Mizrahi Jews

Mizrahi Jews (Hebrew: יהודי המִזְרָח), also known as Mizrahim (מִזְרָחִים) or Mizrachi (מִזְרָחִי) and alternatively referred to as Oriental Jews or Edot HaMizrach (עֲדוֹת-הַמִּזְרָח, lit. 'Communities of the East'), are a grouping of Jewish communities comprising those who remained in the Land of Israel and those who existed in diaspora throughout and around the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from biblical times into the modern era.

Mizrahi is a political sociological term that was coined with the creation of the State of Israel. It translates as "Easterner" in Hebrew and refers to Oriental Jews. In current usage, the term Mizrahi is almost exclusively applied to descendants of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa; in this classification are the descendants of Mashriqi Jews who had lived in Middle Eastern countries, such as Yemenite Jews, Egyptian Jews, Persian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Lebanese Jews, Syrian Jews, Turkish Jews and Iraqi Jews; as well as the descendants of Maghrebi Jews who had lived in North African countries, such as Algerian Jews, Libyan Jews, Moroccan Jews, and Tunisian Jews. These various Jewish communities were first officially grouped into a singular identifiable division during World War II, when they were distinctly outlined in the One Million Plan of the Jewish Agency for Israel, which detailed the methods by which Jews in diaspora were to be returned to the Land of Israel (then under the British Mandate of Palestine) after the Holocaust.

In current usage, Mizrahi also includes Jewish communities from Central Asia and the Caucasus such as the Persian Jews, Afghan Jews, Bukharan Jews from Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, and the Mountain Jews from Dagestan and Azerbaijan. While these communities have traditionally spoken Judaeo-Iranian languages such as Juhuri and Bukhori, some of their descendants are also widely fluent in Russian due to those countries' former status as republics of the Soviet Union.

An earlier cultural community of southern and eastern Jews were the Sephardi Jews. Before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, the various current communities of Mizrahi Jews did not identify themselves as a distinctive Jewish subgroup, and many considered themselves Sephardis, as they largely followed the Sephardic customs and traditions of Judaism with local variations in minhagim. The original Sephardi Jewish community was formed in Spain and Portugal, and after their expulsion in 1492, many Sephardim settled in areas where Mizrahi communities already existed. This complicated ethnography has resulted in a conflation of terms, particularly in official Israeli ethnic and religious terminology, with Sephardi being used in a broad sense to include Middle Eastern and North African Jews, as well as Sephardim proper from Southern Europe around the Mediterranean Basin. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has placed rabbis of Mizrahi origin in Israel under the jurisdiction of the Sephardi chief rabbis.

Following the First Arab–Israeli War, over 850,000 Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were expelled or evacuated from Arab and Muslim-majority countries between 1948 and the early 1980s. As of 2005, 61% of Israeli Jews were of full or partial Mizrahi/Sephardi ancestry, while in a 2018 study 45% of Jewish Israelis identified as such.