Sephardic or Mizrahi?
by Rabbi Haim Ovadia*
How do you define a Jew who was born in Israel to parents who were born in Iraq? Sephardic? Iraqi? Mizrahi? And what if his mother was born in Baghdad and was brought to Israel when she was three weeks old, his father was born in the city of Samarah and then moved to Baghdad, and his maternal great-great-grandfather came from Syria to Baghdad in the 1700’s? This happens to be my family’s history, and when people ask me about my origin, I usually define myself as Sephardic. A couple of minutes into the conversation, however, someone will say “but you are not really Sephardic, you are Mizrahi, aren’t you?” – thus giving me an opportunity to teach some history, and to be more specific with definitions of identity.
My conversational partners are often surprised to hear that I dislike the term Mizrahi, and that it is a derogatory term coined in the 1950’s in Israel to mark the immigrants from Arab lands and from North Africa (note that I am not referring to North Africa as Arab lands, for reasons which will be explained later). I would then say that my theological worldview and religious culture are generally Sephardic, while my ethnic background, including language, cuisine, practices and rituals, is Baghdadi or Babylonian.
Let me explain what I mean by Sephardic theology. The communities in Spain started flourishing from the time of the Muslim conquest in the year 711, but until the 10th century they were still tethered to and influenced by the Torah centers in Babylonia [now in Iraq], led by the sages known as Geonim. When these communities became strong enough to break away from the Babylonian center, which was still active and significant for another 100-150 years, they maintained the theology of those centers.
The Spanish communities endured many crises and changes of government. Most significant among them were the invasion of fanatic Muslim warriors from Morocco, the Almoravid dynasty in the 11th C, the Almohad in the 12th C, and the ongoing campaign of returning Spanish kingdoms and principalities to Christian hands, which was known as the Reconquista (reconquering) and was completed shortly before Columbus’ voyage.
Under Christian rule, Jews had to defend their religion in public disputations, face the terrors of the Inquisition, and eventually choose between conversion to Christianity or expulsion. The famous expulsion of 1492, decreed by the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain (Los Reyes Católicos), was preceded by a pogrom against the Jews in 1391 that led to mass conversions. The Jews who fled Spain to Portugal in 1492 were expelled from that land in 1498 unless they converted. Hundreds of thousands of Jews left the Iberian Peninsula during those years and spread all over the world, bringing with them not only their culture but also their theology, which was largely informed by that of the Babylonian Geonim.
The fate of Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the new countries they now had to call home, as well as the level of integration with the local Jewish communities, was multifaceted and diverse. That immigration, however, and the Spanish influence that came with it, were not a completely new phenomenon, and in most of the exiles’ destinations there were already deep roots of Geonic and Sephardic heritage. From the seventh to the thirteenth century there was constant traffic and flow of information and knowledge between the centers in Iraq, North Africa, Spain and Egypt. They were also connected to the communities of Yemen, and the Jewish Iraqi merchants of the Raddhan region traveled to the Far East and to Europe regularly. Prominent Spanish families of rabbis, poets and translators, such as the Ibn Tibbon and the Kimhi families, fled Spain in the 11th - 12th centuries and settled in Narbonne, Provence. In the 12th century, thousands of Iraqi Jews migrated to Morocco, while others went eastward, towards Bukhara and the Caucasus.
What, then, is that unique heritage that can be called “Sephardic” and what is its source? How does it differ from Ashkenazi heritage? Why are the terms Mizrahi Jew or Arab Jew incorrect when describing Jews who are neither Ashkenazi nor from the Iberian Peninsula?
Let us be honest and admit that we are not looking for a taxonomic system which will file and classify all Jews, much in the way Carl Linnaeus classified the natural world under kingdom, class, order, genus and species. If that is what we want, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and Mizrahi will not suffice, because each era in our history introduces variations which will not fall under those categories, not to mention that the Sephardic/Ashkenazi dichotomy did not exist until the turn of the first millennium CE. Where is one to put the Jews of Persia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Italy, China and India, for example? And how would one define the descendants of migrants from different origins? It would be more accurate to state that we are discussing a binary system which is largely rooted in Jewish religious literature, and which divides it into two main schools of thought.
