About Jewishness

The mix of Jewish cultures

Mizrahi Jews or Mizrahim, also referred to as Edot HaMizrach (Communities of the East) are Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus. The term Mizrahi is used in Israel in the language of politics, media and some social scientists for Jews from the Arab world and adjacent, primarily countries. This includes Iraqi Jews, Syrian Jews, Lebanese Jews, Yemenite Jews, Persian Jews, Afghan Jews, Bukharian Jews, Maghrebi Jews, Berber Jews, Kurdish Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews and Ethiopian Jews. It would also include the Jews of India, Pakistan, and Baghdadi Jews who settled in the last few centuries (in contrast to Jewish communities of the Indian subcontinent established millennia earlier). The Mizrahim often integrated closely with the communities they lived in, and a great deal of cultural exchange between the Mizrahim and native populations occurred.
Musta'arabi Jews, (Musta'arabim or Mista'arevim in Hebrew), was a term used to designate Arabic-speaking Jews (today termed Mizrahi Jews) who lived in the Arab world prior to the arrival and integration of Sephardi Jews (Jews from Spain and Portugal) following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Following the expulsion, Sephardi exiles moved into the Middle East (among other places around the world), and settled amongs their Musta'arabi co-religionists.
Despite their heterogeneous origins, Mizrahi Jews generally practise rites identical or similar to traditional Sephardic Judaism, although with some differences among the minhagim of the particular communities. This has resulted in a conflation of terms, particularly in Israel, and in religious usage, where "Sephardi" is used in a broad sense to include Mizrahi Jews as well as Sephardim proper. Indeed, from the point of view of the official Israeli rabbinate, the Mizrahi rabbis in Israel are under the jurisdiction of the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel who, in most cases, is a Mizrahi Jew. The unique nature of the Mizrahim has thus been diluted by people who lump the Mizrahi Jews in with the Sephardi Jews, a culturally distinct Jewish population.

The Old Yishuv (Ha-Yishuv ha-Yashan) refers to the Jewish community that lived in Israel from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE to the First Aliyah in 1881, prior to the onset of Zionist immigration.
The Old Yishuv was composed primarily of three elements: the Mista'arevim (indigenous Jews who had never left the land), the Sephardim (Jews with an extended history in Spain and Portugal, mostly expelled in 1492, and those descended from these) and the Ashkenazim (Jews with an extended history in Germany, Poland and Russia, and those descended from these).
The Old Yishuv dwelled mainly in the Four Holy Cities: Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias and Hebron. Smaller communities also existed in Jaffa, Haifa, Peki'in, Acre, Shechem, Shfaram and until 1779, in Gaza. Petah Tikva, although established in 1878 by the Old Yishuv, nevertheless was also supported by the arriving Zionists. Rishon LeZion, the first settlement founded by the Hovevei Zion in 1882, could be considered the true beginning of the New Yishuv.

Early settlers
Maimonides traveled from Spain to Morocco and Egypt, and lived briefly in Israel (after 1178), then returned and settled in Egypt. The aliyah of a group of 300 Jews headed by the Tosafists from England and France in 1211 struggled very hard upon arrival in Israel, as they had no financial support and no prospect of making a living. The vast majority of the settlers were wiped out by the Crusaders who arrived in 1219, and the few survivors were allowed to live only in Acre. Their descendants blended with the original Jewish residents, called Musta'arabim or Maghrebim, but more precisely Mashriqes (Murishkes).
In 1260 Rabbi Yechiel of Paris arrived in Israel along with his son and a large group of followers, settling in Acre. There he established the Talmudic academy Midrash haGadol d'Paris. He is believed to have died there between 1265 and 1268, and is buried near Haifa, at Mount Carmel.
Nahmanides arrived in 1267 and settled in Acre. In 1488, when Rabbi Ovadiya from arrived in the Holy Land and sent back letters regularly to his father in Italy, many in the diaspora came to regard living in Israel as feasible.

Exile from Spain
In 1492 and again in 1498, when the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal respectively, some took it as a call from heaven to return to their homeland, Israel. Don Joseph Nasi succeeded in resettling Tiberias and Safed in 1561 with Sephardic Jews, many of them former Marranos. By the early 16th century, Safed had become a center of Kabbalah, inhabited by important rabbis and scholars. Among them were Rabbi Yakov bi Rav, Rabbi Moshe Cordevero, Rabbi Yosef Karo, and the Arizal. At this time there was a small community in Jerusalem headed by Rabbi Levi ibn Haviv also known as the Mahralbach. Rabbi Yeshaye Horowitz, the Shelah Hakadosh, arrived in 1620.

