MUSIC IN THE ORAL LITERATURES OF THE SEPHARDIC JEWS AND THE IGBOS OF EASTERN NIGERIA: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Abstract

Music is the universal language of the soul and the music of oral literature flows from the core essence of a people‘s existence. Here it becomes a way of expression intricately tied to their social, cultural, economic and political aspirations and to a great extent becomes the determinant of the peaceful co-existence of the society of people that spawn it. Ordinarily, traits of music in the oral literatures of different people have been instrumental to the establishment of links and bonds between societies of people and affirming relationships between peoples now widely separated in spatial, historical, and cultural terms. All through the ages, scholars of oral literature and anthropology have tried to trace the link between the Jews and the Igbos of Eastern Nigeria. There have been claims of satisfactory empirical evidence to support the fact that these two societies of people have a kinship bond of a sort. Daniel Lis, from the Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Basel, Switzerland, is one of the foremost researchers on Jewish identification among the Igbo. He said in an oral interview that there has been a clear continuity of Jewish identity among the Igbo. "It's not just something that happened yesterday." The Swiss-Israeli anthropologist says that Igbo-Jewish identity can be traced back to the 18th century. Apart from Lis, cross-cultural comparisons have been documented by people ranging from George Thomas Basden, the influential Anglican missionary and ethnographer who proposed that the word "Igbo" evolved as a corruption of the word "Hebrew," to Olaudah Equiano, a freed Igbo slave that lived in the 18th century British society. This paper analyses the musical elements in the folk literatures of the Sephardic Jews and the Igbos with a view to establishing some similarities in their eccentric values.