By sheer numbers, the overwhelming majority of Jews fall into only a handful of communities. The largest ethnically Jewish community, constituting the majority of world Jewry, are the Ashkenazim (historically meaning "German" in Medieval Hebrew) who can ultimately be traced back to Jews who migrated from Israel to Italy in the first and second centuries"[3][4] and from Italy to southern Germany in the 7th-8th centuries, spreading thereafter to central and eastern Europe. The Sephardim (Hebrew for "Spanish") are those descended from Jews who migrated from the Middle East to the Iberian Peninsula in the 8th-9th centuries, and scattered since 1492 throughout North Africa, south-eastern Europe, back to the Near and Middle East, and parts of the Americas. Together, the Ashkenazim and Sephardim comprise 85-90% of the world's Jewish population — the Ashkenazim alone constitute at least 70% of Jews worldwide (90% before the World War II).
The designations "Ashkenazi" and "Sephardi" encompass cultural, religious, culinary, linguistic and etc, still, they share much in common in all of this aspects, being of the same ethnic group or, at least, the closest ethnic groups. Some scholars maintain that Ashkenazi Jews are inheritors of the religious traditions of the great Babylonian Jewish academies, and that Sephardi Jews are descendants of those who originally followed the Judean Jewish religious traditions.[1]. Others, such as Zunz, maintain precisely the opposite.
Contents
1History
2In Israel and Judea
3Divisions
3.1Europe
3.2The Caucasus and the Crimea
3.3North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia
3.4Sub-Saharan Africa
3.5India and China
3.6Americas
4See also
5References
History
As long ago as Biblical times, cultural and linguistic differences between Jewish communities even within the area of Judea are observed both within the Bible itself as well as from archeological remains. The full extent of these differences, however, is unknown. Following the defeat of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Jewish people were dispersed throughout the Middle East, especially in Egypt, Yemen and Mesopotamia. By the height of the Roman Empire, Jewish communities could be found in nearly every notable settlement throughout the Empire, as well as scattered communities found in settlements beyond the Empire's borders in northern Europe and in Africa. In the east, Jewish communities could be found throughout Parthia and in empires even further east including India and China. Jews could also be found in eastern Europe and southwestern Asia.
In the late Byzantine period the khan of Khazaria in the northern Caucasus and his court converted to Judaism, partly in order to maintain neutrality between Christian Byzantium and the Muslim world. This event forms the framework for Yehuda Halevi's work 'The Kuzari'. How far traces of Judaism among this group survived the collapse of the Khazar empire is a matter of scholarly debate.
Following the collapse of the Roman Empire, and especially after the Moorish invasion of Iberia, communications between the communities in various parts of the former Empire became sporadic. With increasing persecution in "Ashkenaz"—that is, the areas that are now northern France and Germany—masses of Jews began to move further to the east, where they were welcomed by the king of Poland. At the same time, as a result of the freer communications within the Muslim world, the communities in Iberia were in more frequent communication with those in North Africa and the Middle East. Meanwhile, communities further afield, in central and south Asia and central Africa, remained isolated and continued to develop their own unique traditions. Following the 1492Expulsion from Spain, the Sephardim were dispersed to the Americas, the Netherlands, the Balkans, North Africa and in smaller numbers to other areas of the Middle East.
In Israel and Judea
Although the Jewish population was severely reduced by the Jewish-Roman Wars and the hostile policies of the Christian emperors[2], Jews had always retained a presence in Palestine.
In the 6th century, there were 43 Jewish communities in Palestine.
During the Islam and Crusader periods, there were 50 communities which included Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza.
During the early Ottoman Period there were 30 communities which included Haifa, Shchem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and many in the north, the most dominant one being Safed which reached a population of 30,000 Jews by end of the 16th century.
Over the centuries following the Crusades, Jews from around the world began emigrating in increasing numbers. Upon arrival, these Jews adopted the customs of the Mizraḥi and Sephardi communities into which they moved. With Baron von Rothschild's philanthropic land purchases and subsequent efforts to turn Palestine into a verdant Jewish homeland, and the subsequent rise of Zionism, a flood of Ashkenazi immigration brought the Jewish population of the region to several hundred thousand.
