playing style is geographically determined: Serbian Sephardic Jews would have Serbian sounding music, those in Rhodes would have music sounding like Rhodes', etc. I decided my rendition would have the typological features of West Anatolian and Aegean music of circa the previous two centuries. Therefore, I used an oud, a saz, qanun, kaval, and percussions of the area. It's important to note that I'm unsure whether the song was actually performed in that region or not, as some songs were historically more localised and very few songs of the Sephardis actually date back to their common Iberian roots pre-dispersion.

Unlike most Sephardi songs, this one is not in the Ladino language, but instead in Hebrew, a language that was long dead, or rather dormant for much of Jewish history, and only survived has a liturgical and prestige language before being fully revived recently. The lyrics come from the Book of Songs.

Hebrew lyrics:
Kol dodi, kol dodi
Kol dodi hineh ze ba
M’kapetz al heharim
M’daleg al hagva’ot

English translation:
My lover's voice, my lover's voice,
My lover comes!
Leaping on the mountains,
Skipping on the valleys.

[loganglasspell]

I'd live to see him try his hand at some of the Psalms.

[TheOrrican]

Your Hebrew pronunciation is spot on, to the letter. I am deeply impressed

[gregorsamsa]

Note regarding the text: the lyrics come from Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) 2:8. Traditionally attributed to Solomon, the book is a series of love poems. Despite its near total absence of explicitly religious content, both Jews and Christians hold it to be allegorical. We hold it to be an allegory of the love of G-d and the People Israel (though later Jewish mystics would read additional layers of meaning into it, ) and Christians hold it to be an allegory of love between Christ and the Church. Rabbi Akiva, one of the most important rabbis of Mishnaic times, is reported to have said "for all the writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies!" In most communities, the book (which is quite short) is recited in its entirety on the Shabbos that falls during Pesach; ostensibly due to its allegorical content, but also implicitly because Pesach is a springtime holiday, and the book is filled with imagery of verdant, blooming gardens and hillsides. In medieval Spain, the book took on a literary significance as Jewish poets worked from Arabic genres and metres to reinvent Hebrew poetry, writing both liturgical poetry and (arguably for the first time in the language) secular poetry in which quotations or borrowed phrases from Song of Songs were used prominently. For the Jewish mystical tradition, which reached its full flowering in the 1500s mediterranean diaspora, the book, which this tradition sees as the fullest possible expression of the erotic aspects of the divine, took on additional status. It became the custom in many Sephardic/Mizrachi communities to recite it in its entirety on friday afternoon before Shabbos, a custom which spread to those parts of the Ashkenazi world more inclined to pick up Kabbalistic customs from the Sephardim. This particular verse is also recited during a ritual caled Kiddush Levanah, a monthly blessing said on the waxing moon. (Sources: for the reinvention of Hebrew poetry in Muslim Spain, see Scheindlin, "Wine, Women, and Death, " and "The Gazelle, " Cole, "The Dream of the Poem, " and Carmi, "Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse." For the mystical uses of the text, this is a subject of very extensive scholarship, but the one I'm drawing from is Hellner-Eshed's "A River Flows From Eden; the Language of Mystical Experience in the Zohar." For the liturgical uses of Song of Songs, I literally just used my siddur (prayer book, ) which is a Koren Sefard Siddur. Koren is the publisher, and 'Sefard' confusingly does not refer to one of the Sefardic rites, but to the prayer rite of Ashkenazi Jews in the 1700s who decided to alter the Ashkenazi rite to be more in line with Sephardi customs, especially customs of mystical origin. The most common though by no means the only rite used by Sephardic and Mizrachi communities is called 'Edot Hamizrach., ' testimony of the east. If you want to confirm the origin of this verse, just look up Song of Songs 2:8. Sefaria is a good website for this.)

[baklavalover]

Thank you for your beautiful work!!! Every time you cover a Sephardic song my heart grows two sizes, it's not often I get to see my culture represented or even really recognised. Love from Istanbul <3

[NoTimeforTeatime]

thank you for doing jewish music, especially right now. it is profoundly lonely as a jewish musician right now and seeing our music sung/celebrated means an enormous amount. your hebrew pronunciation is wonderful and sparks so much joy. thank you for being a friend to the jewish people.

[HistorywithCy]

Beautiful song and just what I needed to soothe my spirit after a long day. Thanks for also providing the translation, historical context and the mix of instruments you used...truly fascinating stuff and really appreciate you sharing it all with us!

[SirBolsón]

Farya Faraji: *makes this masterpiece
His cat: 😸

[ellaartenstein]

Thank you so much for covering Jewish songs too, I’m Jewish and it means the world to me

[palamaro]

Wonderful song. One recommendation related to this. There is a famous song from Bosnia called "Kad ja pođoh na Bembašu", which is actually a Sephardic melody sung in the synagogues by the local Jewry. In their Ladino tongue the folk song derived from this is called "Mi kerido mi amado". It would be really cool to hear your rendition of these two songs, perhaps in both Serbian and Ladino, similar to what you did with Katibim and Apo xeno topo.

