NORTH AFRICAN SEPHARDIM
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Sephardic JewsSephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendants. The term "Sephardic" comes from Sepharad, the Hebrew word for Iberia. These communities flourished for centuries in Iberia until they were expelled in the late 15th century. Over time, "Sephardic" has also come to refer more broadly to Jews, particularly in the Middle East and North Africa, who adopted Sephardic religious customs and legal traditions, often due to the influence of exiles. In some cases, Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Sephardic communities and adopted their liturgy are also included under this term. Today, Sephardic Jews form a major component of world Jewry, with the largest population living in Israel. The earliest documented Jewish presence in the Iberian Peninsula dates to the Roman period, beginning in the first centuries CE. After facing persecution under the Pagan and later Christian Visigothic Kingdom, Jewish communities flourished for centuries under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus following the Umayyad conquest (711–720s), a period often seen as a golden age. Their status declined under the radical Almoravid and Almohad dynasties and during the Christian Reconquista. In 1391, anti-Jewish riots in Castile and Aragon led to massacres and mass forced conversions. In 1492, the Alhambra Decree by the Catholic Monarchs expelled Jews from Spain, and in 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal issued a similar edict. These events led to migrations, forced conversions, and executions. Sephardic Jews dispersed widely: many found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, settling in cities such as Istanbul, Salonica, and İzmir; others relocated to North African centers like Fez, Algiers, and Tunis; Italian ports including Venice and Livorno; and parts of the Balkans, the Levant (notably Safed), and the Netherlands (notably Amsterdam). Smaller communities also emerged in France, England, and the Americas, where Sephardim often played key roles in commerce and diplomacy. Historically, the vernacular languages of the Sephardic Jews and their descendants have been variants of either Spanish, Portuguese, or Catalan, though they have also adopted and adapted other languages. The historical forms of Spanish that differing Sephardic communities spoke communally were related to the date of their departure from Iberia and their status at that time as either New Christians or Jews. Judaeo-Spanish and Judaeo-Portuguese, also called Ladino, is a Romance language derived from Old Spanish and Old Portuguese that was spoken by the eastern Sephardic Jews who settled in the Eastern Mediterranean after their expulsion from Spain in 1492; Haketia (also known as "Tetuani Ladino" in Algeria), an Arabic-influenced variety of Judaeo-Spanish, was spoken by North African Sephardic Jews who settled in the region after the 1492 Spanish expulsion. In 2015, more than five centuries after the expulsion, both Spain and Portugal enacted laws allowing Sephardic Jews who could prove their ancestral origins in those countries to apply for citizenship. The Spanish law that offered citizenship to descendants of Sephardic Jews expired in 2019, although subsequent extensions were granted by the Spanish government—due to the COVID-19 pandemic—in order to file pending documents and sign delayed declarations before a notary public in Spain. In the case of Portugal, the nationality law was modified in 2022 with very stringent requirements for new Sephardic applicants, effectively ending the possibility of successful applications without evidence of a personal travel history to Portugal—which is tantamount to prior permanent residence—or ownership of inherited property or concerns on Portuguese soil.
