Very confused atheist Jew here: I've always been told by my parents that Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are more of jewish "tribes" in a sense that it's more about where this specific Jewish person is from; wiki seems to say it's an ethnic subdivisions.
So I am curious why in the post you talked about it more like it's a difference in religious/cultural beliefs? Not to say there isn't one, just curious why this seems to be how you defined it in the post!
(My family was very much not religious, so I might be missing context. Or haven't seen the particular discourse that inspired you to write the post. Thank you for your time, either way!)
Well so to start out, they’re not tribes in any sense.
Rabbinic Judaism (that is, all of us except for the Karaites and the Samaritans) holds that oral Torah has the same weight as written Torah. This means, among other things, that the transmission and preservation of oral tradition is absolutely critical.
Now, with a written text, you can easily error check. If you have two communities with two copies of the Torah, and the two texts disagree, you can just find a Torah that’s older than both of them, or more likely, consult a scribal reference text that’s older than both of them. With oral traditions, however, it’s harder. You can’t go back in time and ask the rabbis in the time of the Mishnah which tradition they practice, and you can’t rely on written sources that describe their practices to be complete, or to account for newer Halachic rulings made to, for example, account for geographic realities of Jews living in galut.
For this reason, the official Jewish halachic opinion is that we are supposed to follow all of the orally transmitted religious traditions of the place we grew up (or, in the case of converts, of the Jewish community they first joined when they converted), even if there is no halachic source text to support their existence.
This is what is known as minhag, and it’s a different category than true halacha, because the rabbis recognize that transmission errors in the form of “this was actually never a religious tradition, your grandmother just happened to do that for some reason because she was odd like that” are common. The rule is therefore that you are always supposed to follow your minhag, but that unlike halacha, religious authorities are not bound by precedent – if your community’s rabbi believes that your community has a minhag which is not actually a preservation of oral religious tradition (generally with the evidence for that being, there’s no logical support for it and it’s actively harmful in some way), they can rule that people in the community no longer need to follow that tradition, and they can do so on their own authority.
Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi are the three biggest catch-all umbrellas for community minhagim (and technically, Sephardi is an even broader umbrella that includes pretty much all of Mizrahi, with some odd corner-cases such as the Yemenites). These minhagim formed geographically but not ethnically.
Let me explain what I mean by that. Let’s imagine that your father was raised in a small community in Poland. He married your mother, who was from another small community in Poland, and came to live with him in his community. You would then, by default, follow the minhag of your father’s community. This is what most commonly happened, and it’s why the default rule for minhagim is “you do whatever your father did.”
But let’s say that when you’re an infant, your family flees a pogrom and moves all the way to Madrid. Now, you grew up living in a community with a different minhag. First of all, your family might change some of their practices to conform to their new community – you can’t really pass down an oral tradition about communal activities when you’re the only person in the community with that tradition. But secondly, even for individual practices, your father might not pass down an oral tradition for every situation. What happens if you’re an adult and your father has passed, and you’re not sure what his tradition was for, for example, whether or not you could eat beans on Passover, because your mom hated beans and so your family just never cooked with them at all? Well, in that case you’re supposed to default to the minhag of the community you actually grew up in: the oral traditions you learned from your friends, at Hebrew school, etc. And over time, this means that unless your family lives in an isolated community of Polish Jews in Madrid, their oral traditions will gradually and over many generations become just another Madrid variant tradition – with slight differences on household things, just like all other families, but with most of the communal ones the same as what everyone else in Madrid practices.
Ok, so with all that out of the way, what are Ashkenazi and Sephardi and Mizrahi, and why do non-Jewish sources (many of which get cited by Wikipedia) keep claiming that they must be ethnic categories of some kind?
Sephardi is a catch all umbrella for the minhagim of Spain, Italy, and a few other Mediterranean regions. Ashkenazi is a catch all umbrella for the minhagim of most of the rest of Europe. Mizrahi is a catch all umbrella for all of the minhagim of most of the Middle East.
Ashkenazi traditions, being the most isolated, diverged farthest from Sephardi and Mizrahi traditions, but also had the most divergence between communities. Litvaks (a specific Ashkenazi community from Lithuania) are arguably almost as different from Galitzianers (a specific Ashkenazi community from southeastern Poland and western Ukraine) in terms of their various minhagim as either one of them are different from the various Sephardi communities. That said, the cleanest minhag line in terms of categorization is between all of the various Ashkenazi minhagim and all of the various Sephardi minhagim, because there are a couple of specific and significant differences that all Sephardi communities do and all Ashkenazi communities don’t, and vice versa, eg. “Do you eat beans on Passover?”
