In the years following the establishment of the State of Israel, more than 800,000 Jews living in Arab lands and Persia were expelled or fled their homelands, seeking refuge largely in the newly founded Jewish state. While the reasons for their exodus are complex, the reality for those experiencing this upheaval was profound. Today, we call the descendants of these people Mizrahim or describe them using the adjectival form, Mizrahi.
The term Mizrahi derives from the phrase “Bnei Edot Hamizrach,” translated as “children of the Oriental tribes” or “children of the Eastern communities.” In the 1950s and 1960s, the designation became Edot Hamizrach, “tribes of the Orient,” and then even more simply Mizrahim, literally translated today as “Easterners.” In the context of the early state, however, it carried a connotation of otherness and racial minority status, and is perhaps better understood as “Orientals.”
At first, the idea of a Mizrahi identity was somewhat counterintuitive. The diverse Jewish groups from dozens of different countries didn’t share much in terms of language or culture. “Bnei Edot Hamizrach was not truly a collective identity,” says Guy Abutbul-Selinger, a sociologist and dean of the Bnei Brak Campus at the College of Law and Management in Israel.
“Jews arriving from other countries did not see themselves as belonging to one homogeneous identity. There were significant differences between them, cultural and class-based.” Jews from Persia, for example, likely would have referred to themselves as Iranian Jews, and Jews from Iraq would have referred to themselves as Baghdadi Jews.
Despite this diversity, their shared experience in the transit camps and “development towns” on the periphery of the country (where new immigrants, largely Jews recently arrived from the Muslim world, were sent to establish agricultural communities) led to the creation of a Mizrahi identity. This treatment, explains Sergio DellaPergola, professor emeritus and former chairman of the Hebrew University’s Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry, came from an erroneous conception held by Ashkenazi elites that the Mizrahim were backward. Westerners, he says, were seen as “more developed, more rational, better functioning and richer,” while the Easterners were regarded as “underdeveloped, mystical, colorful and lagging behind.”
This prejudiced perception fostered a sense of cohesiveness among the different groups of Mizrahim, who began to speak the same language (Hebrew) and intermarry without assimilating into the mainstream Ashkenazi culture. The struggle for socioeconomic and racial justice in turn led to political organization, says Bryan K. Roby, an associate professor of Jewish and Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. Groups such as the Israeli Black Panthers helped create a communal Mizrahi identity. And Mizrahi voters, fed up with the long-entrenched left-wing Ashkenazi establishment, played a major role in electing right-wing Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1977.
For years, says Abutbul-Selinger, “Mizrahi identity was mainly about protest…they wanted to be part of Israeli society, too.” This dynamic, he explains, “began to shape an alternative culture, a style of dress, language, home, design, body movements, and all of this created an alternative to the mainstream Israeli culture.” As decades passed and Mizrahim achieved hard-fought entry into the country’s economic, military and political elite, the divide between Ashkenazi Israel and Mizrahi Israel began to narrow. No longer did Mizrahi connote “subordinate, victim, unrepresented, irrational and backward,” says Abutbul-Selinger. Instead, to be Mizrahi meant “being cool, being emotional, being masculine, being authentic,” while to be Ashkenazi was “being a nerd, being introverted, being cold.” Today, particularly among the youth culture, adolescents want to be Mizrahi. In Israel, Mizrahi music has become the most popular form of pop music (the favorite for weddings), and restaurants featuring Mizrahi cuisine attract enthusiastic diners.
In Israel, Mizrahi music has become the the favorite for weddings, and restaurants featuring Mizrahi cuisine attract enthusiastic diners.
At the same time, the importance of being Mizrahi or Ashkenazi has waned. “When you live in the same neighborhoods and you’re going to the same schools and to the same units in the military,” explains Abutbul-Selinger, “there are no cultural and sociological differences anymore.” This has led Mizrahi identity to be mostly symbolic—more about the way you celebrate holidays or the traditional food you eat, rather than about a statement regarding your place in society.
For Hebrew University’s DellaPergola, the term Mizrahim—but also categories such as Ashkenazim and Sephardim—are fundamentally reductive. Historically, he notes, Jewish populations have been characterized by geographic mobility, adopting customs and forming subcultures from the various societies they’ve lived in, eschewing the simple binary classification engendered by terms like Mizrahi.
This whole naming convention becomes even more confusing when the word Sephardim is introduced. Literally speaking, Sephardim are Jews descended from those expelled from Spain during the Inquisition, emigrating to North Africa, Anatolia, the Levant and the Balkans. The word is often used interchangeably with Mizrahim, partly because so many Sephardim lived in the Muslim world pre-1948 and partly because Sephardi religious practices have become mainstream among Mizrahi Jews. In many ways Sephardi is better understood as a religious identification, as opposed to an ethnic one like Mizrahi, but that too is an oversimplification.
In some cases, both historically and, to a lesser extent, in the modern day, Mizrahim will refer to themselves as Arab Jews, especially those who had been involved in the nascent Arab nationalist movements throughout the Middle East. The term Arab Jews in particular is a charged one, touching on the thorny contradictions between Israeli and Arab nationalist narratives about the exodus of Jews from the Muslim world. For Hadar Cohen, an artist, mystic and educator who identifies as an Arab Jew, the erasure of the Arabness of Jews from Arab countries was systemic. “At home, my grandfather, even my parents, loved Arabic music. Our food was very Arab and our culture was Arab,” she explains, “but we couldn’t say we were Arab, because at school we were taught that Arabs are the enemy, or Arabs are the terrorists, or being Arab is something that is not beautiful.”
The phrase Arab Jews can be reductive as well. “The difficulty with the term Arab Jews,” notes University of Michigan’s Roby, “is that it does, in some ways, erase a lot of the kind of ethnic diversity within the Jewish community in those countries.” For example, Jews living in Berber or Kurdish communities may have identified more with those groups than with the Arab majority of the countries they lived in. Likewise, says Cohen, “a lot of people really identified with their local cities,” rather than with a country or nation.
At various points in Israel’s history, buoyed by a shared cultural heritage, language and discrimination by the Ashkenazi establishment, Mizrahim and Arab Israelis actually formed political coalitions, particularly at the beginning of the state. But such efforts largely atrophied after the conquest of the occupied territories in 1967, and as the Israeli electorate moved sharply to the right and in the wake of the failed peace process in the 1990s.
In the United States, where Jews are overwhelmingly Ashkenazi, the word Mizrahi has a fundamentally different history and cultural context. In fact, the prevalence of the term in American Jewish discourse is a relatively recent development, says Gal Levy, a professor and a researcher at the Open University, Israel. While the word had some purchase in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly among academics, it only really gained prominence in the 2010s with the rise of social justice movements such as Black Lives Matter; young Mizrahim, often feeling isolated by largely Ashkenazi-American Jewish society, began to identify with other underrepresented minority groups. According to Levy, the use of the word Mizrahi is prevalent among young American Jews and especially popular in left-wing activist circles. “Many of them told me that when they got into college, they suddenly realized their own experience as non-Ashkenazi Jews within American Jewry overlapped with the themes of social justice activism,” says Levy.
And indeed, for so many Jews, in Israel and around the globe, the word Mizrahi, much like the words Ashkenazi and Sephardi, is less important than the knowledge people have about their own identity and their place in the Jewish community. “We spend so much time just talking about what these terms mean, who’s included, who’s not,” reflects Cohen. For her, what’s important is the message she’s trying to convey about her history. “That there were Jewish communities all over this region and that our stories have been either untold or misunderstood. That our voice matters, and we deserve to have a seat at the table.”