A clue to the idea that the main markers of distinction between Sephardic and Ashkenazi have to do with theology, the approach to Torah study and Halakhic orientation, rather than country of origin, can be found in this phrase I picked at random from R. Y. M. Epstein’s Arokh HaShulhan (Orah Haim, 11):
אחד מגדולי ספרד, הגאון חיד"א בברכ"י, העיד בשם בן הרח"ו שהיה תלמיד מובהק של האר"י ז"ל
[One of the great sages of Sepharad, the renowned HYD”A… attested by the name of the son of R. Haim Vital, who was a direct disciple of the Ar”i…]
Rabbi Haim Yosef David Azoulay, also known as HYD”A, was a prolific author and traveler who was born in Jerusalem in 1724 and passed away in Livorno, Italy, in 1806. His paternal grandfather was born in Fez, Morocco, to a family which traced its origin to the Spanish community of Castille, and migrated to Hebron about a hundred years before the HYD”A was born. His maternal grandfather was a Polish kabbalist who came to Jerusalem in 1700 with his master, Rabbi Yehudah Hassid. He transmits a Halakhic tradition through the son of R. Haim Vital, born in Safed to a father who migrated from Calabria in Southern Italy. The master of R. Vital, the Ar”i, was born in Jerusalem to a Sephardic mother of the Francis family and an Ashkenazi father of the Luria family, and then migrated to Egypt, where he studied under R. David ben Zimra and R. Betzalel Ashkenazi, leading Sephardic scholars of the time. Rabbi Betzalel, in turn, who was himself also a disciple of R. Ben Zimra, was born in Jerusalem to an Ashkenazi father and then moved to Egypt. So here we have a great Sephardic scholar, the HYD”A, whose ancestry and that of his masters is a tapestry of origins and traditions from Spain, Morocco, Italy, Egypt, Germany and Poland.
With this in mind, I searched the responsa literature found in the Bar Ilan database for occurrences of the terms Sephardic and Ashkenazi. I also searched for Mizrahi [eastern or oriental], Maaravi [western or occidental], Mizrah, and Maarav.
“Sephardic” and “Ashkenazi” each appear around 7,500 times, while the contrast or pairing of both appear 3,000 times. The pair Mizrah and Maarav, on the other hand, rarely appears, and when it does, it refers to other geographic constellations. In early literature, up to the 11th or 12th century, Maarav is Israel and Mizrah is Bavel. In later literature, Mizrah and Maarav are used to describe the two large divisions of the Muslim, Arabic-speaking world. The East, or al-Sharq, is the Middle East, while the West, or al-Maghreb, is North Africa. The terms are also sometimes used by North African rabbis to distinguish between regions within North Africa.
It is only in the halakhic writings of rabbis in Israel, or those speaking of Israel, from the 1950’s and on, that the term Mizrahi, or Edot ha-Mizrah (the communities of the East) appears in reference to non-Ashkenazi Jews who originated from Arabic-speaking countries and did not directly descend from Iberian Jews. For example, R. Mordechai Yaakov Breis (Poland, 1896 – Switzerland, 1977) writes in 1952 that in Israel “a large contingency comes from the lands of the East, and from Yemen and the like.” R. Yehudah Zerahyah Segal (Israel, 1924-2001), an Ashkenazi scholar who happens to be a descendant of the HYD”A, makes several references, not always clear, to the Eastern communities, in his responsa “Tzemah Yehudah.” Besides the term Edot ha-Mizrah, which is well-known today, he also writes about:
(קהלות המזרח ספר"ד (ג:צח); אשכנזי הדר בין הערבים ואנשי המזרח היהודים (ד:ט) ; בעדות המזרח הספרדיות (ד:מט
[The communities of the East Sepharad (3:98); an Ashkenazi who lives among the Arabs and the Jewish people of the East (4:9); The Sephardic communities of the East (4:49)].
R. Eleizer Waldenberg (1916-2007) and R. Meir Brandsdorfer (1934-2009) also refer several times to Edot ha-Mizrah, but the greatest number of occurrences of the term is found in the writings of a scholar who for many is identified with the revival of Sephardic Jewry in Israel.
The terms East and West were used in that literature to distinguish between parts of one country, Israel and Babylonia, Eastern and Western Europe, and between the Middle East and North Africa. The term Mizrahim or Adot HaMizrah was created in Israel as a derogatory label for Jews from Arab lands, probably inspired by Hertzl’s vision: “To build in the Middle east a European defense wall against Asia”.
