Mizrahi Jews

Overview

Mizrahi Jews are descendants of Jewish communities established across the Middle East and North Africa, including communities in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Egypt. Their ancestral roots, like those of the Jewish people as a whole, lie in the Land of Israel. The Hebrew word mizrahi means “Eastern”; Mizrahim is its plural form. The name gathers communities with different histories, languages and customs under a broad geographic description. It does not imply that every family followed the same route from ancient Judea or shared a single local culture. Jewish communities developed across the region over millennia, long before Christianity or Islam emerged.

The history of Mizrahi Jews connects ancient Jewish life in Judea with enduring communities elsewhere in the region. Imperial conquests and exiles helped establish some of those communities; later movement, trade and settlement extended their reach. Babylon, Persia and the Arabian Peninsula became major centers of Jewish life. Families preserved religious practices, languages and local traditions while remaining part of the wider Jewish people. In the twentieth century, persecution, insecurity and political upheaval drove mass departures from Arab and Muslim countries. Many Jews reached Israel through aliyah, the Jewish return to the historic homeland; others settled in Europe and the Americas. Mizrahi life remains central to Israel’s society and to the continued presence of the Jewish people in their historic homeland.

Mizrahi and Sephardi describe related but distinct histories. Mizrahi refers principally to Jews from longstanding Middle Eastern and North African communities. Sephardi refers by ancestry to Jews whose forebears lived in Spain and Portugal. The categories came to overlap after the expulsion of Jews from Iberia in 1492, when Sephardi refugees joined older communities in North Africa and lands ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Religious practice and later communal identity brought the names still closer together. Their overlap does not erase the different origins of a family rooted in Babylon or Persia and one descended from Jews expelled from Iberia.

Origins

The Jewish people originated in Judea. The name “Jew” is linked to that ancient homeland, and Jewish history, religion and identity remain rooted in the Land of Israel. Conquests by the Assyrian, Babylonian and Roman empires dispersed Jews and helped establish communities beyond it. In 586 BCE, the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah and exiled Judeans to Babylon, in what is now Iraq. The exile became a defining event in Jewish history. It also strengthened a Jewish community in Mesopotamia that would endure long after Babylonian imperial rule ended.

About fifty years after the Babylonian exile, the Persian Empire conquered Babylon. Persian rule permitted exiled Jews to return to the Land of Israel and rebuild communal life there. Some returned; many remained in Babylon, where families had made new lives. Their decision sustained a major Jewish center outside Judea. Communities persisted in the territories of present-day Iraq and Iran, and Jews spread over subsequent centuries to Syria, Yemen and Egypt. Some moved farther to India, China and Afghanistan. The result was a connected but geographically varied Jewish world, rooted in Israel and present across much of the Middle East and beyond.

Babylonian Jewry became a center of religious scholarship. Its scholars developed the Babylonian Talmud, a central text of rabbinic Judaism and Jewish law. The Talmud records generations of discussion about legal duties, interpretation, ethics and communal life. Its influence reached Jewish communities far beyond Mesopotamia and continued long after the political powers under which its scholars lived had disappeared. That achievement illustrates why the history of Jews in the Middle East cannot be reduced to migration alone: these communities helped shape the religious and intellectual traditions shared by Jews worldwide.

Other communities developed their own local histories. Jews lived in Persia and across the Arabian Peninsula, while communities in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean maintained ties to wider Jewish networks. Their synagogues, schools, manuscripts and family traditions preserved records of life across changing empires. Jewish settlement in these places predates Islam. It also predates the modern State of Israel by many centuries. Ancient communities across the region show that Jewish history is neither exclusively European nor confined to one place outside the Land of Israel.

History

Over centuries, Mizrahi communities lived among many peoples and under successive governments. Conditions differed sharply by place and period. Jewish communities sometimes flourished in commerce, scholarship and local cultural life. They also experienced restrictions and persecution. Under Islamic rule, Jews could be assigned dhimmi status, a subordinate legal position that included special taxes, among them jizya, and regulations affecting dress and aspects of material life. The existence and enforcement of such restrictions varied. A single account of uninterrupted harmony or uninterrupted persecution would obscure the different experiences of Jews across the region and across time.

