Diasporic food meaning

For other uses, see Jews of the Orient. Mizrahi is a political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. Hebrew and refers to Oriental Jews. Israeli War, over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews diasporic food meaning expelled or evacuated from Arab and Muslim-majority countries from 1948 until the early 1980s.

In modern Israeli usage, it refers to all Jews from Central and West Asian countries, many of them Arabic-speaking Muslim-majority countries. Before the establishment of the state of Israel, Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a separate Jewish subgroup. This broader definition of “Sephardim” as including all, or most, Mizrahi Jews is also common in Jewish religious circles. The reason for this classification of all Mizrahim under Sephardi rite is that most Mizrahi communities use much the same religious rituals as Sephardim proper due to historical reasons. Many of the Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain resettled in greater or lesser numbers in the Arab world, such as Syria and Morocco. In Syria, most eventually intermarried with, and assimilated into, the larger established communities of Musta’rabim and Mizrahim. In some Arabic countries, such as Egypt and Syria, Sephardi Jews arrived via the Ottoman Empire would distinguish themselves from the already established Musta’rabim, while in others, such as Morocco and Algeria, the two communities largely intermarried, with the latter embracing Sephardi customs and thus forming a single community.

Mizrahim most often speak Arabic, although Arabic is now mainly used as a second language, especially by the older generation. Aramaic is a Semitic language subfamily. In Kurdistan, a region which includes parts of Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran, the language of the Mizrahim is a variant of Aramaic. The Jewish diaspora in the Middle East outside the Land of Israel started in the 6th century BCE, during the Babylonian captivity, which also caused some Jews to flee to Egypt. As Islam started to spread in the 7th century CE, Jews who were living under Muslim rule became dhimmis.

Because Jews were seen as “People of the Book”, they were allowed to practice their own religion, but they had an inferior status in an Islamic society. Some Mizrahim migrated to India, Central Asia, and China. Israeli War, most Mizrahim were either expelled by their Arab rulers or chose to leave and emigrated to Israel. Anti-Jewish actions by Arab governments in the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the founding of the State of Israel, led to the departure of large numbers of Mizrahi Jews from the Middle East. The exodus of 25,000 Mizrahi Jews from Egypt after the 1956 Suez Crisis led to the overwhelming majority of Mizrahim leaving Arab countries.