Hertzl’s statement, in turn, was a product of the German school of Oriental Studies which equated the Orient with Islam and which attributed to the Orientals attitudes such as wily, inscrutable, lazy, and primitive. Ironically, as Oriental Studies became an academic field in European countries in mid-19th century, its racist elements considered the Jews of Europe to be Orientals. It is a well-documented fact that immigration from Arab Lands was not a priority for the Zionist movement, but after the establishment of the State of Israel and the decimation of European Jewry, there was no choice but to rely on Jews from Arab Lands to populate and build the new country. When these immigrants arrived, not everyone was happy to welcome them. In 1949, Aryeh Gelblum wrote in HaAretz1:
This is an immigration of a race until now unknown in Israel… we face people whose primitivism is at a record, their level of knowledge borders with absolute ignorance, and more alarming is their incapability of absorbing any spiritual idea, generally they are only a little better than the level of the Arab, black and Berber natives of their countries of origin and definitely at a lower level than Palestinian Arabs, unlike the Yemenites they lack Jewish background, and they are totally controlled by the wild game of primitive instincts….
In the living quarters of the Africans you will find filth, gambling, drinking and prostitution, many of them are plagued with severe eye, skin and sexual diseases, without even mentioning stealing and mugging. There is nothing secure against this a-social element…
Above all these, there is another basic fact no less alarming and that is the lack of ability to adapt to life in Israel and primarily chronic laziness and rejection of work…
The particular tragedy of this immigration is that unlike lower human material from Europe, their children have no hope [...] to raise their cultural level [...].
Did we consider how our state is going to look if this will be its population?
One would like to dismiss this article as the rant of a racist publicist, but here is a pearl from Abba Eban: “One of our greatest fears is that the increase in immigration will force Israel to compare its cultural level to that of the neighboring world.” Eban was born in South Africa to Lithuanian parents and migrated to London at a young age. He was very familiar with the culture of the Middle East since he studied Arabic and Semitic languages. Eban was appointed Israel’s U.N. ambassador at the age of 35 and is still venerated in Israel as someone who set the gold standard for Israeli diplomats. He later served as minister in several governments, mostly as Minister of Exterior Affairs, but also as the Minister of Education.
And what would one expect to hear from the Minister of Immigration at the time? Giora Yoseftal was the Minister of Immigration and Absorption, the man in charge of absorbing the Jews from Arab lands, and one after whom there is a street or a neighborhood named for him in each developing city in Israel: “This is an immigration wave with deteriorated moral values, with lower cultural level and poor ideological baggage that might degrade our young country into the abyss of a Levantine culture at the same low level of the neighboring nations.”
And let us conclude this sad chapter with a quote from none other than the President of Israel, Zalman Shazar, who in 1951 said that:
We are going to pay dearly, this is inconceivable… we are facing an immigration that never knew what education is…. They are not used to so much education, so much learning even if we assume that they will be able to graduate from elementary schools, but what will be our level then, how will Israel look, will we still be a light to the nations? How can the State of Israel survive without a European and Anglo-Saxon reinforcement, our Jews!… the actual role of Zionism is to bring the Jewry and not necessarily Mizrahi Jews into the cycle of Aliyah…
It was against this backdrop that the term Mizrahi was created in Israel, and, after a while, it was adopted by the broader society. At one point, publishers created a new label for the Sephardic Siddur which was now renamed “Nusah Adot HaMizrah”. They could not call it Sephardic because that label had been appropriated by the Hasidic movement, which had abandoned the Ashkenazi prayer book in favor of the Sephardic centuries earlier. When Sephardic and Hassidic Jews gathered in Israel, there was a need for a new label, but anyone who studies the history of Jewish prayer and Siddurim knows that Nusah Adot HaMizrah never existed before the 1950’s.
