Okay, goyim, gentiles, folks…until you learn what the terms Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi actually mean, you really need to stop using them. Because at this point they’re mostly being used as shorthand by goyim for western racial/national/ethnic identifiers, and…they aren’t.
Ashkenazi doesn’t mean “white/European.”
Sephardi doesn’t mean “Latino.”
Mizrahi doesn’t mean “Arab.”
Not only are these uses inaccurate, and they are, but trying to flatten Jewish cultural signifiers into weird racial/ethnic labels is absolutely unhelpful to any conversation.
Since I’ve got asks and tags and whatnots asking what this does mean, then, I will provide. That said, we are going to be speaking fairly broadly here, as variations between and within Jewish cultures is a topic that could be a blog of all its own.
Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are words related to minhagim - traditions - within Judaism. So, to get this out there first, they aren’t the only minhagim. There are others with other names, some which are better known than others.
But let’s look at these three, for now, as the most commonly used terms.
The Ashkenazim are those communities and people that follow the traditions - melodies, pronounciations, food, languages - that trace from the diaspora in central and eastern Europe. This is the most common minhag in the United States, which is why it tends to be the best known.
The Sephardim are those communities and people that follow the traditions of the diaspora in the Iberian peninsula. (Sometimes it is used more broadly to reference traditions from anywhere in the Mediterranean basin, but that’s not entirely accurate.). Because the Iberian peninsula was largely purged of its Jewish population through the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, communities that follow these traditions exist in a lot of places.
The Mizrahim are, speaking very technically, communities and people who follow traditions from “the East.” Places like Iraq, Iran, Yemen, etc. and it is sometimes also applied to some traditions that originate in northern Africa. HOWEVER, the entire designation of certain traditions as being Mizrahi is kind of a recent invention; for much of history they used other terms and weren’t seen as a single group (which is not a bad thing, just a different way of grouping traditions that was more specific/localized).
Note that one doesn’t have to have ancestors who lived in those places to follow those traditions. Most Jews in the United States will, at least at some point, be introduced to if not educated in the Ashkenazic minhag because most (though not all!) synagogues in the US are Ashkenazi. And, of course, having ancestors who did live in those places doesn’t tell us much about how someone would be viewed through a western racial/ethnic lens today.
A high proportion of Dutch Jews are Sephardi. A good portion of Italian and Greek Jews are neither Sephardi nor Ashkenazi. Many Middle Eastern and North African Jewish communities are Sephardi, not Mizrahi. Someone who converts to Judaism and is a Mexican-American living in the United States has a solid likelihood of being Ashkenazi. There are Jews of many nationalities, races, ethnicities, etc. in each of these three minhags. Because these terms aren’t about any of those things, they’re about the type of Judaism one practices.
Now, traditions are passed down, right? We are taught how to make food, how to bless the candles, etc. by our parents, our grandparents, and the immediate communities we are raised in. Many Ashkenazic Jews do have ancestors who lived in central or eastern Europe, some quite recently. Many Sephardi communities can and do trace their founding back to Spanish and Portuguese Jews who fled the Inquisitions hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Some Mizrahi Jews can trace their families or communities back to before the Roman Empire destroyed the Second Temple.
There is often history there, but it’s not a one for one mapping to either historic or modern nationality, ethnicity, or race. It’s inaccurate to treat it like it is, not to mention oftentimes offensive.
I had heard, and correct me if I'm wrong, that it was immigration cycles. Sephardi Jews came in the first immigration wave out of Jerusalem during Rome's history, so they mainly inhabited Roman territory, and after the Spanish Inquisition, that group spread to various Protestant nations where Jewish people could live peaceably. The Ashkenazi was the second wave when the various Muslim empires took over Jerusalem, and are around the same timeline as the Crusades, both to try and escape the Muslim Inquisition and because the Ottoman Empire relocated many of them. They went to nations with less Catholic affiliation, because Rome gave the rights to Crusaders to kill anyone that was Arab, whether Muslim or Jewish; therefore, it's tied more to Eastern Orthodox countries like Russia and Romania. They also had less time and demand to change their religion to Christianity, so there's less chance of cryptojews within Ashkenazi populations than Sephardi. Mizrahi stayed in their homelands and were relocated (or not) by the Muslim caliphates that controlled the area. Today, most have emigrated out of the area due to both Muslim violence and the reconstruction of their homeland as a Hebrew state, and most either live in the US or Israel.
