The hidden Jewish origins of flamenco

Last year Sydney dancer and choreographer Annalouise Paul received a fellowship from New York’s Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture to research and perform a combined dance-theatre work called Self Portrait.

The work is both an exploration of Paul's own identity and heritage, and a research project into the deep connections between flamenco and Jewish culture.

The dance, music, song and rhythm of flamenco draws on the rich multicultural mix of southern Spain. “Every flamenco book and every flamenco person says flamenco has Arabic, Jewish and African influences,” says Paul. But she wants to know exactly how Jewish, “because nobody has actually done that”.

Paul’s research is also personal: she’s been dancing flamenco and grappling with identity for decades.

Paul’s Ashkenazi mother was born in England and her Sephardi-Mizrahi father in Calcutta. Paul’s early years were spent immersed in Sydney’s Jewish community. (Her family also lived in Israel for a short time after making aliyah; they found it difficult and soon returned to Australia.) But after her parents divorced when she was 10, Paul moved to western Sydney with her mother and four siblings; far from the heart of the Jewish community. She never really got to know her father.

At 19, Paul discovered flamenco. Or as she prefers to put it, flamenco found her. As a child, Paul loved to dance but with no money for classes, she only began formal lessons as an adult. At first, Paul danced contemporary and ballet. A year later, she saw a chalkboard sign outside a dance studio on Sydney’s Pitt Street with one word: ‘flamenco’. “And that was it, it felt so right,” she says. That was almost 40 years ago, and Paul has been dancing flamenco and contemporary – in what she describes as a “bilingual practice” – ever since.

Paul’s interest in the connection between Sephardi and flamenco culture, however, only came later. When Paul was 21, her father died. His passing sparked her interest in exploring her roots, as she knew very little about her paternal family’s origins.

Around that time, Paul also revived a script she’d previously written, about a flamenco dancer who travels back in time and meets a cruel queen who is casting out the girl’s tribe (this later became her 2008 work, Isabel). When Paul first conceived the story, a friend remarked that it must be about Queen Isabel and the Spanish Inquisition. But back then, Paul knew nothing about Spanish history.

Now, Paul intuited that there was a connection between her late father, Queen Isabel and flamenco. Longing to know more, she went to visit to her aunt Rachel, her father’s older sister – whom she hadn’t seen or spoken to in 35 years.

When she asked Rachel – who also happened to have a collection of flamenco dolls on her mantlepiece – where their family was from, Rachel’s response left Paul flabbergasted. “We're Spanish Jews, Queen Isabel kicked us out in 1492.”

“That was the beginning,” says Paul. “It was the show I was making; it was my ancestry and connection to flamenco all in one.” From there, Paul became curious about how flamenco and Jewish culture intersect.

Paul explains that flamenco expresses deep sorrow, pain, grief, loss and lament, as well as high joy, excitement and energy. “So, it has this duality to it.” The dance and the music always have a crescendo, too, and “a kind of a rising above itself”.

“To me, that’s the biggest connection with Jewish thought – that we rise up regardless of what happens to us,” she says. “We make good of a situation, and it’s the same in flamenco; we're not afraid to go to the deep, dark space, but there's always a lift that happens towards the end that takes us back into a more positive place.”

The origins of flamenco are highly contested, but there are obvious – although unproven – connections to Sephardi ancestry. For example, “we already know that the peteneras [a flamenco style] is a song that talks about a Jewish woman,” says Paul. Other known connections include saetas (a style of flamenco singing) sung during Easter, and a kaddish tune which sounds almost identical to a solea (a style within flamenco, meaning solitude).

Paul also mentions an interview with the late Paco de Lucia, a guitarist who she describes as “the Ravi Shankar of flamenco music,” where he says he's been studying scores in Toledo, and believes there's so much Sephardi influence in flamenco music that hasn’t been discovered yet. Paul hypothesises that the words of loss and lament could well be the longing Jews felt for their home after being expelled from Spain.

Paul initially began work on Self Portrait in 2012, but the project went on hold in 2017, before Paul revived in it 2023. Early iterations were missing something, admits Paul, and after October 7, she realised what it was: she needed to embed her Jewish identity in the work.

Paul travelled to Spain in 2024 and will visit Spain again this May, centring her trip around Cordoba, Toledo, and most likely Girona, too. She will visit synagogues, Jewish museums and historic sites, and interview members of the Jewish and flamenco community – including Andalusian Rabbi Haim Casas, the first Cordoba-born rabbi since 1492; and the Jewish owner of both the Flamenco Dance Museum in Seville, and Casa de Sefarad, a Sephardi museum in Cordoba.

Paul is also reading academic papers and conducting online interviews with scholars such as Judith Brin Ingber, an American dance historian who specialises in Jewish dance and has suggested Paul look closely at Jewish wedding dances as part of her research.

The first stage of Self Portrait will be finished this October, and both the Sydney Jewish Museum and the Jewish Museum of Australia in Melbourne have agreed to a work-in-progress showing later this year. (With the Sydney Jewish Museum currently closed for renovations, a different venue will be found.) Paul explains this is like a draft of the show, where she’ll present her findings, most likely in a solo performance and perhaps followed by a Q&A session, to a public audience. But Paul points out that Self Portrait is not a traditional flamenco show. Rather, it's a dance and a theatre work which includes acting, flamenco and contemporary dance – and which will incorporate Paul’s Jewish identity.

Some two decades ago, Paul told a friend that she just didn’t “feel the Jewish thing”.

“But you do flamenco, that's your connection,” her friend replied.

“He saw it immediately, that I connect to my Jewish culture through flamenco,” she says. Paul sees it clearly now, too, explaining that dancing flamenco is about moving into sorrow rather than avoiding it; about healing pain, alchemising trauma into joy, and ultimately, celebrating life.

In doing so, flamenco mirrors cherished Jewish values; allowing Paul to express the continuum of Jewish ancestry through her art. “But how I can draw it out more? I guess this work, Self Portrait will reveal that to me.”