Mizrahi Jews

Based on Wikipedia: Mizrahi Jews

Here's a riddle that tells you everything about the politics of identity: What do you call a Jew from Morocco? The answer depends entirely on who's asking, when they're asking, and what they're trying to prove.

Before 1948, there was no such thing as a "Mizrahi Jew." The term simply didn't exist as a category of identity. Jews living in Baghdad, Cairo, Sana'a, and Casablanca didn't wake up thinking of themselves as members of some unified "Eastern" bloc. They were Iraqi Jews. Egyptian Jews. Yemenite Jews. Moroccan Jews. Each community had its own centuries-old traditions, its own relationship to the surrounding culture, its own dialect of prayer and way of preparing Shabbat dinner.

Then Israel was founded, and suddenly bureaucrats needed boxes to tick.

The Invention of "Eastern"

The word "Mizrahi" comes from the Hebrew word for "east" — mizrach. It sounds straightforward enough. But here's where it gets strange: many of the Jews labeled "Mizrahi" came from places west of Israel. Morocco sits at roughly the same longitude as Portugal. Algeria and Tunisia are hardly "eastern" from any Mediterranean perspective. The Jews who actually lived east of Central Europe — the shtetl dwellers of Poland and Russia, those Eastern European peasants from rural villages — were never called Mizrahi. They were Ashkenazi, a term derived from the Hebrew word for Germany.

The Israeli novelist Sami Michael, himself an Iraqi Jew, has called this labeling scheme what it is: a political fiction. He argues that the category was invented by the dominant Ashkenazi establishment — specifically the Mapai political party that controlled Israel's early government — to create a permanent "other." By lumping together Yemenite Jews, Persian Jews, Moroccan Jews, and dozens of other distinct communities into one undifferentiated mass, the label effectively erased their individual histories while positioning them as perpetual outsiders to European Jewish power.

Michael doesn't mince words. He notes that when he writes novels, critics call his work "ethnic literature." When Ashkenazi authors write about their history, it's just called literature. No qualifier needed.

What the Communities Actually Share — And What They Don't

The communities grouped under the Mizrahi umbrella do share some genuine connections, though these are more complicated than the label suggests.

Many trace their origins to the Babylonian Exile — one of the most formative events in Jewish history. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the First Temple in Jerusalem and deported the Judean elite to Babylon, in what is now Iraq. This wasn't just a military defeat; it transformed Judaism itself. The exiled Jews developed new institutions to preserve their identity without a homeland or a temple: the synagogue, the rabbinate, and eventually the Talmud itself. When Cyrus the Great of Persia conquered Babylon and permitted Jews to return to Jerusalem, many stayed behind. Their descendants formed the backbone of Jewish communities across the Persian and later Islamic empires.

Iraqi Jews, Iranian Jews, Bukharian Jews from Central Asia, Kurdish Jews, Afghan Jews, Mountain Jews from the Caucasus, Georgian Jews — all can trace threads back to this Babylonian origin. So can Yemenite Jews, though their traditions developed in such isolation that they preserved practices lost everywhere else, like a distinctive pronunciation of Hebrew that linguists believe may be closest to how the language sounded in ancient times.

But then there's another layer entirely.

When Spain Came to the East

In 1492, the same year Columbus sailed for the Americas, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella issued the Alhambra Decree, ordering all Jews to convert to Christianity or leave Spain. Portugal followed with its own expulsion in 1497. These Jews — called Sephardim, from the Hebrew word for Spain — scattered across the Mediterranean world. Many settled in the Ottoman Empire, which actively welcomed them. Others ended up in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria.

What happened next varied dramatically by location.

In some places, like Syria, the Sephardic refugees eventually intermarried with and assimilated into the existing Jewish communities. The older populations, sometimes called Musta'arabim (meaning "those who became like Arabs"), had lived there for centuries. The newcomers brought Spanish customs and Ladino — a Jewish language based on medieval Spanish — but over generations, the communities merged.

In Morocco, the dynamic was reversed. So many Sephardic Jews arrived that they became the dominant force. The pre-existing Moroccan Jewish communities largely adopted Sephardic practices rather than the other way around.

Either way, the result was a tangle of identity that defies simple categorization. Are Moroccan Jews "Mizrahi" or "Sephardic"? The answer is: yes. Both. Neither. It depends on whether you're talking about ancestry, religious practice, or political taxonomy.