The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 reshaped Jewish communities throughout the Mediterranean. Sephardi Jews fleeing Iberia settled in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire, joining established Mizrahi communities. The newcomers brought their own religious learning, family customs and language traditions. Over generations, Sephardi and older local practices influenced one another. This convergence helps explain why a community may be described as Sephardi in religious practice while its members also have longstanding Middle Eastern or North African ancestry. The two terms therefore answer different questions: one may identify an Iberian family lineage, while the other identifies roots in the Jewish communities of the eastern and southern Mediterranean and adjoining lands.

Movement within the region continued into the modern era. In Bahrain, the Yadgar family arrived from Iraq in 1880, part of a later Jewish community that also drew migrants from Iran and India. Its members built lives in trade and other occupations. The community maintained a synagogue in Manama, and at its peak Bahrain’s Jewish population numbered as many as 1,500. This history shows that Mizrahi settlement was not solely a story of ancient exile followed by twentieth-century departure. Families also moved between Middle Eastern communities for work, opportunity and kinship, carrying Jewish religious and cultural traditions with them.

In the twentieth century, changing states and conflicts altered the position of Jews across North Africa and Southwest Asia. Some families made aliyah from religious longing or in pursuit of opportunity. Others left because of Jew hatred, discrimination or direct danger. These motives could coexist within a family or community. Jews fleeing severe violence found refuge chiefly in Israel, and also in France, the United Kingdom and the Americas. Their journeys connected ancient regional communities to new centers of Jewish life while ending, or greatly reducing, Jewish presence in many places where it had endured for generations.

Persecution and survival

The 1941 Farhud in Baghdad was a devastating episode in the history of Iraqi Jewry. During the Shavuot holiday, anti-Jewish violence killed nearly 200 Jews, injured about 1,000 and destroyed hundreds of Jewish homes. The attack exposed the vulnerability of a community with an ancient history in Iraq. Later discrimination, insecurity and loss of property accelerated departures. The Farhud was one event in a wider twentieth-century upheaval, but its violence gave lasting force to Iraqi Jewish memories of persecution and the need for refuge.

After World War II, some 800,000 Jews lived across North Africa, the Middle East and Iran. Barely a decade later, most had left. Their departures did not follow one pattern: some fled attacks or feared further violence, some faced discriminatory policies or expulsion, and others chose to leave amid worsening prospects. Many lost homes, businesses, money and other property. The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world uprooted communities whose histories stretched back centuries or millennia. Israel became the principal destination for many of those leaving, while others rebuilt their lives in Europe and the Americas.

Large rescue and immigration operations brought entire communities to Israel. Operation Magic Carpet, also called On Wings of Eagles, carried about 49,000 Yemenite Jews to Israel between 1949 and 1950. Many first made difficult journeys to Aden before boarding aircraft. Operation Ezra and Nehemiah brought large numbers of Iraqi Jews to Israel around 1950–1951, as Iraq’s Jewish community faced mounting pressure and the loss of citizenship and assets. These operations saved lives and enabled Jews from two of the region’s oldest communities to establish new homes in Israel. They also marked the near disappearance of Jewish populations from places that had long been centers of Jewish life.

For years, Israeli public language often described arrivals from North Africa and Southwest Asia as the “in-gathering of exiles.” That phrase expressed the religious and national meaning of return to the Land of Israel, but it did not fully describe the forced flight and material losses many families had experienced. Displaced Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews became known as “forgotten refugees” because their history received little diplomatic attention. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Israeli policy began explicitly recognizing Jews displaced from these countries as refugees. Legislation introduced in both chambers of the United States Congress in 2008 sought recognition of Jewish refugees from Arab and Muslim states in regional diplomacy. Their displacement and lost property form part of the region’s refugee history.