By the time the State of Israel was proclaimed, the majority of Jews in the state and the region were Ashkenazi. Following the declaration of the state, a flood of Jewish refugees entered Israel from the Arab world, most of whom were Sephardim and Jews from the Maghreb, Yemenite Jews, Bukhorim, Persian Jews, Iraqi Jews, Kurdish Jews, and smaller communities, principally from Libya, Egypt and Turkey. More recently, other communities have also arrived including Ethiopian Jews and Indian Jews. Because of the relative homogeneity of Ashkenazic Jewry, especially by comparison to the diversity of the many smaller communities, over time in Israel, all Jews from Europe came to be called "Ashkenazi" in Israel, whether or not they had any connection with Germany, while Jews from Africa and Asia have come to be called "Sephardi", whether or not they had any connection with Spain. One reason is that most African and Asian Jewish communities use the Sephardic prayer ritual and abide by the rulings of Sephardic rabbinic authorities, and therefore consider themselves to be "Sephardim" in the broader sense of "Jews of the Spanish rite", though not in the narrower sense of "Spanish Jews". Similarly "Ashkenazim" has the broader sense of "Jews of the German rite".
The founders of modern Israel, mostly European-descended people, believed themselves superior to these new arrivals. With higher degrees of Western-standard education, they were better positioned to take full advantage of the emerging Western-style liberal democracy and Western mode of living which they themselves had established as the cultural norm in Palestine during the pre-state era.
Cultural biases against the newcomers were compounded by the fledgling state's lack of financial resources and inadequate housing to handle the massive population influx. Thus, hundreds of thousands of new Sephardic immigrants were sent to live in tent cities in outlying areas. Sephardim (in its wider meaning) were often victims of discrimination, and were sometimes called schwartze (meaning "black" in Yiddish). One immigrant from Iraq recalls being given a tent when first arriving in Israel, while a neighbor from Germany was given an apartment. Those Sephardic Jews lucky enough to get an apartment were placed in inexpensive concrete apartment blocks that were for the most part of a lesser standard than those erected to house Europeans or Westerners.
Worse than housing discrimination was the differential treatment accorded the children of these immigrants, many of whom were tracked by the largely European education establishment into dead-end "vocational" schools, without any real assessment of their intellectual capacities. Mizrahi Jews protested their unfair treatment, and even established the Israeli Black Panthers movement with the mission of working for social justice.
The effects of this early discrimination still linger a half-century later, as documented by the studies of the Adva Center[5], a highly respected think tank on social equality, and by other Israeli academic research (cf., for example, Tel Aviv University Professor Yehuda Shenhav's article in Hebrew documenting the gross underrepresentation of Sephardic Jewry in Israeli high school history textbooks, [6]. Every Israeli prime minister has been Ashkenazi, although Sephardim and Mizrahim have attained the (ceremonial) presidency and other high positions. The student bodies of Israel's universities remain overwhelmingly European in origin, despite the fact that roughly half the country's population is non-European. And the tent cities of the 1950s morphed into so-called "development towns". Scattered over border areas of the Negev Desert and the Galilee, far from the bright lights of Israel's major cities, most of these towns never had the critical mass or ingredients to succeed as places to live, and they continue to suffer from high unemployment, inferior schools, and chronic brain drain.
While the Israeli Black Panthers no longer exist, Mizrahi Democratic Rainbowand many other NGOs carry on the struggle for equal rights in housing, education, and employment for the country's underprivileged populace - still largely composed of Sephardim and Mizrahim, joined now by newer immigrants from Ethiopia and the Caucasus Mountains.
Marriage between the groups of Jews was initially uncommon, but in recent generations, social discrimination has diminished somewhat due to extensive intermarriage and assimilation as a whole into a common Israeli identity.
Divisions
Because of the independence of local communities, Jewish "ethnicities", even when they circumscribe differences in liturgy, language, cuisine and other cultural accoutrements, are more often a reflection of geographic and historical isolation from other communities. It is for this reason that communities are referred to by referencing the historical region in which the community cohered when discussing their practices, regardless of where those practices are found today. The Jewish communities of the modern world can all be found represented today in Israel, which is as much a melting pot as it is a salad bowl.
The smaller groups number in the hundreds to tens of thousands, with the Georgian Jews (also known as Gruzinim or Qartveli Ebraeli) and Beta Israel being most numerous at somewhat over 100,000 each. Many members of these groups have now emigrated from their traditional homelands, largely to Israel. For example, only about 10 percent of the Gruzinim remain in Georgia. A brief description of the extant communities is as follows, by the geographic regions with which they are associated:
Married. An Ashkenazi Jewish man with a Mizrahi Jewish woman, whose ancestors lived in Iran, in San Francisco (2003). As Jews from different communities marry one another, the background differences in Judaism are blurring.
Married. An Ashkenazi Jewish man with a Sephardic Jewish woman, whose ancestors lived in Morocco, in the Meron Forest in Israel (2003). Cultural and religious differences that separated the older generations in Israel are disappearing in the younger generations, creating a new Israeli identity.
