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Art and spirituality: questions about religious iconography

Keywords: Alterity, Authorship, Bakhtin, Dialogism, Jewish, Knowledge Transmission, Music, Palimpsestic, Sacred, Secular.

The aim of the present work is to analyze the reuse of secular traditional melodies from the Sephardic culture with sacred texts adapted for liturgical service, hypothesizing that this procedure works well for knowledge transmission and perpetuating traditions. Disregarding any insinuation or intention of profanity in making this interchange of melody/text, profane/sacred, a convention enshrined by a custom consecrated since the Middle Ages, the main scope of this paper, both among Christians and Jews, I resort to the analogy with the technique of palimpsest – reutilization of parchment whose primitive text has been scraped or washed off to give way to another – to understand the migration of meanings between the profane/sacred genres covering en passant the concept of authorship, alterity and dialogism of the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin.