Mizrahi Jews (), also known as Mizrahim () in plural and Mizrahi () in singular, and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach (, ), are a grouping of Jewish communities that lived in the Muslim world. Mizrahi is a politico-sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew.
The term Mizrahi is exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities throughout Asia, North Africa, and parts of the North Caucasus. This includes Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Afghan Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews, and the small community of Bahraini Jews. The aforementioned groups are believed to derive their ancestry from the Babylonian captivity.The Wellspring of Georgian Historiography: The Early Medieval Historical Chronicle The Conversion of Katli and The Life of St. Nino, Constantine B. Lerner, England: Bennett and Bloom, London, 2004, p. 60 Yemenite Jews are also Mizrahi Jews, although they differ from other Mizrahim, who have undergone a process of total or partial assimilation to Sephardic law and customs.
Syrian Jews, Egyptian Jews, Tunisian Jews, Moroccan Jews, Algerian Jews, and Libyan Jews (also known as Musta'arabi Jews or Maghrebi Jews) are sometimes labeled as Oriental Jews or Mizrahim, although these groups largely merged with the mass arrival of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, following their late 15th-century expulsion from Spain and Portugal. The vast majority of Maghrebi Jews (Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian) are Sephardim of point of view of the religious rite. Maghrebi is an Arabic term which translates to "Westerners."
Indian Jews (specifically Cochin Jews and Bene Israel) are sometimes labeled as Mizrahi, although members of the community identify as a separate category, as South Asian.
These various Jewish communities were first officially grouped into a singular identifiable division during World War II, when they were distinctly outlined in the One Million Plan of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which detailed Jewish immigration schema to Palestine (then under the British Mandate for Palestine) after the Holocaust.: "The principal significance of this plan lies in the fact, noted by Yehuda Shenhav, that this was the first time in Zionist history that Jews from Middle Eastern and North African countries were all packaged together in one category as the target of an immigration plan. There were earlier plans to bring specific groups, such as the Yemenites, but the "one million plan" was, as Shenhav says, "the zero point", the moment when the category of Oriental or Mizrahi Jews in the current sense of this term, as an ethnic group distinct from European-born Jews, was invented."
An earlier cultural community of Eastern Jewish peoples were the Sephardim. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the ancestors of various communities now labelled "Mizrahi Jews" did not identify themselves as a distinctive Jewish subgroup, and many considered themselves Sephardim, as they largely followed the Sephardic rite of Judaism, with local variations in minhagim. The original Sephardi Jewish community was formed in Spain and Portugal, and after their expulsion in 1492, many Sephardim settled in areas where older Jewish communities already existed. This complicated ethnography has resulted in a conflation of terms, particularly in official Israeli ethnic and religious terminology, with Sephardi being used in a broad sense to include Mizrahi Jews, as well as Sephardim proper from Levant, Italy, Balkans and Romania, Western Europe, America, Iberian peninsula, Turkey and northern Africa around the Mediterranean Basin. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has placed rabbis of Mizrahi origin in Israel under the jurisdiction of the Sephardi chief rabbis, who were most of Oriental origin
Following the First Arab–Israeli War, 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews emigrated or were expelled from Central Asia, West Asia, the Caucasus, and North Africa between 1948 and the early 1980s. A 2018 statistic found that 45 percent of Jewish-Israelis self-identified as either Mizrahi or Sephardi.
Terminology Mizrahi is literally translated as 'Oriental', 'Eastern', , Hebrew for 'east'. In the past, the word Mizrahim, corresponding to the Arabic word (, 'Easterners'), referred to the natives of Turkey (partially), Iraq and other Asian countries, as distinct from those of North Africa (, 'Westerners'). In medieval and early modern times, the corresponding Hebrew word () was used for North Africa. In Talmudic and Geonic times, however, this word referred to the land of Israel, as contrasted with Babylonia. For this reason, many object to the use of Mizrahi to include Moroccan and other North African Jews.
During the 1940s, before Israel's establishment, the demographer Roberto Bachi used the categories of "Mizrahim" and "Ashkenazim" in his ethnic classification of the Yishuv.Anat Leibler, "Disciplining Ethnicity: Social Sorting Intersects with Political Demography in Israel's Pre-State Period," Social Studies of Science 44, no. 2 (2014), p. 273. In the 1950s, the Jews who came from the communities listed above were simply called and known as Jews (, in Arabic). To distinguish them in the Jewish sub-ethnicities, Israeli officials, who themselves were mostly Eastern European Jews, transferred the name Mizrahi to them, though most of these immigrants arrived from lands located further westward than Central Europe."The Settling of Western Jews in Jerusalem", Official Israeli Ministry of Education paper for high school students about North African Jews who prior were called "Western Jews" to as &/ "Mugrabi Jews" as opposed to "Mizrahi/Eastern Jews".For God's Sake: Why Are There So Many More Israelis with the Surname "Mizrahi" Than "Friedmans"?, by Michal Margalit, 17 January 2014, Ynet. Mizrahi is subsequently among the surnames most often changed by Israelis,The Surname that Israelis Change the Most: "Mizrahi", Ofer Aderet, Haaretz, 17 February 2017. and many scholars, including Avshalom Kor, claim that the transferring of the name Mizrahim was a form of OrientalismAlon Gan, "Victimhood Book", Israel Democracy Institute, 2014. Pp. 137–139. towards the Oriental Jews, similar to the ways in which had labeled Ostjuden as "second class" and excluded them from possible positions of power.Dina Haruvi and Hadas Shabbat-Nadir, "Have You Ever Met A Streotypical Mizrahi?"" (in Hebrew), Ohio State University.Haggai Ram, "Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession", Stanford University Press.