Ashkenazim are the descendants of Jews who migrated into northern France and Germany around 800-1000 CE, and later into Eastern Europe. Ashkenazim comprise the overwhelming majority of Jews, with approximately 80 percent of the Jewish total. (Prior to the Holocaust, they were an even greater percentage of world Jewry.) Among the Ashkenazi Jews are a number of major cultural subgroups:
Western Jews, stemming from northern France, from the Lowlands, historical Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Switzerland, and Scandinavia, originally spoke Western Yiddish, which had less slavic influence than other Yiddish dialects. By the early 20th century, Yiddish was in decline in this population, and assimilation was proceeding rapidly. In Israel, a sometimes derogatory term for these Jews (also applied to Austrian Oberlander Jews), is Yekkes.
Oberlander, originating in the Oberland region of Hungary and the district surrounding Bratislava in Slovakia, originally spoke western Yiddish. In modern times before the Holocaust, many Oberlander Jews migrated to urban centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and adopted German or Hungarian as their first language.
Sephardim are Jews whose ancestors lived in Spain or Portugal, where they lived for possibly as much as two millennia before being expelled in 1492 (see Alhambra decree); they subsequently migrated to North Africa, Latin America, Italy and the Netherlands. Also a large portion of them migrated to the Ottoman Empire which at the time was considered a safe haven for the Jews of Europe. Here they mostly settled in the European portion of the Empire and mainly in the major cities such as: Constantinople, Thessaloniki and Bursa). Thessaloniki, in modern-day Greece, had a large and flourishing Sephardic community. During the 1950s and '60s most Jews from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia fled to either Israel (where they presently comprise approximately 20% of the Jewish population) or to France (where they have become the majority of a Jewish population that was traditionally Ashkenazi).
Italkim or Bené Roma represent many of the Italian Jews, though Italy also has both Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities.
Chuts were Dutch Jews, observing an amalgam of Ashkenazi and Sephardi customs, living in London, although this community has almost completely been lost to history.
Krymchaks and Karaim are Turkic-speaking Jews of the Crimea and Eastern Europe. The Krymchaks practice rabbinical Judaism, while the Karaim are Karaites. Whether they are primarily the descendants of Israelite Jews who adopted Turkic language and culture, or the descendants of Turkic converts to Judaism, is still debated.
Subbotniks are a dwindling group of Jews from Azerbaijan and Armenia, whose ancestors were Russian peasants who converted to Judaism for unknown reasons in the 19th century. [7]
North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia
Jews originating from Arab lands are generally called by the catch-all term Mizrahi Jews, more precise terms for particular groups are:
Bukharan Jews are Jews from Central Asia. They get their name from the Uzbek city of Bukhara, which once had a large community.
Berber Jews are the Jews from the Maghreb in North Africa. The region coincides with the Atlas Mountains in today's Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. A small pre-Islamic presence of Jews is historically attested, and these are said to have mingled with the indigenous Berber population, converting many powerful tribes.
Persian Jews from Iran (commonly called Parsim in Israel) have a 2700-year history.
Yemenite Jews are Oriental Jews whose geographic and social isolation from the rest of the Jewish community allowed them to develop a liturgy and set of practices that are significantly distinct from other Oriental Jewish groups; they themselves comprise three distinctly different groups, though the distinction is one of religious law and liturgy rather than of ethnicity.
Egyptian Jews are generally Jews thought to have descended from the great Jewish communities of Hellenistic Alexandria, mixed with many more recent groups of immigrants. These include Babylonian Jews following the Muslim conquest; Jews from Eretz Israel following the Crusades; Sephardim following the expulsion from Spain; Italian Jews settling for trading reasons in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and Jews from Aleppo in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Lebanese Jews are the Jews that lived around Beirut. After the Lebanese Civil War, the community's emigration appears to have been completed; few remain in Lebanon today.
Omani Jews are the early Jewish community of Sohar. They are thought to be descendants of Ishaq bin Yahuda, a Sohari merchant around the first millennium. This community is believed to have disappeared by 1900.
Syrian Jews are generally divided into two groups: those who inhabited Syria from the time of King David (1000 B.C.), and those who fled to Syria after the Spanish Inquisition (1492 A.D), at the invitation of the Ottoman sultan. There were large communities in both Aleppo and Damascus for centuries. In the early 20th century a large percentage of Syrian Jews emigrated to the U.S., South America, and Israel. Today there are almost no Jews left in Syria. The largest Syrian-Jewish community is located in Brooklyn, New York, and is estimated at 40,000.
