“I started as a Ladino singer, before this music was known around the world. No one would listen to Ladino songs but somehow we managed to help breathe new life into them and today it has become well recognized.”
But Yasmin Levy is more than just a Ladino singer. She’s a singer with an extraordinary range of influences and textures, singing in modern Spanish as well while adding the wonderful moods of Flamenco, Turkish and Persian music together into a style all her own.
Ladino, as it is popularly known, is an archaic form of Spanish with structures and vocabulary that can be traced back to the fifteenth century. The Spanish Jews who fled Spain in 1492 after the Edict of Expulsion took with them a rich cultural heritage including the Spanish language. For nearly five centuries Sephardic Jews kept the language of those Spanish exiles alive.