Concert “Flamenco Judaico” of the Timna Brauer and Elias Meiri Ensemble

Flamenco Judaico

When one becomes acquainted with the variety of Jewish music, sooner or later, the treasures of  Canzones Judeo-espagnol are bound to open. These songs are also called sephardic* songs. (*Sepharad means in Hebrew the Iberian Peninsula. ) They were originally sung by women without accompaniment. Many songs are lovesongs and lullabys, but also the  Song of the Songs from the Psalms or the longing after Zion have inspired some of them. They originate from the medieval Spanish civilization and were given further orally. After 1492, when Jews were driven out of Spain, the music lived further among the Sepharads in  Diaspora . Ladino is still today the colloquial language of the Sephardic Jews, who settled down in the whole region of the Mediterranean. It is a mixture of old Spanish and Hebrew and equivalent to Jiddish in Central Europe. Some of their songs were overtaken by the gipsies in Andalusia and this formed a connection to flamenco. Other songs were born along the immigration and picked up new influences without loosing their original essence. Many of them were also translated, mostly into Turkish and Hebrew.
Timna Brauer strives for drawing a line between the Jewish, the Christian and the Islamic as a recollection of the civilization these cultures formed together in the medieval Spain. The programme includes  classics of Sephardic music as well as Arabic-andalusian songs and new compositions on old scripts.