Abayudaya of Uganda (are not recognized as part of the Jewish people by the vast majority of the Jewish communities)
Beta Israel or Falashim of Ethiopia, tens of thousands of whom were brought to Israel during Operation Solomon and Operation Moses. Many studies considered them to be descendants of local Ethiopian conversions[3], happened 600 years ago.
Descendants of the Jews of the Bilad el-Sudan (West Africa). Jews whose ancestry was derived from the communities that once existed in the Ghana, Mali, and Songhay Empire. Anusim in and around Mali who descend from Jewish migrations from North Africa, East Africa, and Spain.
The House of Israel, several hundred Sefwi tribesmen in Ghana(are not recognized as part of the Jewish people by the vast majority of the Jewish communities)
The emergent Igbo Jewish community of Nigeria, perhaps as many as 30,000 strong (although many of them maintain a belief in the Messiahship of Jesus and adhere to basic tenets of Christianity that are mutually exclusive of normative Judaism) their Jewish origin is under heavy doubt.
The Lemba in Malawi which number as many as 40,000. This group claims descendancy from ancient Israelite tribes that migrated down to southern Africa via southern Arabia. Genetic testing has partially upheld these claims[4]. Many are now moving toward practicing normative Judaism.
The Jews of Rusape, Zimbabwe; which believe they too, as well as many other black Africans are descendants of ancient Jewish communities. Although they held a belief in Jesus as a prophet, the community is now shifting towards mainstream Judaism and abandoning their belief in Jesus. They are not considered as Jews by most of the Jewish world.
South African Jews make up the largest community of Jews in Africa. Dutch Sephardic Jews were among the first permanent residents of Cape Town when the city was founded by the VOC in 1652. Today, however, most of South Africa's Jews are Ashkenazic and, in particular, of Lithuanian descent.
Chinese Jews: most prominent were the Kaifeng Jews, an ancient Jewish community in China, descended from merchants living in China from at least the era of the Tang dynasty. Today functionally extinct, although several hundred descendants have recently begun to explore and reclaim their heritage.
Americas
HispanicCrypto-Jews are the descendants of those Sephardi Jews who migrated to the New World at the onset of the Spanish Inquisition, and who then hid their Jewish ancestry and beliefs in fear of persecution by the Inquisition's franchises that had followed them to Latin America. Their numbers are difficult to ascertain as most are at least nominally Catholic. Collectively, they could possibly reach the millions. Most are mixed descendants, although some communities may have been able to maintain a degree of endogamy (marrying only other Crypto-Jews) throughout the centuries. They may or may not consider themselves Jewish, some may continue to preserve some of their Jewish heritage in secrecy, many others may not even be aware of it. Most are not recognised as Jews according to halakha. Small numbers of various communities have formally returned to Judaism over the past decade after over five centuries of isolation. See also anusim.
Iquitos Jews are the "accidental" descendants of mostly Moroccan Jewish traders and tappers who arrived in the Peruvian Amazon city of Iquitos during the rubber boom of the 1880s. Because usually only one in four or eight of their ancestors was Jewish, and because their Jewish descent was patrilineal (the Jewish traders were all males who had coupled up with local mestizo or Amerindian females), their Jewishness is not recognised according to halakha. The Iquitos Jews are integrated into the local mestizo population. Because of the still existing Peruvian race/class system, there is virtually no interaction between the small mostly Ashkenazi population concentrated in Lima (under 3,000, most of whom are integrated into Lima's elite white minority) and the Jews of Iquitos. Iquitos Jews have only recently begun rediscovering their Jewish roots thanks to efforts made by Israeli outreach programmes. Some have formally returned to Judaism and now live in Israel after having made aliyah.
Inca Jews are converts to Judaism originally from the Andes Mountains north of Lima, Peru. Some of these individuals are of indigenous Amerindian descent — hence Inca — though most are mestizo (mixed Spanish and Amerindian, though none with any known Sephardi ancestors). Again, there is virtually no interaction between Peru's small Ashkenazi population and the Inca Jews. The Ashkenazi community in Lima only approved of their conversions to Judaism if they were not conducted under the authority of the local beit din, and that they agree to emigrate from Peru once converted. The conversions were subsequently conducted under the auspices of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, most then made aliyah and now live in Israel. There are still some left in Peru, and a few hundred more of the same community are awaiting conversions.
Other Jewish communities throughout the Americas are the descendants of Jews who found their way to the New World at different periods in modern history. Most of these Jews, particularly American Jews, are Ashkenazi, and they in fact compose the majority of recognised Jews on the American continent today. There are also Sephardi, Mizraḥi and other historic groups represented, as well as mixes of any or all of these, but they are included in their respective groups discussed in earlier sections of the article.
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