Painted about flamenco’s Jewish roots. More details in description ☁️

Flamenco is usually described as Romani + Moorish, but it also carries a deep Sephardic Jewish thread. Before 1492, Jewish communities across Andalusia sang in Middle Eastern modes, using melisma, wails, and trembling ornamentation. These same techniques appear in cante jondo, which is the oldest and most emotional flamenco style.

Sephardic synagogue music used the Phrygian and Hijaz modes AKA the same scales that give flamenco its “crying” sound. Medieval piyyutim (Jewish devotional poems) share vocal shapes with early Andalusian songs. Musicologists have noted striking similarities between flamenco cante and Sephardic baqashot, kinot (lamentations), and dirges.

After the 1492 expulsion, many of our tribe became conversos or “crypto-Jews,” living outwardly as Catholics while secretly preserving fragments of Jewish ritual. They wore crosses in public, attended Mass, yet whispered Hebrew blessings in their homes. Their songs of exile, longing, and hidden identity blended with Romani and Morisco traditions in the neighborhoods where marginalized communities lived side by side.

Even certain coplas (short poetic verses) in early Andalusian music echo Sephardic folk structure (symbolic fruits, riddles, metaphors of forbidden love, and coded religious longing). And fun fact: one of my favorite poets, Lorca, described cante jondo as carrying echoes of “ancient Semitic laments.”

This painting aims to honor this hidden thread: the cross is worn like many crypto-Jews once wore, the rainbow acts as a covenant, the pomegranate as both Granada* and Jewish abundance, and the Sephardic dancer as a keeper of Jewish memory.

So yes, if you follow the deepest notes of flamenco, they lead all the way back to Sepharad ✡︎

*When the Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711 CE, they found a thriving Jewish community with many pomegranate trees. The Moors named the settlement Gharnata al Yahud (Pomegranates of the Jews). The name eventually evolved into “Granada”.