So, what you’ve been told/taught isn’t accurate, but I do find it really interesting. So, genuinely, thanks for sharing because I had never heard this theory.
So I’m actually going to break this down into pieces, because there is a lot here to dig into, so let’s go under the cut to spare folks’ dashes.
Sephardi Jews came in the first immigration wave out of Jerusalem during Rome's history, so they mainly inhabited Roman territory, and after the Spanish Inquisition, that group spread to various Protestant nations where Jewish people could live peaceably.
Okay, so, as a starting point, the Roman expulsions weren’t the first expulsions. Typically they are where we start talking about the diaspora, due to the size of the population shift, but they aren’t the earliest expulsions of Jews from the historic Kingdoms of Israel and Judah.
But that aside, the diaspora in the Iberian peninsula - the ancestors of the Sephardim - does largely trace back to the Roman expulsions. As do the Ashkenazim. The differences between those two traditions and communities would come over time, but initially they all were in diaspora in what was then the Roman Empire.
Following the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, many of the Sephardim either converted (or feigned conversion and became Crypto-Jews) or fled. They fled to a lot of places: Iberian colonies (the oldest synagogues in the Western Hemisphere are Sephardic synagogues), the Middle East, and North Africa were the most common. They also fled to other parts of Europe (this is why many Dutch Jews, for example, are Sephardim). They mostly did not flee to places in Protestant Europe. First, because the Protestant Reformation would not begin - taking the earliest possible date - until 1517 or so while the Alhambra Decree (Spanish Inquisition) was issued in 1492. But also, Protestant Europe was no safer for Jews than Catholic Europe, generally speaking.
The Ashkenazi was the second wave when the various Muslim empires took over Jerusalem, and are around the same timeline as the Crusades, . . .
The Ashkenazim also stem from the Roman expulsions, largely. Indeed, genetic evidence indicates that the European admixture in Ashkenazic DNA is primarily from Mediterranean Europe, from the heartland of Rome, not the Central and Eastern European places those communities developed the Ashkenazic tradition in. But in any case, the Ashkenazim predate the Crusades. Indeed, the Crusaders murdered around 99% of Ashkenazic Jews during the Crusade period.
They went to nations with less Catholic affiliation, because Rome gave the rights to Crusaders to kill anyone that was Arab, whether Muslim or Jewish; therefore, it's tied more to Eastern Orthodox countries like Russia and Romania.
Ashkenazic Jews largely began their time in Europe within the historic Roman Empire’s borders (Gaul, Roman Germany, etc.) As this substantially predates the Protestant Reformation, and even predates the Great Schism, this relocation wasn’t Catholic/non-Catholic based so much as dependent on who the local rulers were and what they’d allow.
And the Crusaders’ mandate wasn’t the death of all Arabs, but all “heretics.” Which is why they slaughtered so many Jews in Europe on their way to Jerusalem.
Mizrahi stayed in their homelands and were relocated (or not) by the Muslim caliphates that controlled the area. Today, most have emigrated out of the area due to both Muslim violence and the reconstruction of their homeland as a Hebrew state, and most either live in the US or Israel.
The Mizrahim, dependent on community, can trace their histories back to expulsions that predate Rome, the Roman expulsions, and expulsions/violence/etc. that post-date the Muslim conquests. Some, as you indicated, were never expelled at all, but that’s not uniformly true in the least.