Rabbi Yehuda he-Hasid
In 1700, a group of over 1,500 Ashkenazi Jews set out for Israel to settle in Jerusalem. At that time, the Jewish population of the Old City was primarily Sephardi: 200 Ashkenazi Jews versus a Sephardi community of 1,000. These Ashkenazi new immigrants heeded the call of a Rabbi, a Maggid of Shedlitz, Poland who went from town to town advocating a return to Israel to redeem its soil.
Almost a third of the group died of hardship and illness during the long journey. Upon their arrival in the Holy Land, they immediately went to Jerusalem. Within days, their leader, Rabbi Yehuda he-Hasid, died. They borrowed money from local Arabs for the construction of a synagogue but soon ran out of funds and borrowed more money at very high rates of interest. In 1720, when they were unable to repay their debts, Arab creditors broke into the synagogue, set it on fire, and destroyed their homes. The Jews fled the city and over the next century, any Jew dressed in Ashkenazi garb was a target of attack. Some of the Ashkenazi Jews who remained began to dress like Sephardi Jews. One known example is Rabbi Abraham Gershon of Kitov.

Hasidim and Perushim
In the 18th century, groups of Hasidim and Perushim settled in Israel. In 1764 Rabbi Nachman of Horodenka, a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov settled in Tiberias. According to "Aliyos to Eretz Yisrael," he was already in Israel in 1750. In 1777, the Hasidic leaders Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk and Rabbi Avraham of Kaliski, disciples of the Maggid of Mezeritch settled there. Misnagdim began arriving in 1780. Most of them settled in Safed or Tiberias, but a few established an Ashkenazi community in Jerusalem, rebuilding the ruins of the Hurvat Yehudah He-Hasid (the destroyed synagogue of Judah He-Hasid). Starting in 1830, about twenty disciples of the Chasam Sofer settled in Israel; almost all of them in Jerusalem.

Earthquake in Safed
Finally, the Galilee earthquake of 1837 destroyed Safed, killed thousands of its residents, and contributed to the reconstitution of Jerusalem as the main center of the Old Yishuv.

By the early 1950s, virtually the entire Jewish community of Kurdistan—a rugged, mostly mountainous region comprising parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and the Caucasus, where Jews had lived since antiquity—relocated to Israel. The vast majority of Kurdish Jews, who were primarily concentrated in northern Iraq, left Kurdistan in the mass aliyah (emigration to Israel) of 1950-51. This ended thousands of years of Jewish history in what had been Assyria and Babylonia.
In 2007, an important book came out, by Mordechai Zaken, describing the unique relationship between Jews in urban and rural Kurdistan and the tribal society under whose patronage the Jews lived for hundreds of years. Tribal chieftains, or aghas, granted patronage to the Jews who needed protection in the wild tribal region of Kurdistan; the Jews gave their chieftains dues, gifts and services. The text provides numerous tales and examples about the skills, maneuvers and innovations used by kurdistani Jews in their daily life to confront their abuse and extortion by greedy chieftains and tribesmen. The text also tells the stories of Kurdish chieftains who saved and protected the Jews unconditionally.

Post-1948 dispersal
After establishment of the state of Israel and the following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, most Mizrahi Jews (900,000) were either expelled by their Arab rulers or chose to leave and emigrated to Israel. Roughly half of Israeli Jews are of Mizrahi origin. Political tensions led many Arab nations to push their Jewish populations to relocate, ignoring the fact that many of these individuals had ancient family ties to the region.
Anti-Jewish actions by Arab governments in the 1950s and 1960s, including the expulsion of 25,000 Mizrahi Jews from Egypt after the 1956 Suez Crisis, led to the overwhelming majority of Mizrahim leaving Arab countries. They became refugees. Most went to Israel. Many Moroccan and Algerian Jews went to France. Thousands of Lebanese, Syrian and Egyptian Jews emigrated to the United States.
Today, as many as 40,000 Mizrahim still remain in communities scattered throughout the non-Arab , primarily in Iran, but also Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Turkey. There are few remaining in the Arab world. About 5,000 remain in Morocco and fewer than 2,000 in Tunisia. Other countries with remnants of ancient Jewish communities with official recognition, such as Lebanon, have 1,000 or fewer Jews. A trickle of emigration continues, mainly to Israel and the United States. A number have been arrested, mostly for alleged connections with Israel and the United States. Some have been executed, with religious intolerance often cited as the main contributing factor.

