The First Modernist Sephardic Artists: The Sephardic Nationalist & The Radical

Editor’s Note

In this third installment of the series “Sephardic Art and the First Modernist Sephardic Artists,” I look at two fascinating twentieth-century artists—Daniel Kabiljo, from Sarajevo, and Angel Castro, originally from Salonica before settling in New York City—whom I describe, respectively, as “The Sephardic Nationalist” and “The Radical.” Unlike the other artists featured in this series, Kabiljo and Castro intentionally depicted scenes of Sephardic life, and they did so not only for the sake of nostalgia, but also as a manifestation of their broader ideologies and worldviews.

For Kabiljo, painting and drawing Sephardic scenes and “types” were his contribution to a nascent movement of “Sephardic nationalism” that sought to resist the dominance of Ashkenazi culture and Zionist ideology among Jews in Yugoslavia between the World Wars. He saw Sephardic identity not as a subset of Jewish identity but rather as its own discrete national community—one that nonetheless would ultimately be decimated during World War II, during which Kabiljo himself was murdered. In contrast, Castro, who arrived in New York during World War I, developed contacts with a wide range of artists and artistic traditions of various national and racial backgrounds that inspired him to embrace both a radical politics and a kind of cosmopolitan humanism. Through his art, Castro fought for the underdog while also seeking to depict and legitimize (especially through the medium of the mural) the world of Sephardic Jews across time and space. While Kabiljo’s life and work have only recently been brought to public attention by the art historian Mirjam Rajner, Castro—once hailed by La Vara, New York’s Ladino newspaper in the 1930s, as “the First Sephardic American Painter”—has been almost completely forgotten. Reproductions of his work, mostly lost or destroyed, can be viewed here for the very first time. 

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The Sephardic Nationalist

While Raphael Avraham Shalem and Siona Tagger—two artists discussed in the previous essay in this series—subordinated their Sephardiness to their Zionism in their artistic expression, Daniel Kabiljo (1894–1944), a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo, took a different path. He was likely the first Sephardic artist to produce art motivated by what he considered a “Sephardic nationalist” ideology, related to but distinct from—and even antagonistic to—Jewish nationalism or Zionism. Born and raised in Sarajevo’s thriving Sephardic Jewish community that dated back to the sixteenth century, Kabiljo would be forgotten today were it not for recent groundbreaking research by the art historian Mirjam Rajner.¹ 

Like many others of his generation and cultural background, Kabiljo confronted opposition from his parents when he announced his desire to become an artist. His father denounced the decision because, in his view, it would force his son to join “the bohemians and gypsies” and guarantee that he would never have enough money to support himself. Despite the resistance he faced, Kabiljo convinced La Benevolencija, the city’s Sephardic welfare society (established in 1892), to grant him a stipend to study art in Vienna, Munich, and Zagreb, enabling him to become the first academically trained Jewish artist from Sarajevo. Although he initially affiliated with the Ashkenazi-led Zionist movement upon his return to Yugoslavia, Kabiljo soon embraced Bosnian modernism. He even adopted the Slavic pseudonym “Danilus” before becoming enticed by the cultural renaissance that would soon unfold within his own Sephardic community. 

Sarajevo was among those locales in the former Ottoman Empire where Sepharadim constituted the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population. After centuries of Ottoman rule ended in 1878, the Austro-Hungarian Empire took power over Sarajevo and the region for four decades. It was after World War I, which began with the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, that the city found itself part of the new country of Yugoslavia. As the nascent country became home to a smaller Ashkenazi Jewish community, tensions brewed over which Jewish group ought to represent Yugoslavia’s Jews to the state, other Jewish communities, and the outside world.

Tensions between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews in Yugoslavia came to a head in 1924. Ashkenazi Jews, based in Zagreb, promoted Zionism to try to unify all Jews in the country, and viewed the persistence of a separate Sephardic heritage as an obstacle. Sephardic Jews, based in Sarajevo, resisted what they viewed as the Zionists’ effort to denigrate and erase the unique Sephardic character of their community. Kabiljo gravitated toward the emergent movement of “Sephardic nationalism” (as it was called at the time) that sought to defend and elevate the status of Sepharadim in the country. As he wrote that year in the essay “The Jewish Spirit in Art” in Narodna židovska svijest (Jewish National Consciousness), a Zionist magazine dominated by Ashkenazi Jewish writers in Yugoslavia, he saw in the rebirth of Jewish art the rebirth of the Jewish soul—a theme that echoed earlier approaches to Jewish art articulated by the philosopher Martin Buber.² Kabiljo specifically highlighted the work of illustrator and printmaker Ephraim Moses Lilien and painter Marc Chagall as inspirations. Intrigued by the burgeoning Zionist movement, but clearly at odds with its dismissal of Sephardic identity, Kabiljo wondered whether a Sephardic counterpoint might be possible. 

Sephardic nationalism initially emerged in nineteenth-century Vienna as a movement among Sephardic university students who sought to challenge Ashkenazi dominance over the city’s Jewish cultural and political life. Vienna had been home to a long-established, but relatively small, Sephardic Jewish community that dated back to the eighteenth century and benefited from the support of the Ottoman state. Beginning in the 1860s, several Ladino newspapers appeared in Vienna (such as El Koreo de Viena), and many religious books catering to Ottoman Jews were printed there. Vienna’s Turkish Jewish community (as the Sephardic Jews were known) erected a new Moorish-style synagogue in 1887 where the service included prayers for both Franz Joseph I and Abdul Hamid II, and the singing of the Austrian and Ottoman anthems.³ (The synagogue was destroyed during Kristallnacht in 1938.) The community’s leaders saw themselves as Jewish, but specifically Sephardic, as well as Viennese and Turkish. They viewed their multirooted affiliations as a sign that they had been “kissed by fortune,” with the unique opportunity to “become whomever we want.”⁴ At the same time, Vienna was home to major Ashkenazi Jewish figures like Nathan Birnbaum, who coined the term “Zionism” in the 1890s, and Leon Pinsker, the author of the famous Zionist tract Auto-Emancipation. It was the age of nationalism, and Jewish thinkers and leaders were beginning to seriously engage with different expressions of national identity and state formation.  

The defining feature of Sephardism, as it was also known, was the Ladino language. The ideology of Sephardism served as a kind of diasporic nationalism in contradistinction to Ashkenazi-dominated Zionism. The movement envisioned a still-flourishing Sephardic culture in the diaspora even if a Jewish homeland were to be established in Palestine; it operated parallel to, but distinct from, both Yiddishism and Jewish Autonomism, competing political movements for Jewish self-determination among diasporic Ashkenazi Jews. The Sephardic nationalist movement gained adherents not only in Vienna and Sarajevo, but also among Sephardic intellectuals as far afield as New York. 

Intrigued by the burgeoning Zionist movement, but clearly at odds with its dismissal of Sephardic identity, Kabiljo wondered whether a Sephardic counterpoint might be possible. 

Kabiljo’s growing interest in the nascent Sephardic nationalist movement manifested itself in his changing aesthetics. Kabiljo’s earliest paintings generally consisted of landscapes and reimaginings of biblical scenes, but his style soon evolved, and he began depicting local “types,” especially women, with titles like “Muslim Girl,” “Jewess,” and “Peasant Women in the Town.” These paintings were exhibited at Sarajevo’s Jewish Club and beyond. In a sense, these early paintings show the influence of the first European painters to arrive in that corner of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire—orientalists who sought “exotic” and “authentic” motifs that encapsulated the afterlife of the Ottoman world. For these painters, the art and architecture in Sarajevo reflected the merging of Art Nouveau with local Muslim and Christian folk traditions, a style in which Kabiljo’s early work may be situated.

