Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews

The division between Ashkenazim and Sephardim did not come from a schism or a quarrel over doctrine. It grew out of geography. In the Middle Ages most Jews lived either in the Christian lands of northern Europe or in the Mediterranean world, much of it under Muslim rule, and the two groups developed their own customs, scholarship and languages. Medieval Jews borrowed biblical names for these lands: Ashkenaz, a descendant of Noah in Genesis, became the name for Germany, and Sepharad, a place mentioned by the prophet Obadiah, for Spain.

Ashkenazi Jewry took shape from about the 10th century in towns along the Rhine, such as Mainz, Worms and Speyer, and in northern France, where the great commentator Rashi lived. These communities suffered badly in the Crusades and later expulsions, and from the late Middle Ages many moved east into Poland and Lithuania, which became the heartland of Ashkenazi life for centuries. There they spoke Yiddish, built yeshivas, and later gave rise to Hasidism and its opponents.

Sephardi Jewry flourished in Muslim al-Andalus and later in the Christian kingdoms of Spain, producing poets, philosophers and legal scholars such as Maimonides. After waves of violence in 1391, Spain expelled its remaining Jews in 1492, and Portugal forcibly converted its Jews in 1497. The exiles settled in the Ottoman Empire, in cities such as Istanbul and Thessaloniki, in North Africa, in Italy and later in Amsterdam, London and the Americas, carrying with them the Spanish language that became Ladino. Some families who had been forced to convert later returned openly to Judaism in Amsterdam and elsewhere, forming the Western Sephardi communities sometimes called Spanish and Portuguese Jews. Their synagogues, such as the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam and Bevis Marks in London, still stand.

Ashkenazim and Sephardim share the same Torah, Talmud and core of Jewish law, but they follow different authorities on many details. The most famous code of law, the Shulchan Arukh, was written by Joseph Karo, a Sephardi scholar in Safed, and printed in 1565. Moses Isserles of Kraków added glosses recording where Ashkenazi custom differed, and the combined work became the standard for both. Sephardim generally follow Karo’s rulings; Ashkenazim follow Isserles where he disagrees.

Some differences are visible at home. At Passover, Ashkenazi custom has long forbidden kitniyot, a category that includes rice, beans, lentils and maize, while most Sephardi communities eat them. Ashkenazim traditionally name children only after relatives who have died; Sephardim often name a first son and daughter after living grandparents. Food reflects the old homelands, from Ashkenazi gefilte fish and cholent to Sephardi bourekas and slow-cooked hamin. Both cholent and hamin answer the same need: a dish that can cook slowly overnight, so that a hot meal is ready on the Sabbath without lighting a fire.

The synagogue sounds and looks different too. Ashkenazi and Sephardi prayer books contain the same main prayers but vary in wording, order and additional poems, and their melodies are distinct. Sephardi and Mizrahi communities often keep the Torah scroll in a rigid case called a tik, and read it standing upright, while Ashkenazim dress it in a cloth mantle and lay it flat. Pronunciation of Hebrew differs: traditional Ashkenazi Hebrew says “Shabbos” where Sephardi Hebrew says “Shabbat”. Modern Israeli Hebrew adopted the Sephardi vowels and stress, though many of its sounds come from the Ashkenazi speech of its early speakers.

Mizrahi Jews, from countries such as Iraq, Iran, Yemen and Syria, form a third great heritage. Many of their communities are older than either Ashkenazi or Sephardi Jewry, but because they mostly follow Sephardi legal rulings and rites, they are often grouped with Sephardim in religious matters. Smaller traditions, such as the Romaniote Jews of Greece, Ethiopian Jews and the Jews of India, have their own customs as well. In practice, the boundaries have always been porous: Sephardi exiles settled among older Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and often absorbed them, and many families today keep customs from more than one heritage.

Before the Second World War, Ashkenazim made up the large majority of the world’s Jews, by some estimates around nine in ten, most of them in Eastern Europe. The Holocaust destroyed most of that world, and it also annihilated the great Sephardi community of Thessaloniki, most of whose Jews were deported in 1943. Today Ashkenazim are still usually estimated to be a majority of the world’s Jews, especially in the United States, while Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are concentrated in Israel and France.

In Israel the two heritages have mixed more than anywhere else. After 1948 hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived from Arab countries and Iran, and Israel’s religious institutions reflect both heritages, with an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi Chief Rabbi since the time of the British Mandate. Social tensions between the groups were real in the early decades of the state, and historians continue to study them. Today a large share of young Israelis have both Ashkenazi and Sephardi or Mizrahi ancestors.

The old languages have declined but not vanished. Yiddish remains the everyday language of many Hasidic communities and is studied at universities, while Ladino survives among older speakers, singers and scholars working to preserve it. For most Jews, the difference between Ashkenazi and Sephardi is now less a boundary than a matter of family memory, melody and food on the festival table.