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Mizrahi Jews
יהודים מזרחים | |
|---|---|
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| Languages | |
| Traditional: Hebrew, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Bukharian, Judaeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, Judaeo-Aramaic, Judaeo-Georgian, Judaeo-Tat, Judaeo-Iranian (Judaeo-Persian), Syriac Modern: Israeli Hebrew, Mizrahi Hebrew (liturgical), French, English, Russian, Arabic, Georgian, Turkish and Azerbaijani | |
| Religion | |
| Judaism | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| Sephardic Jews, Ashkenazi Jews, other Jewish ethnic divisions and Samaritans; various Middle Eastern ethnic groups, Arab Jews |
| Part of a series on |
| Jews and Judaism |
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Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: יהודי המִזְרָח), also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) in plural and Mizrahi (מִזְרָחִי) in singular, and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת־הַמִּזְרָח, lit. 'Communities of the East'),[1] are terms used in Israeli discourse to refer to a grouping of Jewish communities that lived in the Muslim world. Mizrahi is a political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew.[2][3]
The term Mizrahi is almost exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities from North Africa, Central Asia, West Asia, and parts of the North Caucasus.[4] This includes Yemenite Jews, Kurdish Jews, Turkish Jews, Egyptian Jews, Syrian Jews, Lebanese Jews, Iraqi Jews, Bahraini Jews, Algerian Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, Tunisian Jews, Iranian Jews, Bukharian Jews, Afghan Jews, Mountain Jews, and Georgian Jews.[5][6][7][8]
Indian Jews are sometimes labeled as Mizrahi, though members of the community have identified themselves as a separate category, as South Asian.[9]
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 of the diaspora were to be returned to the Land of Israel (then under the British Mandate for Palestine) after the Holocaust.[10]
An earlier cultural community of southern and eastern Jews were the Sephardi Jews. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the various current communities of Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a distinctive Jewish subgroup,[6][11] and many considered themselves Sephardis, as they largely followed the Sephardic customs and traditions 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 Mizrahi communities already existed.[6] 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 Middle Eastern and North African Jews, as well as Sephardim proper from Southern Europe around the Mediterranean Basin.[11][12][6] The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has placed rabbis of Mizrahi origin in Israel under the jurisdiction of the Sephardi chief rabbis.[12]
Following the First Arab–Israeli War, over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were expelled or evacuated from Arab and Muslim-majority countries between 1948 and the early 1980s.[13][14] A 2018 statistic found that 45% of Jewish Israelis identified as either Mizrahi or Sephardic.[15]
- ^ "Mizrahi Jews". Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
- ^ Shohat, Ella (1999). "The Invention of the Mizrahim". Journal of Palestine Studies. 29 (1): 5–20. doi:10.2307/2676427. JSTOR 2676427.
- ^ Cohen, Hadar (29 November 2022). "Mizrahi Remembrance Month: Reclaiming our stories".
- ^ Shohat, Ella (May 2001). "Rupture And Return: A Mizrahi Perspective On The Zionist Discourse". The MIT Electronic Journal of Middle East Studies. Archived from the original (DOC) on 12 May 2004. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
- ^ "Who Are the Mizrahi (Oriental/Arab) Jews? - Israeli-Palestinian - ProCon.org". Israeli-Palestinian. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- ^ a b c d "Mizrahi Jews in Israel". My Jewish Learning. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- ^ "Ancient Jewish History: Jews of the Middle East". JVL.
- ^ Mazzig, Hen (20 May 2019). "Op-Ed: No, Israel isn't a country of privileged and powerful white Europeans". Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 1 December 2023.
- ^ Birvadker, Oshrit (17 December 2021). "Between East and the Middle East: The Integration Story of the Indian Jewish Community in Israel". jstribune.
- ^ Eyal, Gil (2006), "The "One Million Plan" and the Development of a Discourse about the Absorption of the Jews from Arab Countries", The Disenchantment of the Orient: Expertise in Arab Affairs and the Israeli State, Stanford University Press, pp. 86–89, ISBN 978-0-8047-5403-3: "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 Mizrahi Jews in the current sense of this term, as an ethnic group distinct from European-born Jews, was invented."
- ^ a b katzcenterupenn. "What Do You Know? Sephardi vs. Mizrahi". Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- ^ a b "Sephardi | Meaning, Customs, History, & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 3 March 2021.
- ^ Hoge, Warren (5 November 2007). "Group seeks justice for 'forgotten' Jews". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 12 January 2019.
- ^ Aharoni, Ada (2003). "The Forced Migration of Jews from Arab Countries". Peace Review. 15: 53–60. doi:10.1080/1040265032000059742. S2CID 145345386.
- ^ "Ethnic origin and identity in the Jewish population of Israel" (PDF). Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. 27 June 2018. Retrieved 26 September 2019.
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