The recognition of the power of self-fashioning materialized in a major turning point in 1898, when Sephardic students at the University of Vienna established the Sosyedad Akademika de Djudios Espanynoles: Esperanza (The Academic Society of the Spanish Jews: Hope) specifically with the goal of cultivating “Sephardic nationalism.” The principal claim of the movement was that Sepharadim constituted their own distinct national group, their own separate people. One of Esperanza’s chief ideologues, Kalmi Baruch, who completed his dissertation on the Judeo-Spanish language in Bosnia at the University of Vienna, defined Sephardic nationalism in 1924 as the conceptualization of Sephardic Jews as a distinct ethno-religious community composed of two cultural elements: the spiritual (diasporic Judaism) and the material (Balkan-Levantine society).⁵ Importantly, this vision of Sephardic nationalism did not situate the movement in Spain—in historical Sepharad—but rather traversed the political boundaries of those countries in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans where the descendants of Jews exiled from the Iberian Peninsula had resided since the sixteenth century.

By the 1920s, Sephardic nationalism served as a political and cultural force that linked Sephardic communities from Vienna to Sarajevo. In 1924, Spomenica, La Benevolencija’s magazine, invited Kabiljo to create art that depicted specifically Sephardic “national” culture—a decision likely influenced by the editors’ encounters with Russian Jewish nationalists of the era, who saw the visual arts, theater, and literature as vital realms for ideological and cultural renewal. Kabiljo’s subsequent works in the magazine included a lithograph of Il Kal Grande, the interior of Sarajevo’s sixteenth-century Great Synagogue; another of a woman in traditional Bosnian Jewish garb, wearing the head-covering known in the Sarajevo dialect of Ladino as the tukadu, lighting the Sabbath lights; and yet another of a befezzed and bearded man reciting the Sabbath kiddush with pita bread and a carafe of wine on the table. Key differences between Ashkenazi and Sephardic customs come to light in these lithographs: the woman in traditional Sephardic garb lights an oil lamp rather than wax candles; the bread on the man’s Sabbath table is pita, not braided challah, which is historically Ashkenazi and was unknown in the Ottoman world. For several of these images, Kabiljo drew inspiration from photographs of Sephardic “types” and key sites, including the Baščaršija, Sarajevo’s old Turkish market.⁶ 

Alluding to the loss of customs and ritual practices among Sarajevo’s Ladino-speaking Jews, Kabiljo’s depictions of traditional Sephardic life often excluded children. But, as Mirjam Rajner observes, that initial omission also reflected his desire to preserve and revive those traditions—along with Ladino romansas (folk songs)—in the name of Sephardic nationalism. He worked on oil and canvas, with a style sometimes characterized as nostalgic and far removed from his earlier modernist work. He painted two Sephardic Jewish women and a boy on a Sarajevo street; a Sephardic boy carrying a sack at the market; and local Sephardic Jews, Christians, and Muslims interacting with one another. 

The decision Kabiljo made to distance himself from modernist aesthetics provoked ridicule in some circles. An Ashkenazi Zionist newspaper based in Zagreb declared that while Kabiljo had begun his career as a modernist painter, in the end, he merely produced “oriental art,” in keeping with his supposedly unmodern Sephardic heritage—placing him (in their view) outside the bounds of “modern” and “European” Jewish cultural expression. This was as much a comment about Kabiljo the individual as it was about the prevailing Ashkenazi Zionist attitude toward Sephardic Jews in Yugoslavia and their supposedly quaint, seemingly backward oriental culture. 

Was it out of this set of intra-Jewish tensions that one of the first Sephardic artists—self-consciously and ideologically so—emerged? If indeed that was the case, no matter how much distance from Ashkenazi Jews that figures like Kabiljo sought to establish, and no matter how derogatory the attitudes of Ashkenazi Jews towards Sepharadim became, at the end of the day, the Nazi regime and their local collaborators in Yugoslavia made no distinction between the two during World War II. They viewed both groups as racial Jews marked for extermination. During the war, the Ustaše, the ultranationalist and fascist pro-Nazi Croatian group, perpetrated violence not only against Orthodox Christian Serbs, Muslim Bosnians, and Roma, but Jews as well. The group established and operated the infamous Jasenovac concentration camp, the only extermination camp in occupied Europe run not by Nazis but by their collaborators. The Ustaše murdered 100,000 people during the war at Jasenovac, including thousands of Yugoslavia’s Jews. Kabiljo, at age fifty, was among the victims. Yet even while confronting his mortality at the camp, Kabiljo continued his art, creating a linocut of a typical Bosnian house set within an impressionist landscape that no doubt evoked for him a hope for freedom, an aspiration to regain a sense of local belonging, and nostalgia for a Sephardic world that was no more. Unfortunately, few of Kabiljo’s original artworks survive today. 

