Word: sephardim
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Mongols swept westward in the 13th century, Khazaria's Jews fled to Eastern and Central Europe. These fugitives, Koestler suggests, were part of a second Diaspora that became the Ashkenazim, or European Jews of Russia and Poland. True Semitic Jews, he says, are descendants of the Sephardim, that small group whose exile wanderings can be traced from the ancient Middle East through North Africa, Spain and Portugal...
...Chief Rabbinate consists of the chief rabbi of the Ashkenazim (descendants of Middle European Jews), the chief rabbi of the Sephardim (descendants of Jews from the Iberian peninsula), plus other high-ranking rabbis...
...remaining 16% are divided between the SEPHARDIC and ORIENTAL Jews. The Sephardim developed into a community in medieval Spain, where their achievements in arts, government and letters made them the most influential Jewish community of the Diaspora until their expulsion in 1492. Their language, Ladino, reflects their Spanish roots. The Oriental Jews are scattered from North Africa to Afghanistan, usually speaking Jewish varieties of Arabic or Persian, and in the case of one group, Aramaic...
...Jewish homeland, Israel has Jews of almost every kind, color and Judaic language, although the Sephardic pronunciation of Hebrew has been made standard for Israel. In the U.S., the oldest Jewish community is that of the Sephardim, who first arrived in 1654. They brought with them an ORTHODOX heritage, but many strayed from it in the New World. The first important wave of Ashkenazic immigration from Germany in the 1840s and '50s, on the other hand, brought with it the REFORM movement of religious Judaism, an outgrowth of the Age of Enlightenment. Caught up in the rationalism...
Much of the difficulty grows out of the fact that Israel is not really one Jewish nation but an uncertain amalgam of Ashkenazic (European) and Sephardic (Oriental) Jews. The Sephardim (literally "Spaniards," though most are from North Africa or Asia) represent almost 65% of the Jewish population. The generally better-educated Ashkenazim ("Germans," in Old Hebrew), many of them descendants of the Polish and Russian Jews who founded Israel, rule the country. The Sephardim feel discriminated against because of their cultural shortcomings. Only 3% of all top government officials and 20% of the Knesset, or Parliament, are Sephardim...