Mizrahi Jews

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'), 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 (Paradesi Jew, 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 left 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.

Mizrahi is literally translated as 'Oriental', 'Eastern', מזרח‎ Mizraḥ, Hebrew for 'east'. In the past, the word Mizrahim, corresponding to the Arabic word Mashriqiyyun (Arabic: مشرِقيون, 'Easterners'), referred to the natives of Turkey, Iraq and other Asian countries, as distinct from those of North Africa Maghribiyyun (مغرِبيون, 'Westerners'). In medieval and early modern times, the corresponding Hebrew word ma'arav (מערב) was used for North Africa. In Talmudic and Geonic times, however, this word ma'arav referred to the land of Israel, as contrasted with Babylonia. For this reason, many^[who?] object to the use of Mizrahi to include Moroccan and other North African Jews.^{[citation needed]}

During the 1940s, before Israel's establishment, the demographer Roberto Bachi used the categories of "Mizrahim" and "Ashkenazim" in his ethnic classification of the Yishuv. In the 1950s, the Jews who came from the communities listed above were simply called and known as Jews (Yahud, يهود in Arabic). To distinguish them in the Jewish sub-ethnicities, Israeli officials, who themselves were mostly Eastern European Jews, transferred the name Mizrahi to them, though most of these immigrants arrived from lands located further westward than Central Europe. Mizrahi is subsequently among the surnames most often changed by Israelis, and many scholars, including Avshalom Kor, claim that the transferring of the name Mizrahim was a form of Orientalism towards the Oriental Jews, similar to the ways in which Westjuden had labeled Ostjuden as "second class" and excluded them from possible positions of power.