The Radical

I had to travel all the way to Salonica to discover the first Sephardic American artist, a figure who is completely unknown today. While conducting research at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki in 2005, I came across a document from 1963 that listed twenty-five prominent Salonican and Greek Jews living in the United States. Among them was a sole artist, identified by the pseudonym Angel (later Angelo) Castro (1900–1993). Henry Besso, who composed the Ladino bibliography for the Library of Congress and compiled the list I found, admitted that he could not remember the artist’s birth name. Still, Besso mentioned that Castro—after completing his education at the major French Jewish school in Salonica, the Alliance Israélite Universelle—moved to New York in 1917, worked with the famed muralist Diego Rivera, and won several awards for his paintings. But his full story and oeuvre remained shrouded in mystery. It would take me years to piece together Castro’s story—which still remains suffused with legends—and to see some of his art, which engages with politically radical, dreamlike, and utopian themes, Sephardic Jewish themes, and perhaps the convergence of both.

Only recently did I stumble upon a lengthy two-part profile of Castro published in 1939 in La Vara, New York’s Ladino newspaper, entitled “Our First Painter” (part one here; part two here). If Castro was the first Sephardic American painter, then the author of the profile—Maír José Benardete—might be considered the first Sephardic American art critic. Benardete hailed from Çanakkale, along the Dardanelles Strait in Ottoman Turkey, and founded Columbia University’s Sephardic Studies program in the 1930s (notably situated not under the auspices of the Jewish Studies department, but rather the Hispanic Institute). A prominent intellectual within New York’s Sephardic community, Benardete wrote extensively for the city’s Ladino newspapers, and published some of the first scholarship on the community’s history and culture in both Spanish and English. 

In his articles in La Vara, Benardete sought to demonstrate why Castro ought to be considered the first Sephardic American painter. The two men became acquainted at the intersection of the visual and performing arts, when Castro designed the set for Benardete’s Ladino adaptation of Racine’s Athalie, put on by his Sephardic Studies program’s theater troupe in 1936. Importantly for Benardete, Castro engaged in the genre of art that Benardete viewed as quintessentially Sephardic, and best suited for the United States: the mural. For “humble people” like Sephardic Jews—mostly part of the industrial working class in New York at the time and less able to frequent museums or galleries—Benardete believed that art ought to be shown in public, accessible to all. 

Benardete’s elevation of Castro as a symbol of the Sephardic approach to the arts may also be interpreted as part of a broader polemic during the 1920s and 1930s in which Sepharadim regularly encountered demeaning and dismissive representations of themselves in general English- and Yiddish-language Jewish publications. Perhaps most infamously, in 1926, the Jewish Federation of New York commissioned the first so-called academic study of Sephardic Jews in New York, a relatively small community in the city at that time that numbered around forty thousand. Despite its questionable methods, and protests by Sepharadim themselves, the report generated sensational newspaper articles in Jewish publications that questioned the very ability of Sephardic Jews to produce anything approaching “culture” due to their proximity to Muslims, Africans, and Arabs. In an article about the report in The Forward, one of the widest-circulating newspapers in the US at the time, the author wrote:

In the “old country” [i.e., the Ottoman Empire], they [the Sephardic Jews] had no cultural life of their own worth speaking of. They had no common body of customs and traditions, no common literature, no knowledge of or curiosity about their past … They had been a backward people in a backward country, and how could they hope to progress in this country?⁷

In a certain sense, Benardete saw his own scholarship and Castro’s art as the counterevidence necessary to overturn claims about the culture-less and backward Sephardim, and to demonstrate the contributions of Sepharadim to varied domains of cultural expression, the visual arts key among them.