The Religious Complication

This brings us to one of the most confusing aspects of Jewish ethnic terminology: the word "Sephardic" means two completely different things depending on context.

In the ethnic sense, Sephardic refers to Jews descended from the Iberian Peninsula — those whose ancestors lived in Spain or Portugal before the expulsion. They have distinctive surnames, sometimes preserved Ladino language, and specific cultural traditions.

In the religious sense, "Sephardic rite" refers to a style of Jewish liturgy and practice that developed in Spain but spread far beyond it. This includes everything from the order of prayers to the melodies used in synagogue services to rulings on Jewish law. Over centuries, the Sephardic rite came to be seen as more prestigious in many Mizrahi communities, and local practices were gradually replaced or modified to conform to it.

Today, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel — the official religious authority — uses "Sephardic" as a catch-all for everyone who isn't Ashkenazi. The Sephardic Chief Rabbi has jurisdiction over Mizrahi communities regardless of their actual origin. Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews, Persian Jews, Ethiopian Jews — all fall under "Sephardic" authority for official purposes, even when their ancestors never set foot in Spain.

This has struck some community members as both historically absurd and politically convenient for those in power.

Languages of the Diaspora

One way to grasp the diversity of Mizrahi communities is through their languages.

Throughout the Arab world — Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria — Mizrahi Jews spoke Arabic. But not standard Arabic. They spoke distinctively Jewish dialects, written with Hebrew characters, incorporating Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary, and sometimes preserving archaic features lost in the surrounding spoken Arabic. These Judeo-Arabic dialects were used for everything from business correspondence to biblical commentary to personal letters.

Kurdish Jews, meanwhile, spoke varieties of Aramaic — the same language family as the Jewish prayer books and the Talmud. Their dialects were related to but distinct from the Aramaic spoken by Assyrian Christians, another ancient community tracing roots back millennia in Mesopotamia. When Kurdish Jews speak of their mother tongue, they're speaking a living descendant of the language Jesus probably used in daily conversation.

Persian Jews spoke Judeo-Persian, while Bukharian Jews in Central Asia developed their own related dialect called Bukhori. Mountain Jews in the Caucasus spoke Judeo-Tat. Georgian Jews spoke Georgian with their own Hebrew-influenced vocabulary.

Each of these languages represented not just a mode of communication but an entire culture — literature, poetry, folk songs, jokes, proverbs, and ways of thinking that developed over centuries. When Mizrahi Jews emigrated to Israel in the mid-twentieth century, these languages largely disappeared within a generation or two, replaced by Hebrew.

The Great Departure

The founding of Israel in 1948 and the subsequent Arab-Israeli War set in motion one of the largest population transfers in modern Jewish history.

Between 1948 and the early 1980s, more than 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews left Arab and Muslim-majority countries. The circumstances varied enormously. Some fled violence and persecution. Some were expelled outright by hostile governments. Some left under organized emigration programs, pulled by Zionist ideology and the promise of a Jewish state. Some departed communities that had become untenable as Arab nationalism intensified and Jews were increasingly seen as a fifth column loyal to Israel.

The 1956 Suez Crisis marked a turning point. When Israel, Britain, and France attacked Egypt, the Egyptian government responded by expelling about 25,000 Jews. This exodus helped precipitate the larger departure of Jews from across the Arab world.

Many went to Israel, where they encountered a society dominated by Ashkenazi Jews who had arrived earlier and held most positions of power. The culture shock was immense. Mizrahi Jews arriving from Baghdad or Casablanca — cities with sophisticated Jewish intellectual traditions spanning centuries — found themselves housed in tent camps, processed by bureaucrats who couldn't distinguish Iraq from Iran, and often treated as primitive arrivals in need of modernization.

Others scattered elsewhere. Moroccan and Algerian Jews often went to France, where they became the majority of the French Jewish population. Lebanese, Syrian, and Egyptian Jews established communities in the United States, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico. The largest Jewish community in Brooklyn's Syrian enclave traces to Jews who left Aleppo and Damascus.

The Politics of Recognition

In Israel today, about 45 percent of Jewish citizens identify as either Mizrahi or Sephardic. This makes them not a minority but something approaching half the Jewish population. Yet the early decades of Israeli history saw systematic discrimination in housing, education, and economic opportunity. Mizrahi neighborhoods received less investment. Mizrahi children were disproportionately tracked into vocational rather than academic education. Mizrahi cultural practices were dismissed or suppressed.

