Global InformationMizrahi Jews information
יהודים מזרחים | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Total population | |
| 4.6 million (2018) [citation needed] | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
 Israel | 3,200,000[citation needed] |
 France | 330,000[citation needed] |
 United States | 300,000+[citation needed] |
 Russia | 30,000+[citation needed] |
 Azerbaijan | 11,000–20,000[citation needed] |
 Kazakhstan | 15,000[citation needed] |
 Uzbekistan | 12,000[citation needed] |
 Iran | 8,500[1] |
 United Kingdom | 7,000+[citation needed] |
 India | ~4,800[2] |
 Canada | 3,500[citation needed] |
 Georgia | 3,000[citation needed] |
 Turkey | 3,000[citation needed] |
 Argentina | 2,000[citation needed] |
| Languages | |
| Traditional: Hebrew, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Bukharian, Judaeo-Arabic, Judeo-Berber, Judaeo-Aramaic, Judaeo-Malayalam, Judaeo-Marathi, Judaeo-Georgian, Judaeo-Tat, Judaeo-Iranian (Judaeo-Persian), Judeo-Urdu, 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 | |
| Part of a series on |
| Jews and Judaism |
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Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: יהודי המִזְרָח), also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) or Mizrachi (מִזְרָחִי) and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת־הַמִּזְרָח, lit. 'Communities of the East'),[3] are a grouping of Jewish communities that lived in the Muslim World.
Mizrahi is a modern political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew and refers to Oriental Jews.[4][5] In current usage, the term Mizrahi is almost exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa; in this classification are the descendants of Mashriqi Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern countries, such as Yemenite Jews, Egyptian Jews, Persian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Lebanese Jews, Syrian Jews, Turkish Jews and Iraqi Jews; as well as the descendants of Maghrebi Jews who had lived in North African countries, such as Algerian Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Tunisian Jews.[6][7] 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 in diaspora were to be returned to the Land of Israel (then under the British Mandate of Palestine) after the Holocaust.[8]
In the current usage, Mizrahi also includes Jewish communities from other Muslim-majority countries,[9][10] including Persian Jews, Afghan Jews, Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the Mountain Jews from Dagestan and Azerbaijan. While these communities have traditionally spoken Judaeo-Iranian languages such as Juhuri and Bukhori, some of their descendants are also widely fluent in Russian due to those countries' former status as republics of the Soviet Union.
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,[10][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.[10] 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][10] 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]
- ^ Jewish Population by Country 2021 website
- ^ [1]
- ^ "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".
- ^ "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.
- ^ 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."
- ^ "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.
- ^ 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.