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Sephardic Jews

The two dominant Jewish ethnic groups in Israel are the Ashkenazim (the term comes from the old Hebrew word for Germany), which now includes Jews from northern and eastern Europe (and, later, their descendants from America); and Sephardim (the term may come from the old Hebrew word for Spain), which now includes Jews of Mediterranean, Balkan, Aegean, and Middle Eastern lands. The name Sephardi had its origin in Sepharad, the Biblical name of an unknown land in which the Jews exiled from Jerusalem were brought.

The Sephardim are not divided like the various groups within the Ashkenazim - Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, Humanistic. Instead, almost all Sephardic Jews maintain a strict tradition closest to the Orthodox. There are differences in ritual and liturgy between these two groups, but both sides have always recognized the validity and authority of the other's rabbinical courts and rulings. Nor, throughout the centuries, were scholars or notables from either branch totally isolated from the other. In some countries, Italy for example, communities representing both groups lived together.

Originally, Ashkenazi meant one who spoke Yiddish, a dialect of German, in everyday life and Sephardi meant one who spoke Ladino, a dialect of Castilian Spanish. Although this narrow understanding of Sephardim is still retained at times, in Israeli colloquial usage, Sephardim include Jews who speak (or whose fathers or grandfathers spoke) dialects of Arabic, Berber, or Persian as well. In this extended sense of Sephardim, they are now also referred to as the Edot Mizrah, "the communities of the East," or in English as "Oriental Jews."

The Sephardim or Jews descended from the refugees from Spain after the expulsion in 1492, are generally darker in complexion, and have darker hair than other Jews. In December 1496, King Manuel I of Portugal decreed that all Jews leave Portugal by October 1497, causing many to flee to Holland where a climate of acceptance prevailed. When banished from Spain in 1492, over 200,000 Jews were dispersed in various parts of the world ; some wandered to North Africa, others to Italy, France, Holland, England, Germany, 'Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Asia Minor, etc. Many wandered to North and South America. The first Jews who came to the United States were of this class. The remnants of these Jews who live at the present time in the Balkan States, as Bosnia, European Turkey, Roumania, etc., are also known by the name Spagnuoli, probably because of the Spanish dialect which they employed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was the dominant language of trade in the Balkans.

Large numbers of the Jews of the Peninsula, after their expulsion at the end of the fifteenth century, migrated to Holland. Many delightful qualities have their corresponding defects. The Jewish refugees from Spain who settled in the Netherlands after 1500 had some drawbacks to their cultivated minds and their refined manners. They were very superior, but they were also, on occasion, not a little selfish. They valued much their training in the old country, and the consideration which it gained for them in the new. They valued it, in fact, so much, that they desired to keep it wholly to themselves, and not to risk any loss of social standing by contact with less creditable co-religionists. Naturally enough, when the poor downtrodden Jews of Germany heard of this happy little settlement in Amsterdam, many journeyed thither, hoping to find toleration from strangers and a welcome from their brethren in faith. In this latter hope they were disappointed. The Spanish and Portuguese Jews kept themselves proudly and distinctly aloof from the German Jews, refusing even to intermarry with them.

The Sephardim and Ashkenazim Jews of Holland were, from the very first, entirely separate communities, worshipping in different synagogues, learning in different schools, supporting each their own charities, and using each their own prayer-books, with not even the pronunciation of the ancient language in common. The German Jews, as a body, were, it is undeniable, of a distinctly lower tone, in regard to occupation and education and refinement, to these others. It was impossible, from the widely different antecedents and experiences of both communities, that things should have been otherwise, and many of the differences between them were quite inevitable. Still, that resolute aloofness from the unattractive Ashkenazim was not a nice attitude on the part of the prosperous and respected Sephardim. Excuses may be found for them; their own position was certainly not very secure. Still the fact remains that the Sephardim, under pressure of circumstances, did what the prophet Isaiah warns us all from doing-they 'hid themselves from their own flesh.'

The many sufferings which they had endured for the sake of their faith had made them more than usually selfconscious ; they considered themselves a superior class, the nobility of Jewry, and for a long time their coreligionists, on whom they looked down, regarded them as such." They have their own synagogues, cemeteries, etc., in any place where they find themselves in reasonable number, and refuse to share all this with their Ashkenazi co-religionists. They also refuse to intermarry with the German and Russian Jews, whom they consider beneath themselves. They have an old tradition, which was credited by Mediaeval Jews, that they are descended from the tribe of Judah, while their Russian and German coreligionists, the Ashkenazim, were alleged to have descended from the tribe of Benjamin. This legend had considerable influence in keeping these two groups of Jews from intermarrying one with the other.

Among the nearly 30,000,000 immigrants who poured into the U.S. between 1880 and 1925 were some 30,000 Sephardim. Many settled on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. During that same period nearly 2,000,000 Ashkenazim-Jews mainly of Russian, German, and Polish descent with different religious and cultural traditions-also arrived in the U.S. Another wave of both Sephardic and Ashkenazi peoples emigrated at the time of World War II.

Between 1948 and 1952 about 300,000 Sephardic immigrants came to Israel. The total addition to Israel's population during the first twelve years of statehood was about 1,200,000, and at least two-thirds of the newcomers were of Sephardic extraction. By 1961 the Sephardic portion of the Jewish population was about 45 percent, or approximately 800,000 people. By the end of the first decade, about four-fifths of the Sephardic population lived in the large towns, mostly development towns, and cities where they became workers in an economy dominated by Ashkenazim.

In 1983 the former Sephardi chief rabbi, Ovadia Yoseph, angry at not being reelected to this post, withdrew from the rabbinate to set up his own Sephardic ultra-Orthodox council and political party, called Shas (an acronym for Sephardic Torah Guardians). Shas ran successfully in the 1983 Jerusalem municipal elections, winning three of twenty-one seats, and later in the national Knesset (parliament) elections in 1984, where it cut deeply into Agudat Israel's hold on ultra-Orthodox Oriental voters.