Maghrebi JewsSee Mizrahi Jews for more information about the Eastern Jews. Maghrebi Jews (מַגּרֶבִּים or מַאגרֶבִּים, Maghrebim), are a Jewish diaspora group with a long history in the Maghreb region of North Africa, which includes present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. These communities were established long before the Arab conquest, and continued to develop under Muslim rule during the Middle Ages. Maghrebi Jews represent the second-largest Jewish diaspora group, with their descendants forming a major part of the global Jewish population. Maghrebi Jews lived in multiple communities in North Africa for over 2,000 years, with the oldest Jewish communities present during Roman times and possibly as early as within Punic colonies of the Ancient Carthage period. Under early Muslim rule, Jews flourished in major urban centers across the region. However, they also faced periods of persecution, notably under the Almohads. Before and after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, many Sephardic Jews fleeing persecution settled in North Africa. Over time, Maghrebi Jews largely mixed with the newly arrived Sephardic Jews, and in most cases, they adopted the Sephardic Jewish identity. The mixed Maghrebi-Sephardic Jewish communities collapsed in the mid-20th century as part of the Jewish exodus from Arab countries, moving mostly to Israel, France, Canada and Venezuela. Today, descendants of Maghrebi-Sephardic Jews in Israel have largely embraced the modern Israeli Jewish identity and in many cases intermix with Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jewish communities there. Most of the Maghrebi-Sephardic Jews (Western Jews) also consider themselves as part of Mizrahi Jewish community (Eastern, or Babylonian Jews), even though there is no direct link between the two communities. They have similar histories of Arabic-speaking background and a parallel exodus and expulsion from Arab and Muslim countries: the Mizrahim left nations of the Middle East, and the Maghrebi-Sephardics left nations of North Africa in the mid-20th century. Among Arab countries, the largest Jewish community now exists in Morocco with about 2,000 Jews and in Tunisia about 1,000. The term Maghrebi Jews often refers to communities such as Moroccan Jews, Algerian Jews, Tunisian Jews, and Libyan Jews. The term Musta'arabi was also used by medieval Jewish authors to refer to Jews who had traditionally lived in the Maghreb. Due to proximity, the term 'Maghrebi Jews' sometimes refers to Egyptian Jews as well, though there are important cultural differences between the history of Egyptian and Maghrebi Jews.
Mizrahi JewsMizrahi 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'), 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. 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. 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 in large part from the Babylonian captivity. Yemenite Jews are also Mizrahi Jews, though 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 often labeled as Mizrahim, though these groups largely merged with the mass arrival of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian peninsula, following their expulsion in the late 15th century from Spain and Portugal. Magrebi is an Arabic term which translates to "Westerners." Indian Jews (Cochin Jews and Bene Israel) are sometimes labeled as Mizrahi, though members of the community have identified themselves 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 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. An earlier cultural community of southern and eastern Jews were the Sephardi Jews. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the ancestors of various current communities of Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a distinctive Jewish subgroup, 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 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 southern Europe 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. 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. A 2018 statistic found that 45% of Jewish Israelis identified as either Mizrahi or Sephardic.
Spanish and Portuguese JewsSpanish and Portuguese Jews, also called Western Sephardim, Iberian Jews, or Peninsular Jews, are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews who are largely descended from Jews who lived as New Christians in the Iberian Peninsula during the few centuries following the forced expulsion of unconverted Jews from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. They should therefore be distinguished both from the descendants of those expelled in 1492 and from the present-day Jewish communities of Spain and Portugal. The main present-day communities of Spanish and Portuguese Jews exist in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, and several other Jewish communities in the Americas have Spanish and Portuguese Jewish roots though they no longer follow the distinctive customs of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews.
Sephardic Bnei AnusimSephardic Bnei Anusim (Hebrew: בני אנוסים ספרדיים, Hebrew pronunciation: [ˈbne anuˈsim sfaraˈdijim], lit. "Children [of the] coerced [converted] Spanish [Jews]) is a modern term which is used to define the contemporary Christian descendants of an estimated quarter of a million 15th-century Sephardic Jews who were coerced or forced to convert to Catholicism during the 14th and 15th centuries in Spain and Portugal. The vast majority of conversos remained in Spain and Portugal, and their descendants, who number in the millions, live in both of these countries. The small minority of conversos who emigrated normally chose to emigrate to destinations where Sephardic communities already existed, particularly to the Ottoman Empire and North Africa, but some of them emigrated to more tolerant cities in Europe, where many of them immediately reverted to Judaism. In theory, very few of them would have traveled to Latin America with colonial expeditions, because only those Spaniards who could certify that they had no recent Muslim