Mizrahi Jews
Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: יהודי המִזְרָח), also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) or Mizrachi (מִזְרָחִי) and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת-הַמִּזְרָח, lit.'Communities of the East'),[3]
are a grouping of Jewish communities comprising those who remained in the Land of Israel and
those who existed in diaspora throughout and around the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
from biblical times into the modern era.
Mizrahi is a political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel.
It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew and refers to Oriental Jews.[4][5]
In current usage, the term Mizrahi is almost exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa; in this classification are the descendants of Mashriqi Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern countries, such as Egyptian Jews,
Turkish Jews, and
as well as the descendants of Maghrebi Jews who had lived in North African countries, such as
Moroccan Jews, and
Tunisian Jews.[6]
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 the methods by which Jews in diaspora were to be returned to the Land of Israel (then under the British Mandate of Palestine) after the Holocaust.[7]
Mizrahi often also includes Jewish communities from Central Asia[8] and the Caucasus[9] such as the Persian Jews, Afghan Jews, Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the Mountain Jews from Dagestan and Azerbaijan. While these communities have traditionally spoken Judaeo-Iranian languages such as Juhuri and Bukharian, some of their descendants are also widely fluent in Russian due to those countries' existence as republics of the former Soviet Union.
Before the declaration of independence of the State of Israel in 1948, the various now-Mizrahi Jewish communities did not identify themselves as a distinctive Jewish subgroup,[9][10] and instead many characterized themselves as Sephardi Jews as they largely followed the Sephardic customs and traditions of Judaism (with some differences in minhagim between particular communities). The original Sephardi Jewish community was formed by the Jewish diaspora population in the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), from where they were exiled in 1492; the exodus from Spain led many Sephardim to settle in areas where Mizrahi communities already existed.[9] These phenomena have resulted in a conflation of terms, particularly in official Israeli ethnic and religious terminology, with Sephardi being used in a broad sense and including Middle Eastern Jews, North African Jews, as well as Sephardim proper from Southern Europe around the Mediterranean Basin.[10][11][9] Per a decree by the authority of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, any rabbis of Mizrahi origin in Israel are under the jurisdiction of the order of Sephardi chief rabbis.[11]
Following the First Arab–Israeli War, over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were expelled or evacuated from Arab and Muslim-majority countries from 1948 until the early 1980s.[12][13] As of 2005, 61 percent of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Mizrahi/Sephardi ancestry.[14][15]