Basque Lullaby for Jerusalem

It is all over the news today, Naomi Shemer inspired herself on an old Basque lullaby to write her song "Jerusalem of Gold".

This is what Reuters reports:

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - "Jerusalem of Gold," a song that became Israel's anthem to victory in the 1967 Middle East war and claim to all of the holy city as its capital, was lifted from a Basque folk song, the Haaretz daily said Thursday.

It reported that a few days before her death last year, composer Naomi Shemer wrote to a colleague that an Israeli folk singer had once sung the Basque lullaby to her and the melody "must have crept into me unwittingly" while writing the song.

For decades she denied it, but on a letter written to one of her best friends, she explains that she heard the lullaby from a friend and that later, when asked to compose a song for a festival, she just added a few extra notes that gave her authory of her version.

This is the way Haaretz describes it:

"I consider the entire affair a regrettable work accident - so regrettable that it may be the reason for me taking ill," she wrote to Aldema, another Israel Prize laureate who initiated the composition of the song. "You are the only person in the world - besides my family - who should know the truth about 'Jerusalem of Gold,' and here is the truth," Shemer wrote.

Now, at the very end of the note by Haaretz, there is these intriguing words by Shemer:

At the end of her letter to Aldema, she wrote, "My only comfort is that I tell myself that perhaps it is a tune of the Anusim [Spanish or Portuguese Jews who were forced to convert and kept Jewish practices in secret, called by the insulting term Marranos by the Christians] and all I did was restore past glory. Now you, Gil, know the truth, and I permit you to publish it."

This sadly indicates a trend.

a) Once again there is an attempt to divest something Basque of its Basqueness.

b) Shemer had and many other Israelis and Jewish people around the world have a poor knowledge of the history of Euskal Herria.

When the Catholic Kings of Spain ordered all the Jewish and Muslims out of the Iberian Peninsula, many found a haven in very Basque and very Catholic Navarre. There, they enjoyed the same rights as anyone else, until Spain invaded the tiny Basque Kingdom.

During WWII, when Hitler was busy persecuting Jews all over Europe, once again Euskal Herria served both as a haven for those escaping the Gestapo and a launching pad to England, many Jews were rescued thanks to the aid of Basque gudaris, smugglers, priests, fishermen and farmers.

Is it possible that the folk singer that sang the Basque lullaby was a refugee in Euskal Herria and learned it there?

I say yes, very possible.

Or maybe the folk singer was in one ot the refugee camps in England where many Basque girls worked as volunteers after they themselves had been refugees as younger children in the very same camps?

Plausible.

So I say, this is a golden opportunity for the Jewish community around the world to learn a little bit more about the Basques, and their struggle to one day call home their own Promised Land.

Related post:

• It's Ok.
• Blogosphere Reaction to Basque Lullaby.

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