#sepharadi

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?