These days, many Mizrahim live in the US or in Israel, yes, as is true for most Jews regardless of minhag. Israel and the US have the largest Jewish populations in the world. There are just under 7 million Israeli Jews, and around 6 million American Jews. Doing some rough math, over 80% of the world’s Jewish population lives in one of those two countries.
There was significant depopulation of Jews from Arab nations following the establishment of Israel, largely due to violence and legal disabilities/expulsions in those places. As a result, most Arab nations have minuscule Jewish populations today (if they have any Jewish citizens at all).
Now, what I’ve said above is painting with a very broad brush, and only looks at expulsions and the like. Individual Jewish people and families have emigrated to various places for other reasons as well - economic opportunity, trade routes, etc. - without being forced to leave where they were by law or violence. Those numbers are just much smaller. And, of course, we could look at Jewish demographic changes more granularly if looking at smaller time periods/within smaller geographic limits. The big picture, though, over the last 2000 years and covering the US, Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa largely ties into the above.
Ah, so this woman thinks she's a historian, does she.
If she were an ACTUAL historian and not a fucking FRAUD, she would know that she's writing "Palestine" wrong.
Palestine is a GREEK COLONIZER TERM. And the correct way to write it is Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē).
Συρία ἡ Παλαιστίνη (Syría hē Palaistínē), Romanized as Syria-Palaestina, was a name coined by the Greek historian Herodotus in his "Histories", which he wrote in Athens in the 430s BCE. He coined this name because the Athenians were in a cold war with the Achaemenid Empire (aka the Persian Empire), and Herodotus wanted to diminish the influence that Persia had in the Levant in order to appeal to the Athenian audience who was paying for his work.
So, like many Greeks of his day, Herodotus referred to the entire Levantine region comprising modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Israel as Συρία (Syria), aka Assyria, because the Assyrians had been defeated by the Babylonians 180 years before he was writing, and the Assyrians were therefore considered a historical people. They were not an existential threat to the Athenians like the Persians were.
And then in his survey of Eretz Yisrael, Herodotus discounted most of Yehudah (Judea), and he focused on the strip of land along the Judean coast, which he referred to as Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē), which is what we would call Philistia -- aka Philistine-land.
Why did Herodotus only focus on Palaistine (Philistia), and essentially ignore the rest of Judea? Because he recognized that the area of Philistia had once been inhabited by the Mycenaean Philistines from Crete, and they were Homeric cousins to him. So he erased Yehudah and called the entire land Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē) because he was trying to assert a Greek presence in the land.
This is typical of the Athenians. They also referred to the Achaemenid Empire as "Persia" to give even their Persian sworn enemies a Greek origin. Herodotus writes in his "Histories" that the Persian people were descended from the Greek god Perseus through his son Perses.
So, "Palaistínē" was where the Mycenaean Greek Philistines had once lived, before being slaughtered by the Babylonians in 600 BCE. Herodotus recognized the area of Philistia as once being inhabited by his Homeric cousins, and he used this as Greek propaganda against the Persian Empire.
Herodotus intentionally mis-labeled the region as Syria (to erase the Persian Empire) and Palaistínē (to bolster the Greek claim to the land). And he intentionally erased the endonym Yehudah (Judea), which is what the native Jewish inhabitants called the land.
And all this was done because of late 5th Century BCE Athenian geopolitics, 50 years after the Greco-Persian wars.
Anyone who uses the term "Palestine" (Παλαιστίνη) to refer to Judea is just repeating this Ancient Greek propaganda.
And then 565 years later, in 135 CE, Emperor Hadrian of Rome slaughtered his way to victory over the Jews in the Bar Kokhba Revolt. He needed a way to erase the Jewish claim to the land of Yehudah (Romanized as Judaea). And so Hadrian officially changed the name of Judaea to Syria-Palaestina within Rome, using the Greek exonym for the land that was recorded in Herodotus' "Histories". Hadrian was trying to literally wipe Judaea and Israel off the map.