Rachel Shabi writes, "One of the most striking sentiments expressed by Mizrahis in Israel is a sense of disbelief. Some of these Jewish migrants from Arab countries are still stunned at the level of ignorance and prejudice that greeted them in the new Israel. For some reason, their new Jewish co-nationalists – who often came from the ghettos of Eastern Europe – thought the Mizrahis were backward and inferior, or, as Lyn Julius puts it, "badly educated" and "unwashed".
The Europeans couldn't get their heads around the fact of Mizrahis being poets or communists, driving cars or using toilets. How could they not know, wondered the Mizrahis, about the manner of life in Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo or Casablanca?
What was at first a sense of shock swiftly turned into despair, as Mizrahis understood that the prevailing preconceptions among those in power would shape social status in Israel...
Israel has a particular narrative about the "ingathering of the exiles", the Jewish migrants that arrived after its creation in 1948 from all corners of the world. The talk is of equality, melting pots and a "new Israeli", an amalgam of all those composite cultures. But in reality, Mizrahi culture was, and still is, considered to be an oxymoron. It was channelled into harmless outlets such as cuisine, craftwork and folklore – inconsequential gloss, the presence of which could then be used to bat off complaints of underrepresentation.
Meanwhile, proper, high culture is maintained as a European preserve."

Letter from the Mizrahi population of Israel to president Obama of the U.S.A.:

SIDBAR
Saturday, June 13, 2009
A New Spirit – An open letter from Israeli Descendants of the Countries of Islam
We, the daughters and sons of parents who immigrated to Israel from Arab and Muslim countries, hereby express our support for the new spirit presented by president Obama in his Cairo speech. A spirit of reconciliation, realistic vision, striving for justice and dignity, respect for different religions, cultures and human beings, whoever and wherever they are.
We were born in Israel and we are Israelis. Our country is important to us, and we would like to see it secure, just, and prosperous for the benefit of its inhabitants. Yet, the recent conflict into which we were born cannot erase the long history of hundreds and thousands of years, during which our parents and ancestors lived in Muslim and Arab countries. Not only they have lived in the region from time immemorial, but were also part of the fabric of daily life and have contributed to the development of the region and its culture.
Nowadays, the cultures of the lands of Islam, Middle East, and the Arab world, are all still part of our identity; a part which we cannot, and do not wish to repress nor uproot.
Surely, the Jews living in Muslim countries endured some difficult times. Nevertheless, those painful moments should not conceal nor erase the well known and documented history of shared life. Muslim rule over the Jews was much more tolerant and lenient compared with non-Muslim countries. The fate of Jews in Muslim regions cannot be compared with the tragic fate of Jews in other regions, Europe in particular.
One can view the last decades as a period during which a deep chasm has been opened between the Jews and Israel and the Arab and Muslim world.
We however, prefer to perceive these last decades as a painful yet temporary crack in a history that goes longer than that. We have a shared past and a shared future. Thus, when we look at the map, we see Israel as part of the Middle East, and not solely from a geographical perspective.
Judaism and Islam are not far apart from religious, spiritual, historical and cultural point of views. The alliance between these two religions dates back many generations. Yet the memory of this partnership and the unique history of Jews originated from the Muslim and Arab world (which today constitutes 50% of the Jewish population in Israel!) has unfortunately faded, both in Israel as well as in the majority of the Muslim world. In the necessary reconciliation process between West and East, oriental Jews can and should embody a live bridge of remembrance, healing and partnership.
From our point of view the rift between Israel/Jews and the Arab/Muslim world cannot last forever, it is splitting our identities and our souls. As for the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we hope that a fair solution of mutual respect and mutual recognition will be reached very soon. A solution that considers the hopes, fears and pains of the Palestinian side, as well as those of the Israeli side.
We therefore, express our support for the new spirit set forth by President Obama in Cairo. We wish to join the vision for a future in which bridges of mutual respect and humanity will replace walls of suspicion, aggression and hatred. All this in the spirit of justice and humanism shared by both Judaism and Islam.