[HangrySaturn]

Farya is producing folk music on a mass level. Mad respect.

[iceblueeyes]

Beautiful song, thank you for preserving it!

I wanted to make a comment on your description, specifically the claim that Hebrew was "long dead" or "dormant", because there are some folks who use this talking point without additional context as a way to further their political position:

“Language death” is a term in linguistics that describes when a language loses its last native speaker. “Language extinction” is when a language is no longer spoken by anyone, including second language speakers. You're correct that in the past, Hebrew experienced language death, though thankfully it never became extinct, as it remained the liturgical language of the Jewish People for the next 2000 years.

Throughout history, Jews have practiced resistance to this "language death" in a multitude of ways.

This preservation happened in three forms:

(1) the continued use of Hebrew as liturgical language (i.e. for prayer) which you mention, and some people are aware of, but they usually stop there.

(2) the incorporation of Hebrew in diasporic Jewish languages. For example, virtually all Jewish diasporic languages, from Yiddish to Ladino to Judeo-Arabic, use Hebrew words and the Hebrew alphabet and have throughout their diasporic history.

(3) Jews from different parts of the diaspora continued to use Hebrew as the lingua franca when they interacted with each other, as that was the language that they had in common. For example, an Ashkenazi merchant arriving in North Africa would speak Hebrew to the local Sephardic Jews. Most people don't know this part.

The revival of Hebrew as an everyday language took place over the 19th and 20th centuries, as Jewish refugees arrived to Ottoman Syria-Palestina from the Pale of Settlement, elsewhere in Southwest Asia, North Africa, and Central Asia. By the time the British took control of the Levant and named it the British Mandate of Palestine in 1920, Hebrew became one of the two official languages.

The Israeli government has obviously perpetrated a lot of harms on its neighbors, and it is fair for people to criticize that, but when the claim that "hebrew was a dead language" is taken out of context by folks who have less experience than you do in historical accuracy and authenticity, it can lead to real (even if unintended) harm, which helps create peace for no one.

That said, the only language in the world to be successfully revived as an everyday tongue is the Hebrew language. Other revitalization efforts, such as those for Hawaiian, Welsh, Irish, Cherokee, and Navajo, have enjoyed smaller but still monumental degrees of success.

Some argue that “the revival of a clinically dead language is unlikely without cross-fertilization from the revivalists' mother tongue(s).” In that vein, modern Hebrew does borrow from diasporic Jewish languages, as well as other similar languages, such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Akkadian.

Numerous Indigenous Peoples across the globe, such as the Sámi People in the Nordic countries and the Barngarla People in Australia, currently study the revival of Hebrew in their attempt to revitalize their own ancestral languages.

It's an admirable thing to do, and I'm glad you're contributing to Jewish cultural preservation by producing authentic renditions of sephardic songs. More please and thank you!

[xiorrrayu]

pronunciation 10/10 i can understand him perfectly as a jew who speaks hebrew

[Jeremiah-hu]

Yes! One of my favorite Sephardi songs ❤
you should do a cover of dror Y’kira. it’s originally a Sephardic poem, but it’s often sung by the Yemenite Jews in their dialiect which is an older form of Hebrew, resembling how it may have been spoken during the second temple
Period. It maintains a lot of the original Semitic sounds that are absent from modern Hebrew.

[iberius]

Interesting choice to have settled for Modern Israeli pronunciation. That's the one I myself am using for both Modern and Biblical Hebrew, with occasional forays into Yemenite. Beautiful rendition by your mother and yourself! Great instrumentation by all involved. I think I like this version more than the previous one.

[arrievanbruggen]

That moment, when as a Hebrew speaker, I learn that the word "dod" has another meaning other than "uncle"- it also means "lover" (no -this has nothing to do with Alabama).

[logoncal]

As a brazilian, a fellow iberian descent, it dissapoints me that people only remembers the Ashkenazi Jews from germanic regions and if they remember, the Mizrahim native jews while forgetting that Sephardim Jews had also its heritage and cultural legacy.
As always, i admire your work, Farya. Spot on

[TheZerech]

Love the Sephardi music! Please keep up the amazing work, really shows how Jewish culture is a great deal more than bagels.

[dushmanmardom]

Thank you so much for this rendition!
I've known this melody ever since I was a kid, from Catholic Church. Some years ago I've heard somewhere the version by Qyian Krets (now I know that!), and thus learned it was a Jewish song - but that is all I knew. I tried to find it for years, but had no idea what to search for - and now another piece of my memory has fallen into it's place ❤

[eladbenyehuda]

Excellent! I love it. One thing in regard for the translation you gave: the last word (hagva'ot) means 'the hills', not 'the valleys'. So 'Leaping on the mountains, Skipping on the hills'.