The usage of the term or (), Oriental communities, grew in Israel as a result of the settlement of Jewish immigrants from Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, along with followers of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Temani (Yemenite) rites. In modern Israeli usage, it refers to all Jews from Central and West Asian countries, many of them Arabic-speaking Muslim-majority countries. The term came to be widely used by Mizrahi activists in the early 1990s. Since then in Israel it has become an accepted semi-official and media designation.
Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a separate Jewish subgroup. Instead, they generally characterized themselves as Sephardi, as they follow the customs and traditions of Sephardi Judaism (but with some differences among the "customs" of particular communities).
Sami Michael rejects the terms and , claiming it is a fictitious identity advanced by Mapai to preserve a "rival" to the and help them push the below in the social-economic ladder, so they will not ever be in line with the Israeli elites of European Jewish descent."There Are People who Want to Keep Us in the Bottom", Sami Michael's 1999 interview with Ruvik Rozental. He also speaks against the Mapai manner of labeling all the Oriental Jews as "one folk" and erasing their unique and individual history as separated communities. Instead, he wonders why the real Easterners of his time, who were the Eastern European Jewish peasants from the villages, were not labeled as "Mizrahi" in Israel, despite this term being more appropriate for them than for the Oriental Jews who were labeled that way. Michael also opposes the inclusion of Oriental Jewish communities who do not descend from Sepharadic Jews, as "Sepharadim" by Israeli politicians, calling it "historically inaccurate." He also claims that his work as an author is always referred to as "ethnic," while European Jews' work, even if historic in theme, is not, as a result of racism.
Most of the Mizrahi activists actually originated from North African Jewish communities, traditionally called "Westerners" (), rather than "Easterners" (). The Jews who emigrated to Palestine from North Africa in the 19th century and earlier started their own political and religious organization in 1860 which operated in Jerusalem and was called "The Western Jewish Diaspora Council" (). Many Jews originating from Arab and Muslim countries today reject or any other umbrella description, and prefer to identify themselves by their particular country of origin, or that of their immediate ancestors, such as "Moroccan Jew," or prefer to use the old term in its broader meaning.Yochai Oppenheimer, "Mizrahi fiction as a minor literature", in Dario Miccoli eds., Contemporary Sephardic and Mizrahi Literature: A Diaspora, 2017. pp. 98–100.
Religious rite designations
Today, many identify non-Ashkenazi rite Jews as Sephardi – in modern Hebrew Sfaradim – mixing ancestral origin and religious rite. This broader definition of "Sephardim" as including all, or most, Mizrahi Jews is also common in Jewish religious circles. During the past century[20th?], the Sephardi rite absorbed part of the unique rite of the Yemenite Jews, and lately Beta Israel religious leaders in Israel have also joined Sefardi rite collectivities, especially following rejection of their Jewishness by some Ashkenazi circles.
The reason for this classification of all Mizrahim under Sephardi rite is that most Mizrahi communities use much the same religious rituals as Sephardim proper for historical reasons. The prevalence of the Sephardi rite among Mizrahim is partially a result of Sephardim (in the narrow sense) joining some Mizrahi communities following the 1492 Alhambra Decree, which expelled Jews from Sepharad (Spain and Portugal). Over the last few centuries, the previously distinctive rites of the Mizrahi communities were influenced, superimposed upon, or altogether replaced by the rite of the Sephardim, which was perceived as more prestigious. Even before this assimilation, the original rite of many Jewish Oriental communities was already closer to the Sephardi rite than to the Ashkenazi one. For this reason, "Sephardim" has come to mean not only "Spanish Jews" proper but "Jews of the Spanish rite," just as "Ashkenazim" is used for "Jews of the German rite," whether or not their families originate in Germany.
Many of the Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain resettled in countries in the Arab world such as Syria and Morocco. In Syria, most eventually intermarried with, and assimilated into, the larger established communities of Musta'rabim and Mizrahim. In some North African countries, such as Morocco, Sephardi Jews came in greater numbers, and so largely contributed to the Jewish settlements that the pre-existing Jews were assimilated by the more recently arrived Sephardi Jews. Either way, this assimilation, combined with the use of the Sephardi rite, led to the popular designation and conflation of most non-Ashkenazi Jewish communities from Western Asia and North Africa as "Sephardi rite", whether or not they were descended from Spanish Jews, which is what the terms "Sephardi Jews" and "Sfaradim" properly implied when used in the ethnic as opposed to the religious sense.