There are conflicting accounts of how Castro came to be interested in art. According to Benardete, Castro became attracted to painting during his stint as an interpreter for the American cruise line with which he traveled the Americas and Asia. The “oriental” art he encountered in Asia—Calcutta in particular—inspired his creative process. After years at sea, Castro returned to New York and began painting, first murals of cityscapes of Istanbul and other “Levantine landscapes”—scenes of the Eastern Mediterranean terrain of his birth—that decorated the interior walls of one of the Sephardic cafés on Allen Street, on the Lower East Side. In the early years of the Great Depression, a benefactor named Haim de Mayo⁸ commissioned Castro to paint an image of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments to hang in his home in Brooklyn. The WPA (Works Progress Administration), a New Deal agency that employed millions of Americans in public works projects, enabled Castro to apprentice with Mons Breidvik, a Swedish painter; Jean Charlot, a French American muralist associated with Diego Rivera; Oronzio Maldarelli, an Italian American painter; and Monty Lewis, a Welsh American artist known for his frescoes. According to Benardete, Castro’s experience with the WPA helped him perfect his method as a muralist and legitimized his status in the New York art scene. 

Castro himself, however, recounted his path quite differently in rare interviews. In 1982, in the News World, a now defunct New York City newspaper, he claimed to have been born in Nice, France, but raised in “Turkey” due to his father’s work as a merchant.⁹ He said that he had drawn and painted since childhood; that he visited Amedeo Modigliani—whom he claimed was his uncle—in Paris, and that he had met Picasso before heading to New York.¹⁰ He stated that he found odd jobs, including work as an elevator boy, and that he enrolled in (and later taught) evening art classes at Cooper Union. He painted portraits of nude models at his apartment, scandalizing his neighbors in the process. He then set out on his journey across the globe as a deckhand and created paintings at every port where the ship stopped. 

It would take me years to piece together Castro’s story—which still remains suffused with legends—and to see some of his art, which engages with politically radical, dreamlike, and utopian themes, Sephardic Jewish themes, and perhaps the convergence of both.

While praising Castro as “Manhattan’s Michelangelo,” a 1991 article in the Sephardic Home News indicated that Castro had indeed found inspiration for art in his family—especially through his mother, Leah (née Raphael). It was on his mother’s side that he claimed Modigliani as his uncle. Although not mentioned in the article, it may be the case that the Salonican Jewish painter Maurice Raphael was a more proximate influence, if not an actual relative (given the shared surname). I have not been able to find any information about Maurice Raphael other than the fact that he painted scenes of the old city of Salonica. One such painting, dated 1928, once hung in the office of the well-known Salonican Jewish historian, teacher, and Bergen-Belson survivor Joseph Nehama. (In 2021, his granddaughter, Boston architect Elena Saporta, gifted the painting to me—and it now hangs on the wall in my office!)

As for Castro, in the News World interview, he recalled that his minor claim to fame came in 1933, when he worked as an assistant to Diego Rivera during the creation of Man at the Crossroads, Rivera’s infamous fresco in the lobby of Rockefeller Center. Intended to reveal the contrast between socialism and capitalism, the fresco came under assault by newspapers like the New York World-Telegram as “anti-capitalist propaganda.”¹¹ In response to the accusations, Rivera doubled down on the message and decided to add images of Lenin and of a Soviet Day Parade. Castro recalled that while standing on the scaffolding, he warned Rivera not to include the image of Lenin; Rivera responded by throwing a paintbrush at him. The next day, Rockefeller fired Rivera and ordered that the fresco be destroyed. Rivera was paid for his work, but Castro never received a dime. In a variation of this story, the Sephardic Home News reported in 1991 that following a “heated argument” between Castro and Rivera over the Lenin image, the former preemptively resigned—and never received compensation for the work he had done.   