The Mizrahi activist movement that emerged in the 1970s and grew through the 1990s sought to challenge this marginalization. Activists organized, wrote, produced music, and built political power. The rise of the Shas political party — an ultra-Orthodox party with Mizrahi leadership and constituency — represented one path to influence, though critics argued it channeled Mizrahi grievances into religious conservatism rather than broader social justice.

Interestingly, many of the most prominent Mizrahi activists came from North African backgrounds — communities that, as noted earlier, were traditionally called "Westerners" (Maghrebi) rather than "Easterners" in Arabic. The term Mizrahi thus ended up being championed by people from the West organizing under a label meaning "East."

Some Mizrahi intellectuals reject the label entirely. They prefer to identify by their specific country of origin — as Moroccan Jews, Iraqi Jews, Yemenite Jews — rather than accepting an umbrella term they see as erasing their distinct histories. Others embrace the broader category as a source of solidarity and political power, arguing that whatever their differences, Mizrahim share a common experience of marginalization in Israeli society.

Dhimmis: Second-Class Citizens in the Islamic World

Understanding Mizrahi history requires understanding the legal framework that governed Jewish life under Islamic rule for over a millennium.

Jews living in Muslim-majority societies were classified as dhimmis — a protected but subordinate status available to "People of the Book" (Jews and Christians, who shared scriptural traditions with Islam). As dhimmis, Jews could practice their religion, maintain their communal institutions, and conduct their businesses. They were not forced to convert. This made the Islamic world, for much of medieval history, considerably more hospitable to Jews than Christian Europe, where persecution, expulsion, and massacre were recurring features.

But dhimmi status came with restrictions. Jews paid special taxes. They were often required to wear identifying clothing. They could not build synagogues taller than mosques. They faced various social prohibitions that marked them as inferior. The specifics varied enormously by time and place — life for Jews in medieval Baghdad was very different from life in 18th-century Yemen — but the underlying principle remained: Jews belonged to a permanent underclass.

Despite this subordinate legal status, Jews in the Islamic world often achieved remarkable cultural and economic success. They served as physicians, merchants, translators, and scholars. Some of the greatest works of Jewish philosophy, including Maimonides' "Guide for the Perplexed," were written in Arabic by Jews living under Muslim rule. Jews maintained strong communal bonds and rich religious lives even while being officially marked as outsiders.

This complicated legacy — of belonging and exclusion, of flourishing under constraint, of home and marginalization — shapes how Mizrahi Jews remember their pre-Israel lives. For some, the departure from Arab lands was an exile from beloved homelands. For others, it was an escape from impossible circumstances. Most honest accounts acknowledge both elements.

A Note on Names

Names carry politics. The surname Mizrahi — meaning "Eastern" — is one of the most commonly changed names in Israel. People who bear it sometimes prefer to adopt surnames that don't mark them quite so obviously, that don't immediately signal their categorization in Israel's ethnic taxonomy.

In Jerusalem, there's an organization called "The Western Jewish Diaspora Council," founded in 1860 by Jews from North Africa. Note the word: Western. To these Jews, arriving from Morocco and Tunisia, the lands of the setting sun, the Maghreb, they were obviously Westerners. The name persists as a reminder that East and West depend entirely on where you're standing.

And perhaps that's the most important thing to understand about the term Mizrahi: it doesn't describe an objective geographic or cultural reality. It describes a political relationship — a category created by some Jews to organize other Jews, a label that obscures as much as it reveals. The communities it encompasses share some things: the experience of living as minorities in Muslim-majority societies, the upheaval of the mid-twentieth century exodus, and the ongoing negotiation of identity in Israel. But they also carry distinct histories, languages, and traditions that resist easy generalization.

When Noam Shuster-Eliassi identifies as a Jewish-Iranian Israeli, she's invoking one thread of this vast tapestry. Her Iranian heritage connects her to a Persian Jewish tradition stretching back to Cyrus the Great, to the Book of Esther, to communities that predated Islam by a thousand years. Her Israeli identity connects her to a state that categorized her ancestors as Mizrahi upon arrival and has been arguing about what that means ever since.

The riddle from the beginning has no single answer. A Jew from Morocco might be Mizrahi to Israeli bureaucrats, Sephardic to rabbinical authorities, Maghrebi in historical terms, simply Jewish in their own understanding, and specifically Moroccan Jewish to family members who remember the streets of Casablanca or Fez. All these descriptions capture something true. None of them captures everything.