And the name that Hadrian chose was deliberate. He renamed Judaea after the Assyrians and the Philistines, two of the Jewish people's greatest enemies, and he used the name coined by a Greek, another enemy of the Jewish people. Three enemies in one name. The Romans were nothing if not petty and cruel.
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And now, nearly 2000 years later, we have Arabs like the woman in the video who are clinging to this exonym "Palestine" that a Greek historian and a Roman Emperor stamped onto the land of Judea in Eretz Yisrael.
Instead of at least creating an Arabic name for the land, Arabs are clinging for dear life to a name concocted by literal European colonizers who came up with this name because of Greek and Roman geopolitics of their day.
Παλαιστίνη (Palaistínē) is not Arabic. It cannot even be pronounced correctly in Arabic. It is Romanized Greek.
This woman in the video is spreading the historical equivalent of Flat Earther conspiracies.
She is depending on a lot of really stupid people believing her -- because she knows that there are a lot of really stupid people out there who unfortunately will swallow the bullshit she's peddling. She is performing a kind of sleight of hand, and as the old saying goes, there's a sucker born every minute.
But then there are many of us who know the truth. And we know that people like this woman are full of shit.
And what I know is that truth and sunlight are the best disinfectant for the kind of lies that she is spreading.
And eventually, there will be enough people who will cut through this bullshit.
And then where will this woman and all the millions of people like her be?
Maybe they should go ask the Scientologists that question.
Yes, I did watch the whole 20 minute video. Yes, it’s as bad as the clip. Israelis just have settler colonialism in their DNA. How long before “Israelis” becomes “Zionists” and “Zionists” becomes “Jews”?
a quote from people love dead jews on the topic of jews as docile and polite victims who remain kind after atrocities galore:
“Here’s how much some people dislike living Jews: they murdered 6 million of them. This fact bears repeating, as it does not come up at all in Anne Frank’s writings. Readers of her diary are aware that the author was murdered in a genocide, but this does not mean that her diary is a work about genocide. If it were, it is unlikely that it would have been anywhere near as universally embraced.
“We know this, because there is no shortage of writings from victims and survivors who chronicled this fact in vivid detail, and none of those documents have achieved anything like Frank’s diary’s fame. Those that have come close have only done so by observing those same rules of hiding, the ones that insist on polite victims who don’t insult their persecutors.”
the words of dead (murdered) jews exist in the worlds eye to prove a point about us. the words of living (survivors of atrocity) jews are only useful if they confirm the words of jews before the atrocity. we are a political token either way. to be a jew and to be angry threatens the paradigm they have built on the words of jews they killed. that we sat down and took it. the angry jew is a jew with agency. the angry jew forces them to reckon with what the world has done and continues to do. the angry jew speaks for themself and that is too loud. to control our own narrative is to ask for too much.
People do not know how to deal with Jews who are done being understanding and polite and patient and have stopped even being nice.
Jews are supposed to be weak and gentle and understanding and consumable and objects.
I think a bunch of this in progressive spaces is that Jews have been rendered into things, alongside the Shoah being a consumable lesson that the Jews (and no one else) needs to draw the appropriate conclusions from.
Everyone else gets to use the Shoah and Jews as a tool for defining other things.
That there are enough tokens to carry this view of Jews as a whole through is part of the problem.
These tokens are Good Jews. They are Exotic but not too Exotic and Nice and Quirky and Fight G-D Behind A Dennys and Show Up For Progressive Causes and are Fuckable and agree with the Story. They say the Right Things and are Useful and so are worthy of Conditional Humanity.
The thing is if they decide to stop being useful or the Story and Right Words push too far, or if those causes are suddenly more unsafe for them, it is of course on them and they have revealed themselves to be a Bad Evil Jew and that humanity is stripped away and the star shit and struggle sessions begin.