It is difficult to disentangle reality from legend in Castro’s accounts. Whatever the true details, it is clear Castro created a variety of works of art that engaged with political themes suggestive of a left-wing orientation. It is unknown whether Castro may have associated with the robust workers’ movement in his native Salonica, which was home to the largest Ladino-speaking socialist movement in the country, prior to his departure for the United States. Perhaps he became connected to the Sephardic branches of either, or both, the Socialist Party or, later, the Workers’ (Communist) Party in New York, in which fellow Salonican Jewish immigrants played important roles.  

Either way, Benardete linked Castro to the racially marginalized and politically radical artists with whom he associated at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Benardete encountered Castro on Sullivan Street, just south of Washington Square Park. Castro was painting portraits of guests who flocked to the fair, where some of his own work was on display under the open skies. As Benardete approached, he observed Castro conversing with a small group of artists who were also showing their work on the street: an Indigenous woman, a Mexican man, and a Puerto Rican man. In Benardete’s view, Castro’s sense of kinship with other painters from marginalized communities, subjugated by capitalism and racism, reflected their shared vision for the mission of contemporary art: “to protest against the inhumanity and brutal savagery of the enemies of humankind”—likely a reference to rising fascism. But Benardete himself, deeply involved in supporting the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, also saw a specifically Sephardic Jewish perspective at work: “Faithful to the legacy of his people, with his colors and figures, [Castro] fights for justice and for universal brotherhood among men.” 

For Benardete, Castro’s paintings captured “social consciousness,” a “belief in progress,” and the need to “create a better world,” all of which he viewed as core “spiritual values” of the Sephardic Jewish tradition. One such painting, which hung on the wall of a Sephardic café on the Lower East Side, depicted the industrial worker enslaved to and tortured by capitalists; Lenin and Marx appeared as new prophets, prepared to liberate the worker from his chains. 

Another painting, titled The Soul of Spain, was apparently exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1939. The painting seems to have since been lost, but judging by Benardete’s description, it could be understood as a Sephardic rendering of Picasso’s Guernica. Completed in 1938 amid the “anguish” and “suffering” of the Spanish Civil War, the large painting depicts (according to Bernardete’s account), on the left, a defoliated tree reminiscent of a headless woman; and on the right, a building in flames, blown up by the bombs dropped by Nazi airplanes. The sky is blue, black, and gray. In the foreground are the victims of the “unjust war”: a woman in agony, open-mouthed, with her eyes bulging in fear, her hands moving toward her face. Yet she is dressed in green—a sign of youth, of spring, of better times to come. Another woman, a mother embracing her newborn, wears a dress the color of red grapes. Nearby, a man attends to his bloody forehead. And in the center, a glowing fist emerges, as if from behind a mysterious veil, that declares man’s right to defend himself against the barbarity of fascism. The painting must have resonated with many Sephardic Jews, especially those involved in the labor movement and the Communist Party in the United States, given that they actively supported the Republican cause and quite a few saw action in Spain as volunteer fighters with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; others, such as David Amariglio, a Salonican Jew based in New York who served as the treasurer of the Community Party, played a key role in negotiating the repatriation of the American volunteers. 

While I have not seen any of Castro’s paintings in person, through a circuitous route, I did eventually get in contact with one of his sons, Danny Castro, a spiritual teacher now based in New Mexico.¹² He told me that he didn’t have any of his father’s paintings, but he did share several photos of them with me, including one that Benardete considered his favorite, The Magical Flute (La flauta majika). In fact, Benardete purchased the painting and, as he indicated in La Vara, hung it in his summer cottage in Vermont. For Benardete, The Magical Flute’s “oriental” style and bright colors—oranges, yellows, and greens—reflect the influence of Castro’s travels to India and Iran. At the center of the painting is a partially nude Black woman wearing a crown with a peacock feather and playing the flute. She is surrounded by a group of reclining women of different racial or national backgrounds, along with what appears to be lambs or cows, in a mysterious pastoral setting. The central figure seems to be playing a magical melody that produces a dreamlike ambiance that captures the attention of the surrounding women. Benardete interprets this as Castro’s “protest against injustice,” call for “prophetic justice,” and aspirations for a peaceful future. Benardete saw the blending of the lyric with the symbolic, reality with utopianism, as fundamental to Castro’s approach to art and aesthetics.