or Jewish ancestry were supposed to be allowed to travel to the New World. Recent genetic studies suggest that the arrival of the Sephardic ancestors of Latin American populations coincided with the initial colonization of Latin America, which suggests that significant numbers of recent converts were able to travel to the new world and contribute to the gene pool of modern Latin American populations despite an official prohibition on them doing so. In addition, later arriving Spanish immigrants would have themselves contributed additional converso ancestry in some parts of Latin America. The Bnei Anusim concept has gained some popularity in the Hispanic community in the American South West as well as in countries in Latin America. Thousands of Hispanics have expressed the belief that they are the descendants of conversos and many of them have expressed their desire to return to Judaism. Such a desire may probably be understood within the complex identity politics of both Latin and Anglo-America and their interplay with social mobility. Belief in converso identity is normally based on memories of family practices which may resemble perceptions or understandings of Jewish customs and religion. In addition, some have conducted internet genealogical research and have studied publicly available population genetics and atDNA analysis, leading them to their conclusions. Since the early 21st century, a growing number "of [Sephardic] Bnei Anusim have been established in Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Ecuador, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and in Sefarad (Iberia) itself" as "organized groups." Some members of these communities have formally reverted to Judaism, and they have become functional communities of public Judaizers. Although reversion to Judaism among these communities is largely a question of individual belief and interest because any knowledge of Jewish ancestry has generally been long lost over the past four centuries, two specific exceptions exist: The Xueta community of the island of Majorca in Spain and the Marrano community of Belmonte in Portugal. Both communities have practiced endogamy over generations, thus maintaining awareness of their Jewish heritage. In the case of the Xueta, they also suffered social stigma and discrimination well into the 20th century for their converso origin. The Jewish Agency for Israel estimates the Sephardic Bnei Anusim population to number in the millions. Although they are the least prominent of Sephardic descendants, Sephardic Bnei Anusim outnumber their Jewish-integrated Sephardic Jewish counterparts, which consist of Eastern Sephardim, North African Sephardim, and the ex-converso Western Sephardim. With up to 20% of Spain and Portugal's population and at least 10% of Latin America's Iberian-descended population estimated to have at least some Sephardic Jewish ancestry (90% of Latin America's modern population having at least partial Iberian ancestry, in the form of criollos, mestizos, and mulattos), the total population size of Sephardic Bnei Anusim (200 million) is not only several times larger than the combined population of Jewish-integrated Sephardic sub-groups, but also more than four times the size of the total world Jewish population as a whole. The latter encompasses Ashkenazi Jews, Mizrahi Jews and various other smaller groups.
North African SephardimNorth African Sephardim are a distinct sub-group of Sephardi Jews, who descend from exiled Iberian Jewish families of the late 15th century and North African Maghrebi Jewish communities. Since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 and the Jewish exodus from Arab and Muslim countries, most North African Sephardim have relocated to either Israel, France, the US and other countries. Several Iberian Jewish families also emigrated back to the Iberian Peninsula to form the core of the Jewish community of Gilbraltar. There are many Jewish communities in North of Africa, including the communities of the Maghreb, Egypt, and the Horn of Africa. However, it is generally agreed today that North African Sephardic communities include a fraction of those of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya due to their historical ties with Spain and the greater Iberian peninsula.
Eastern SephardimEastern Sephardim are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardic Jews mostly descended from Jewish families which were exiled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, following the Alhambra Decree of 1492 in Spain and a similar decree in Portugal five years later. This branch of descendants of Iberian Jews settled across the Eastern Mediterranean. Eastern Sephardim mostly settled in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, which included areas in West Asia (Middle East, Anatolia, etc.), the Balkans in Southern Europe, plus Egypt. For centuries, these Jews made up the majority of the population of Thessaloniki (now Greece) and were present in large numbers in Constantinople (now Istanbul, Turkey) and Sarajevo (in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina), all of which were located in the Ottoman-ruled parts of Europe. Some migrated farther east to the territories of the Ottoman Empire, settling among the long-established Arabic-speaking Jewish communities of Baghdad in Iraq, Damascus in Syria and Alexandria in Egypt. A few of the Eastern Sephardim followed the spice trade routes as far as the Malabar coast of southern India, where they settled among the established Cochin Jewish community, again, they imparted their culture and their customs to the local Jews. The presence of Sephardim and New Christians along the Malabar coast eventually aroused the ire of the Catholic Church, which then obtained permission from the Portuguese crown to establish the Goan Inquisition against the Sephardic Jews of India. In recent times, principally after 1948, most Eastern Sephardim have relocated to Israel, and others have relocated to the United States, France and Latin America.
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