Word: sephardim
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Some of Israel's other troubling social problems are simply current manifestations of longstanding tensions, notably the antagonism between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews and the often violent clashes between Orthodox and more secular Jews. The differences between Ashkenazim and Sephardim are ancient and real. The original Sephardim were the powerful Jews of Moorish Spain, who were expelled from the country in 1492 and dispersed to North Africa, the eastern Mediterranean and Asia. (A smaller, later wave, who had taken temporary refuge in Portugal, later migrated to The Netherlands, Britain and the Americas...
Ashkenazi Jews, the Europeans who dominated the Zionist movement in the 20th century, originally were a tiny community on the Rhine. The Ashkenazim founded modern political Zionism and brought to Israel Western values, education, technology and tastes. The problem lies in the fact that often they look down on Sephardim, and the Sephardim on them, a phenomenon fed by ethnic differences. Sephardim tend to live in small towns, raise large families, and to eat foods that even now reflect their Spanish heritage. Rice, for example, is permitted during Passover. Ashkenazim tend to make their homes in the city...
...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...
...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...