It’s also separately true that, Ashkenazi communities, being the most isolated, had several major genetic bottlenecks, and as a result, have several genetic diseases which are most common among members of those communities. Now, remember: you don’t have to be related to an Ashkenazi Jew to follow an Ashkenazi minhag. There’s no sense in which the minhagim of the Ashkenazim convey a risk of Tay–Sachs or the BRCA gene; you don’t magically increase your risk of breast cancer by not eating beans on Passover. But given a long history of pogroms and violent expulsions, your family might not have kept good records of where their ancestors lived, and often, the best you can do is use your family’s surviving minhagim to back-figure. For example, if your family doesn’t eat beans during Passover and wears tefillin on the intermediate days of Passover and Sukkot, then your family probably spent multiple generations in Lithuania, and so even if you have no records of that, you might want to consider genetic testing for some of the diseases like Tay-Sachs that are common to those communities of Lithuanian Jews.
Additionally, it is also separately true that Ashkenazi communities, again being the most isolated, frequently had the most interbreeding (both through intermarriage, and also through sexual violence that they experienced at the hands of their persecutors) with the non-Jewish communities around them. This means that phenotypically, Ashkenazi Jews are more likely to look European than Mizrahi Jews are. But… note that this truly only goes so far. For example, all converts who converted into Ashkenazi regions are Ashkenazi, and since a lot of Ashkenazi communities fled antisemitic violence to the United States (note: I don’t just mean the Holocaust; I mean pogroms and other European purges going back well before then) this means that while a majority of Black Jews worldwide are non-Ashkenazi, a majority of African American Jews specifically are Ashkenazi, because their families joined Ashkenazi communities within the United States. You can broadly say that red hair is common among Ashkenazi Jews and rare among Mizrahi Jews – but you can’t say with any certainty at all whether a Jew is Ashkenazi or not by seeing whether or not they personally have red hair. I picked the Episcopalian example in that other post for pretty much exactly this reason. If I knew nothing at all about a person other than that they attended a church that was founded by a community of Anglicans, and if I had to guess their race, I’d say that they were probably white. However, there are a ton of Black churches which are specifically Episcopalian, and so if I stuck to my guns on my guess low-confidence guess and claimed that any and all Christian communities that can trace their sectarian lineage back through the Church of England are white and white only, I’d very quickly look like an absolute idiot.
Ok, so final thing here, and then I’m done: what’s up with Sephardi being used as a catchall term for both Sephardi and Mizrahi? Well, there are two elements to that. The first is that, again, the cleanest single line you can draw is between Ashkenazim and Sephardim/Mizrahim, because the Ashkenazim have traditions (like not eating beans on Passover) that no other communities have. But the second equally important factor is a little thing called the Spanish Inquisition. When the Jews were expelled from Spain, the a huge number of them moved to the Middle East. This means that there was a lot of cross-contact between Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, and a lot of mixing of minhagim. Although there are many oral traditions that are still only Sephardi or still only Mizrahi, the line between, for example, Sephardim whose families fled Spain in the 1400s, settled in Iran, and then eventually fled to Israel and Mizrahim whose families had lived in Iran since the 1100s and then eventually fled to Israel is much blurrier than the line between many Ashkenazi communities living side by side in places like NYC. So in a big tent sense, since certain communities of Sephardim have less difference between themselves and their neighboring Mizarahim than the Ashkenazi communities in that area have with the other Ashkenazi communities in that area, it often makes sense to just talk about Sephardim as though the category includes “anyone who isn’t Ashkenazi” – and this extends to things like community politics, where in some places the Sephardim and Mizrahim are likely to broadly share community interests and vote as a block. But again, note that this only goes so far: there are particular Sephardi communities that have significant beef with particular Mizrahi communities, and in those cases, saying that Sephardi is an umbrella which encompasses both sides of an ongoing fight about, eg. whether or not one community ought to be allowed to keep doing an arguably public nuisance tradition they’ve had for centuries is silly and unhelpful.
Hope this clarifies things!
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