There have been endless "I don't have to hold space for you, how dare you insist I should be nice/contort myself etc" about any minority experience and the same people who say that and analyze that and break that down refuse to apply it to Jews because hating us and blaming us and at best using us as tools for other, worthier causes, while wearing us as an accessory, is more important to them than seeing us as fellow humans regardless.
It's ultimately a mixture of consumerist, authoritarian crunchy-crystal orientalist bullshit and it's toxic to the people doing it in the long run, but it's toxic to us first.
In a testament to the adage that “everything and its opposite is a reason for antisemitism” Jews are being criticized because they are insufficiently Christ-like.
leftists be like: heyyyyy you have to tolerate the whole world wanting you dead. including people actively trying. in fact you have to be endlessly empathetic to the people actively trying to kill you cuz if you arent you deserve to die even more. the fact that you are being protected from them trying to kill you is evil. maybe even help them kill you!! what do you mean im being bigoted? youre the one being bigoted!
When politics is just two camps fighting for red vs blue, obviously you can talk about the bundists as opposed to zionists while curling your hair. Because it just doesn't matter, it's all just for likes, views, shares, virality, and not very real decisions that people made, and are still making, at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and future generations
Minor quibble with the video: a lot of Jews tried desperately to leave Europe, but couldn’t because they had nowhere to go including Mandatory Palestine.
In April 1948, weeks before Israel's independence, 22-year-old Robert F. Kennedy traveled through Mandatory Palestine & saw Jews fighting for their right to live and have a state & Arabs calling for jihad against the Jews and to prevent a Jewish state.
This day, his dispatch was published in the Boston Post:
The Arabs declared openly:
“We shall bring Moslem brigades from Pakistan, we shall lead a religious crusade for all loyal followers of Mohammed … Whether it takes three months, three years, or 30, we will carry on the fight. Palestine will be Arab. We shall accept no compromise.”
The Jews, RFK wrote, were “fighting for their very lives … with their backs to the sea” and “101 percent morale.”
Most importantly, he captured the irreconcilable core of the conflict:
“The Jews want a homeland of their own. That to them is the sole issue.
The Arabs in command believe that eventually victory must be theirs. It is against all law and nature that this Jewish state should exist.”
This was written before modern Israel existed in any borders.
The conflict was never primarily about borders, refugees, or “the occupation.”
It was about one side demanding a sovereign Jewish state — and the other side’s fundamental, non-negotiable principle being that no such state could ever be allowed to exist.
A 22-year-old Bobby Kennedy saw the truth with brutal clarity in real time.
his death is still fresh but losing my grandfather has made me realize that we are losing generation(s) of witnesses of a period in jewish history that we desperately need to preserve. and i know we say that about shoah survivors but the generation(s) of jews that were quickly and violently ethnically cleansed from SWANA are unfortunately leaving this world too, and so are their stories. but their experiences? they have looked islamism right in the face — and they can recognize as we experience it today; it’s repeating itself and spreading beyond the region because we are not in their countries to be their scapegoats this time.
my grandfather, after 10/7/2023, would watch the news and lament, “we’re cousins, our people are cousins” at the unfolding violence. and he would also shake his head at the ceasefires, negotiations, and diplomacy, and he would throw his hands up at the accusations of genocide, ethnic cleansng, starvation, intentional targeting etc because he knew, he KNEW, he experienced firsthand, exactly what israel and other minorities in the region are dealing with — including persians — to this day. it hasn’t truly changed at its root, at all.
we are losing that testimony, that valuable and irreplaceable knowledge, too. it’s not just my grandfather, unfortunately, and i’m desperate to find more ways to preserve it while we can.
I just can't get over the part about how REAL Judaism "died" in the mid-20th century. Antizionists really do wish the Nazis had succeeded, don't they?
@thisgingerisareallybadwriter Yes. The only decent Jews are the dead Jews they can mourn in performative rituals that showcase what good, sensitive people they are.
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