Danny Castro’s perspective enhances the ways we may understand The Magical Flute. Danny recalls that his father was inspired not only by the visual culture of India but also its poetry, especially that of the most famous Indian writer of modern times, Rabindranath Tagore, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 and whom Castro may have met during a visit to India in the 1920s. While often remembered as a mystic in the West, Tagore was also active as a political reformer and sharp critic of colonialism. The flute plays an important role in Tagore’s poetry, including in “The Little Flute,” a poem that imagines the instrument as a source of continual renewal—of song, spirit, and life. Moreover, Danny Castro is under the impression that the figure of the Black woman playing the flute in the center was inspired by Josephine Baker, the iconic Jazz Age Black American actress and civil rights activist who may have traveled in overlapping artistic circles with Castro during the interwar years. It is remarkable to consider the possibility that an Ottoman-born Sephardic Jew—inspired by radical political ideas and the mystical poetry of an anti-colonial Indian writer—opted to center, in a painting imbued with “oriental” aesthetics, a Black woman playing a magical flute as a kind of messianic figure portending a future age of peace. It’s also notable that Benardete viewed the work and its cosmopolitan influences and universal humanistic message as a fundamental expression of the Sephardic Jewish spirit and a key work by the “first Sephardic painter.”

At the same time, Castro remained closely connected to the organized Sephardic Jewish community in New York; Danny recalls that his father recruited young Sephardic Jews from cafés on the Lower East Side to help him with his murals.

In his 1939 essays about Castro in La Vara, Benardete expressed only one set of hopes for the future direction of Castro’s work: that he produce more explicitly Jewish images, and that he delve more deeply into the realm of realism. There was indeed precedent for both within Castro’s work, whether in his cityscapes of Istanbul or his painting of “an old Jewish woman on the East Side.” By his own count, he produced five thousand works of art—especially murals in public places, restaurants, and movie theaters—including a vast mural depicting the history of New York City on the wall of a building on Church Street.¹³ At the same time, Castro remained closely connected to the organized Sephardic Jewish community in New York; Danny recalls that his father recruited young Sephardic Jews from cafés on the Lower East Side to help him with his murals. Castro was a member of the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood of America, and, at an advanced age, became a resident and art teacher at the now defunct Sephardic Home for the Aged on Cropsey Avenue in Brooklyn. Established in 1951, the Home emerged as one of the most significant institutions established by Ladino-speaking Jews in the United States. 

It was at the Home for the Aged where, in 1974, Castro fulfilled Benardete’s expectations and created his masterpiece: a thirty-foot-wide mural painted on tile in the main cafeteria depicting seventeen scenes spanning nine centuries of Sephardic Jewish history—from medieval Spain, to the Ottoman Empire, to the United States. Unfortunately, after the Sephardic Home for the Aged dissolved in 2014, the new owners of the elder-care facility, the King David Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation, which now caters to Russian- and Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews, destroyed the mural. But thanks to photographs and descriptions published in the Sephardic Home News, we know what the mural looked like.¹⁴ The newsletter celebrated Castro as a “Sephardic artist” of “great talent” who had rendered each scene in “beautifully vivid colors.” Like written Hebrew, the images progressed in chronological order from right to left. The first scene began in medieval Spain with famed sages Maimonides and Judah Ha-Levi, and continued on to the Inquisition and expulsion from Spain. Next, Castro depicted the arrival of Jews in the Ottoman Empire and the development of Jewish communal life there (with special attention paid to Salonica, represented by the city’s iconic White Tower). He also included the influential figure of Moses Montefiore, a nineteenth-century philanthropist who sought to improve the conditions affecting Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire. The last series of images centered on Sephardic life in the United States, including the Shearith Israel Congregation, established by Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the colonial era; the Sephardic Temple of Cedarhurst, Long Island, founded in 1963; Ottoman Jews beside the Statue of Liberty; and scenes of Sephardic life on the multicultural Lower East Side. Castro clearly drew on references to scenery, architecture, clothing, and other hallmarks of visual culture for each moment in history. The intent was to immerse residents and visitors in scenes depicting their history, to transform the dining hall into a “magnificent room,” as the Sephardic Home News explained, and to entice people from near and far to visit.