Religion and culture

Mizrahi Jews adhere to Judaism and share its core texts and practices with Jews elsewhere, while preserving customs shaped by their own communities. Religious melodies, prayer traditions, holiday practices and approaches to Jewish law developed in different local settings. The Babylonian Talmud’s central role in rabbinic Judaism is one enduring contribution of Middle Eastern Jewish scholarship. Families also transmitted communal history through synagogues, schools, manuscripts, stories and everyday observance. The term Mizrahi describes this broad regional heritage without making the religious traditions of Iraqi, Persian, Yemenite, Syrian or North African Jews identical.

Language reflects that diversity. Traditional Mizrahi languages included Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian, alongside other local Jewish forms of speech. Judeo-Arabic connected Jewish communities to surrounding Arabic-speaking societies while retaining distinctive Jewish vocabulary and written traditions. Judeo-Persian similarly expressed Jewish life within Persian-speaking settings. Sephardi Jews arriving from Iberia also brought Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, to parts of the Mediterranean and Ottoman world. Because Mizrahi and Sephardi communities met and sometimes merged, a region’s later Jewish culture could carry elements from several traditions. In Israel, Hebrew became a shared public language for immigrants whose families had previously spoken different regional languages.

Food, music and family customs remain visible parts of Mizrahi life in Israel. Iraqi Jewish dishes such as kubbeh and sabich are familiar examples of traditions carried into the country’s daily life. Their presence points to a wider inheritance: recipes and celebrations moved with families, changed in new surroundings and became part of Israeli culture. Preserving these practices has personal significance for descendants of communities that lost homes and institutions elsewhere. It also records the variety of Jewish experience across the Middle East and North Africa, where communities maintained a common religion while developing distinct local cultures.

Present day

Israel absorbed Jews arriving from eastern countries across major linguistic and cultural differences. Their descendants became a major part of its Jewish population and shaped its religious, cultural and political life. More than half of Israel’s Jewish population is not from Europe; Jewish communities in the country trace roots to Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Ethiopia and many other places. Mizrahi families’ presence expresses both a modern history of refuge and the Jewish people’s ancient connection to the Land of Israel. It also makes any description of Israeli Jews as an exclusively European population historically inaccurate.

Political life changed as Mizrahi communities established themselves in Israel. Widespread support among Mizrahi Jews, including voters in Israel’s periphery, helped bring Menachem Begin and Likud to power in 1977. Their participation was one part of a broader transformation in Israeli politics after decades in which many arrivals from North Africa and the Middle East had lived at a distance from established centers of power. Mass immigration from Russia in the 1990s later changed Israel’s Jewish demographic balance after decades of Middle Eastern and North African Jewish predominance. Mizrahi communities nonetheless remained central to Israeli public life.

In the United States, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent are more often called Sephardic than Mizrahi. American use of “Sephardic” may refer to Iberian ancestry, a religious tradition or a broader shared identity among Jews outside the Ashkenazi tradition. This wider usage does not mean that every American Jew described as Sephardic has ancestors from Spain or Portugal. Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews together represent about ten percent of United States Jewry. Many describe themselves through culture, family history and country of origin rather than American racial categories.

American communities show the range behind these labels. Syrian Jews fleeing persecution and instability established communities in Brooklyn. Persian Jews arriving after the 1979 Iranian Revolution built communities in Los Angeles. Bukharian Jews who left Central Asia in the late twentieth century established communities in Queens. Their histories differ, yet each community has contributed to a wider American Jewish world in which Mizrahi ancestry and Sephardic religious or communal identity often intersect. Family institutions, worship and cultural practice have helped preserve ties to countries of origin and to Israel across generations.

Organizations also work to preserve and teach this history. Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, known as JIMENA, advocates for Jewish refugees from Arab countries and preserves Sephardi and Mizrahi culture. Its Arabic Outreach Initiative shares personal histories of Jews from the Middle East and North Africa and promotes normalization with Israel. JIMENA also created lessons on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews for educational work connected to the 2023 United States National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. Such work keeps the histories of ancient communities, twentieth-century displacement and present-day Jewish life connected in public memory.