The saddest part of this story, however, is that Sephardic Jews started using that label, whereas in the past they would have used the general terms Sepharad and Ashkenaz to describe schools of thought and Halakha, and specific geographic terms to describe their origin. The process was hastened by some prominent Sephardic rabbis, chief among them Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, in whose books the term Adot HaMizrah appears close to 200 times. Rabbi Yosef’s use of the term was intertwined with his campaign to revive and establish the authority of Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulhan Arukh, as the sole authority of Sephardic Jewry. The committee that granted Rabbi Yosef a prestigious prize for his Yabia Omer in 1955 consisted of members R. S. Y. Zevin, R. S. B. Werner and R. Yonah Mirkin; they wrote:
רגילים לחשוב שהתורה הלכה ונתדלדלה מהעדה הספרדית, ירד קרנה, פנה זיוה הדרה והודה. ולא היא! נר אלהים טרם יכבה בין אחינו הספרדים, וכפעם בפעם אנו פוגשים אותם ביצירות ספרותיות תורניות... המחבר... מרביץ תורה בין עדות המזרח בירושלים
[It is common to think that Torah has been lost from the Sephardic community. Its importance has diminished, and its glow, splendor, and glory has disappeared. This is not true! God’s candle has not been totally extinguished among our Sephardic brothers, and once in a while we meet them in Rabbinical literary works… the author… teaches Torah to the communities of the East in Jerusalem]
The informed reader is stunned by the arrogance and ignorance displayed by the committee members, who speak of the loss of Torah among the Sepharadim. One wonders if they ever bothered to review the extensive literature of their contemporaries and sages of previous generations from the Ottoman Empire, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Djerba, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq and Syria. What is more perplexing, and even devastating, is that Rabbi Yosef felt comfortable quoting these disparaging words without challenging them, and perhaps it is an indicator of the spirit of those times in Israel.
Geonic Heritage
Now that we have clarified why the term “Mizrahi” is derogatory and inaccurate when describing the Sephardic (or non-Ashkenazi) heritage, let us go back to the Geonic period in Babylonia, and try to understand the cultural mindset and the spirit of that period, which laid the foundation to what was going to become Sephardic culture. As Christian Europe was slowly sinking into the darkness of ignorance in the Early Middle Ages, and fanatic monks, who preached extermination of knowledge, destroyed the famed Alexandria library, Jewish and Muslim scholars joined forces to translate Greek and Roman literature into Arabic. Peter Adamson, a professor of philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and author of The Arabic Plotinus, writes that “philosophers in the Islamic world enjoyed an extraordinary degree of access to the Hellenic intellectual heritage. In 10th-century Baghdad, readers of Arabic had about the same degree of access to Aristotle that readers of English do today.”
Most famous among the Geonim, who led the Babylonian schools from the 6th to the 11th centuries, are Rav Natronai, Rav Sassana, Rav Tzemah, Rav Hanina, Rav Amram, Rav Saadiah, Rav Shemuel ben Hofni, Rav Sherira and Rav Hai Gaon. I believe that getting to know these Geonim, and especially the groundbreaking and prolific work of Rav Saadiah Gaon, is a first step towards appreciation of our Sephardic culture. It might also make some people rethink terms such as שילוב מורשת יהדות המזרח (Integrating the heritage of Mizrahi Jewry) – that is, into Jewish History in Israel -- coined by the Israeli Ministry of Education during Sephardic Heritage Month, “The Other Face of Judaism” (an AJC program in Los Angeles), or the preposterous “Sephardi Gras,” a one-week celebration of Sephardic culture in WYHS in Florida. Sephardic culture is not a curiosity, an addendum, or a dangling participle of Jewish History. It is the core and foundation of our Jewish identity, and it was the Ashkenazi culture that branched out of it and took a different course. A similar misunderstanding exists with the term Western Civilization, which should have been “Mediterranean Civilizations,” since both Judaism and Christianity, as well as Hellenistic and Roman cultures, are all products of that region.
Leaving Rav Saadiah for now, let us look at a section from מבוא התלמוד [ An Introduction to the Talmud], written by Rav Shemuel ben Hofni Gaon2 (c. 930-1013). Rav Shemuel was a prolific author whose close to seventy works were mostly written in Arabic, as was very common at the time.3 He wrote Biblical and Talmudic exegeses, Halakha, and philosophy, and was very involved in the cultural life of the surrounding Muslim society. His son-in-law, Rav Hai Gaon, wrote4 that the master, Rav Shemuel Gaon, and others like him who read secular literature – that is, the Kalam school of Muslim philosophy – said that miracles are only performed for the prophets, and they reject the stories in the Talmud which claim that miracles were performed for righteous people. They said that these stories are not Halakha and therefore not reliable.