Whether he depicted scenes imagining utopian futures, channeling radical political messages to protest against injustices, or reflecting the history of Sephardic Jews across the centuries, his work was viewed by those within the Sephardic Jewish community as fundamentally “Sephardic.” But he also moved well beyond the confines of the Sephardic community, interacting with a range of artists and engaging with a variety of styles and political messages that mesmerized, and challenged, his viewers. Outside the Jewish world, Castro’s “Sephardic”ness became invisible or illegible to some: for example, an American English-language newspaper referred to him as a “Mexican” artist, perhaps due to his native, Spanish-sounding Ladino and his association with figures like Diego Rivera. 

In fact, the first English-language article to profile Castro and his work, by the well-known Black American critic Frederic Ramsey Jr., appeared in 1951 in Park East: The Magazine of New York. The article neither mentioned that Castro was Jewish, nor specifically Sephardic, but did indicate in passing that the artist was born in Salonica. Ramsey captured other fascinating details about Castro’s work in the years after World War II, when Castro was painting murals across town and would hang out at Louis Habib’s grocery store—which also housed a small coffee shop—on Rivington Street, where he would wait to receive new commissions. (Habib was also a Sephardic Jew, from Gallipoli, Turkey, but Ramsey didn’t mention that detail either.) Ramsey wrote that Castro was known for developing the concept for each project by taking hold of one of the store’s coffee saucers, blackening the surface with match smoke, and then scratching out the scene with the clean end of the burnt matchstick. This was the technique he used to draft the murals he then painted on the windows of Habib’s grocery; a mural of a cigar-smoking pig and roosting hen at a butcher shop on Stanton Street; the murals inside Sammy’s Bowery Follies, the last of the famous Gay Nineties saloons; and the murals in Pasha’s Oriental Restaurant on Allen Street. Alluding to the famed seventeenth-century French Baroque painter, Ramsey referred to Castro as the “Allen Street Poussin.”¹⁵ 

Alluding to the famed seventeenth-century French Baroque painter, Ramsey referred to Castro as the “Allen Street Poussin.” 

Despite his prolific output and unique methods, the ambiguity about Castro’s own identity in public was, in part, his own doing. As much as Castro embraced his Sephardic Jewish identity, he also distanced himself from it in various ways, not least by embracing a pseudonym for both life and work. Castro never publicly revealed his birth name. Benardete claimed that Castro chose to assume a new name that reflected aspects of his demeanor and his desire to be viewed as part of the Spanish world. According to Benardete, “Angel” reflected the artist’s status as a calm and soft-spoken angelic figure, and his chosen “very Spanish” surname—also common among Sepharadim—conveyed his desire to embrace his “Hispanic heritage” and to navigate the art world more successfully. Could that decision have stemmed from his desire to escape detection as a Jew? 

Only by sleuthing through immigration and naturalization records did I eventually discover Castro’s birth name: Sabetay Cohen. His tombstone—which he shares with his wife Bella (née Torres), also from Salonica—sits in the Sephardic Jewish Brotherhood cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, and confirms this fact: inscribed in the marble, in both Hebrew and English, is his first name, “Sabaty,” spelled differently than on his official records. The name “Cohen,” however, is rendered only in Hebrew. An image of hands positioned for the priestly blessing is carved in stone—a permanent reminder of the true origin of the “first Sephardic American artist.”

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Devin E. Naar is the Isaac Alhadeff Professor in Sephardic studies and associate professor of history at the Stroum Center for Jewish Studies in the Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. Naar founded and chairs UW’s Sephardic Studies Program. His first book, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece (2016), won a 2016 National Jewish Book Award and the 2017 prize for best book awarded by the Modern Greek Studies Association.

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