from /r/vexillology
Top comment: Colours of Spain, with the layout of the Israeli flag. The Star of David is a little to the left, like the emblem on the Spanish flag
Syria has had both Musta'arab and Spanish (non-Musta'arab) Jewish communities. Mizrahi as an ethnic descriptor is a recent Israeli term that Ashkenazim used to refer to the “Eastern” Jews, and while many people use it nowadays, a greater number of people are against it for reasons concerning Orientalism.
One of the best and concise explanations — in the form of a rant, mind you — I’ve seen out there to explain why Jews who are not of S&P background (the traditional Sepharadim, i.e. ethnically speaking) might call themselves Sepharadi has been written by Ra'hmiel Travitz (who himself is half Iraqi and half Ashkenazi):
“Due to many recent (rather ignorant, IMHO) posts on the subject, there is a need to once again explain why the term “Sepharadi” does NOT refer to people descending from Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and why it is not an ethnic term.
When the centre of Jewish learning and intellectual thought shifted from Babylon (Iraq) to Al-Andalus about 1000 years ago, Jews who followed the output of Al-Andalus (broadly, everyone except for Ashkenazim, Italqim/most Provençalim, Romaniotes, and obviously Ethiopians, started calling themselves Sepharadim even if they had NO roots in the Iberian Peninsula. Why? Because almost all major works of Jewish Law and Philosophy and Biblical interpretation, as well as poetry and liturgy, that we all followed and accepted came from there. ALL (pan-)Sepharadim hold the works of ibn ‘Ezra, ibn Da'ud, Maimonides, Alfasi (who called himself Sepharadi even though he lived mostly in Morocco), ibn Gabirol, R’ Yehuda HaLevy, ibn Naghrela, etc etc etc etc to be our Crowns of our Intellectual Tradition.
All pan-Sepharadim followed Rif, Rambam, and later Maran in Halakha - at least to a majority extent. We called ourselves Sepharadi on the basis of the intellectual traditions and NOT ethnicity. The “Chacham Tzvi”, who was 100% ethnically Ashkenazi, but learned in the then-central Yeshiva of pan-Sepharadim, in Salonica, called himself “Sepharadi”.
To this day, ‘Hakhamim from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Iran, etc. call and called themselves to this day Sepharadim (see, for instance, the Ben Ish ‘Hai, H’ Ovadia Yosef, H’ Mordekhai Eliyahu, the Persian ‘Hakham Bension Abba Sha'ul, et al) even though they never had *ANY* roots in the Iberian Peninsula. It is academically demonstrable that Jews all the way to China were under the influence of the Sepharadi intellectual tradition.
See also 'Hakham Professor Jose Faur’s “HaRav Yisrael Moshe 'Hazzan; Ha-Ish wuMishnatho” pereq 1 footnote 1.
So those of us who use the term to describe ourselves and others from countries of the Sepharadi intellectual tradition have the weight of history and historical usage behind us, and we are not being Eurocentric, and if you think we are, you are free to f*** off nicely. You don’t have to agree or use the term yourselves, but you have no right to stop us doing what has been done for nearly a thousand years.
Furthermore, those who use the term “Mizra'him/Edot haMizra'h” are the ones using Eurocentric terms, as it has been clearly demonstrated by professors of “Mizrahi Studies” such as Ella Shohat and others that this is NOT a term the we historically used to describe ourselves *AT ALL* and is instead a literal translation of the racist European word “Orientals” used to lump the cultures of distinct communities from Morocco all the way to China under one false cultural/ethnic identity (the term Sepharadi is distinguishable in it being a term to describe a broad *intellectual and religious* cultural identity, but not universal culture). So much for “Eurocentrism”, huh?
… don’t you dare deride those who are using a term that their own non-Iberian ancestors used to describe themselves, and MENA/Persian Jewry generally. Keep you historic revisionist crap to yourselves, and pick up a goddamned book from one of the *myriads* in Rabbinic literature where the non-Iberian 'Hakhamim used the term Sepharadi, and shut up."