Rav Hai Gaon describes Rav Shemuel as a well-read and rational thinker who did not shy away from rejecting stories and Midrashic interpretation mentioned in the Talmud. And indeed, this is Rav Shemuel’s approach in his “Introduction” to the Talmud:
והגדה הוא כל פירוש שיבא בתלמוד על שום ענין שלא יהיה מצוה, זו היא הגדה, ואין לך ללמוד ממנה אלא מה שיעלה על הדעת. ויש לך לדעת, שכל מה שקיימו חז"ל הלכה בענין מצוה שהיא מפי משה רבינו ע"ה שקבל מפי הגבורה, אין לך להוסיף עליו ולא לגרוע ממנו. אבל מה שפירשו בפסוקים, כל אחד כפי מה שנזדמן לו ומה שראה בדעתו, לפי מה שיעלה על הדעת מן הפירושים האלו לומדים אותם, והשאר אין סומכין עליהם
[Haggada [or Aggadah] is any commentary mentioned in the Talmud on a non-legal matter, and you should study it only if it makes sense. You should know that the laws transmitted by the sages as a tradition received from Moshe, who in turn received it from Divine Providence, should not be expanded or diminished. But the commentary they wrote on the Bible [also known as Midrash], each with his circumstances and according to his understanding, is only to be studied when it is logically acceptable, and the rest should not be relied upon].
Rav Shemuel demands critical analysis and would not accept Midrashic interpretations which do not stand the test of logic. In today’s orthodox world this “ancient” approach seems refreshing to some and heretical to others. It calls for academic and scholarly honesty, and it is diametrically opposed to the prevalent ideology of the Ashkenazi Yeshivah world, fiercely expressed by R. Avraham Yeshayahu Karelitz, also known as Hazon Ish (c. 1878-1953), in his Letters anthology (1:15):
One of the tenets of faith is that all which is written in the Talmud, whether Mishnah or Gemara, whether Halakha or Aggadah, are the very things revealed to us by a prophetic power which is the connection [kiss] of the inductive mind and the composite mind [body and soul]…
We recoil upon hearing one doubting the Sages, whether in Halakha or Aggadah as hearing blasphemy, God forbid… The deviators, according to our tradition, are heretics who denounce the words of the Sages. Their Shehitah is not kosher and they are disqualified as witnesses…
In a future study I hope to return to the rift between the Sephardic and Ashkenazi schools regarding the authority of non-halakhic material in Rabbinic literature, but let us conclude with R. Avraham ibn Ezra’s criticism of Rav Shemuel Gaon, which sheds light on the latter’s methodology. In the introduction to his Torah Commentary, Ibn Ezra describes different exegetical methods:
הדרך האחת ארוכה ורחבה, ומנפשות אנשי דורנו נשגבה, ואם האמת כנקודה בתוך העגולה, זאת הדרך כקו הרחב, הוא החוט הסובב בתחלה. ובה דרכו גדולים, והמה חכמי הישיבות במלכות ישמעאלים... ובמסלה הזאת עלה רב סעדיה גאון הגולה... גם ר' שמואל בן חפני... והרוצה לעמוד על חכמות חיצונות, ילמדם מספרי אנשי תבונות
[The first path is long and wide, and it is beyond comprehension for our people. If the truth is the dot at the center of the circle, this path is the circumference. This is the path taken by the great scholars, the sages of the Yeshivah in the Kingdom of the Ishmaelites [the Geonim]… this was the road taken by Rav Saadiah… and Rav Shemuel beh Hofni… if one wants to study secular sciences, he can go directly to the source…]
Ibn Ezra’s criticism that the Geonic commentary is too scientific and encyclopedic enforces the image of the great Geonim as prolific writers and multi-disciplinarian authors. Both Ibn Ezra and the subjects of his criticism, though, are exemplary scholars of the Sephardic heritage.
* Rabbi Ovadia is Director of Torah ve Ahava (Torah with Love) and former Rabbi of Magen David Sephardic Congregation / Bet Eliahu of Rockville, MD.
1 Yes, this is the same HaAretz that fights today for the rights of all minorities. Who says that there is no evolution?
2 The Introduction is mistakenly attributed to R. Shemuel HaNagid in the printed editions of the Talmud.
3 Maimonides also wrote his early works in Arabic, not realizing that there are Jews who don’t speak the language.
4 תשובות הגאונים - מוסאפיה (ליק) סימן צט