page_title: Sephardi Jews
section_title: Eastern Sephardim
hierarchical_section_title: Sephardi Jews / Divisions / Eastern Sephardim
caption_attribution_description: English: Sephardi Jewish couple from Sarajevo in traditional clothing. Photo taken in 1900.
context_page_description: Sephardi Jews, also known as Sephardic Jews, Hispanic Jews or Sephardim are a Jewish ethnic division originating from traditionally established communities in the Iberian Peninsula; most were expelled from the region in the late 15th century. They had developed a distinctive diasporic identity that they carried with them to North Africa, South-eastern and Southern Europe, Anatolia, and the Levant, as well as the Americas, and all other places of their exiled settlement. They sometimes settled near existing Jewish communities, or were the first in new frontiers.
  Their millennial residence as an open and organised Jewish community in Iberia began to decline with the Reconquista. Its decline began with the Alhambra Decree by Spain's Catholic Monarchs in 1492. In 1496 Portuguese king Manuel I issued an edict of expulsion of Jews and Muslims. These actions resulted in a combination of internal and external migrations, mass conversions, and executions.
  In 2015 both Spain and Portugal passed laws which allowed Sephardim who could prove their ancestral origins in those countries to apply for citizenship.
context_section_description: Eastern Sephardim comprise the descendants of the expellees from Spain who left as Jews in 1492 or prior. This sub-group of Sephardim settled mostly in various parts of the Ottoman Empire, which included areas in the Near East (West Asia's Middle East such as Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt), and the Balkans in Southeastern Europe. They settled particularly in European cities ruled by the Ottoman Empire, including Salonica in what is today Greece; Constantinople, which today is known as Istanbul on the European portion of modern Turkey; and Sarajevo, in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina. Sephardic Jews also lived in Bulgaria, where they absorbed into their community the Romaniote Jews they found already living there. They had a presence as well in Walachia in what is today southern Romania, where there is still a functioning Sephardic Synagogue. Their traditional language is referred to as Judezmo ("Jewish [language]"). It is Judaeo-Spanish, sometimes also known as Ladino, which consisted of the medieval Spanish and Portuguese they spoke in Iberia, with admixtures of Hebrew, and the languages around them, especially Turkish. This Judeo-Spanish language was often written in Rashi script.
  Some Sephardim went further east to West Asian territories of the Ottoman Empire, settling among the long-established Arabic-speaking Jewish communities in Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, as well as in the Land of Israel, and as far as Baghdad in Iraq. Although technically Egypt was a North African Ottoman region, those Jews who settled Alexandria are included in this group, due to Egypt's cultural proximity to the West Asian provinces.
  For the most part, Eastern Sephardim did not maintain their own separate Sephardic religious and cultural institutions from pre-existing Jews. Instead the local Jews came to adopt the liturgical customs of the recent Sephardic arrivals.
  Additionally, Eastern Sephardim in European areas of the Ottoman Empire retained their culture and language. Those in the West Asian portion gave up their language and adopted the local Judeo-Arabic dialect. This latter phenomenon is just one of the factors which has today led to the broader religious definition of Sephardi.
  Thus, the Jewish communities in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt are partly of Spanish Jewish origin and they are counted as Sephardim proper. The great majority of the Jewish communities in Iraq, and all of those in Iran, Eastern Syria, Yemen and Eastern Turkey, are descendants of pre-existing indigenous Jewish populations. They adopted Sephardic rite and traditions through cultural diffusion, and are properly termed Mizrahi Jews. 
  Modern DNA research has affirmed these classifications. For instance, Syrian Jews, while clustering within the various world Jewish groups (where most Jewish groups cluster closely together at large compared to non-Jews), are most closely related to the Sephardim proper counterparts in other regions of Sephardic settlement, rather than to the Mizrahi Jews who are geographically closest to them.
  A few of the Eastern Sephardim followed the spice trade routes as far as the Malabar coast of southern India, where they settled among the established Cochin Jewish community. Their culture and customs were absorbed by the local Jews. Additionally, there was a large community of Jews and crypto-Jews of Portuguese origin in the Portuguese colony of Goa. Gaspar Jorge de Leão Pereira, the first archbishop of Goa, wanted to suppress or expel that community, calling for initiation of the Goa Inquisition against the Sephardic Jews in India.
  In recent times, principally after 1948, most Eastern Sephardim have since relocated to Israel, and others to the US and Latin America.
  Eastern Sephardim still often carry common Spanish surnames, as well as other specifically Sephardic surnames from 15th-century Spain with Arabic or Hebrew language origins (such as Azoulay, Abulafia, Abravanel) which have since disappeared from Spain when those that stayed behind as conversos adopted surnames that were solely Spanish in origin. Other Eastern Sephardim have sinc
caption: Sephardi Jewish couple from Sarajevo in traditional clothing (1900)
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