Samuel Hayim Brody in the Boston Review:
Mizrahi, a Hebrew word meaning “Eastern,” is used in the State of Israel to refer to Jews from Muslim-majority countries. Confusingly, it has widely come to replace the older term Sephardi, even though the latter traditionally means “Spanish” and has been used since medieval times to describe the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, many of whom fled to the lands of the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion in 1492. It has never made much sense to describe the Jews of Iraq, for example—millennia-old communities with no connection to Spain or Portugal—as Sephardi. Nor does it make sense to describe Morocco as “east” of Germany. Instead, Mizrahi is an artifact of Israeli history, yoking together Jews with divergent histories in Tunisia, Yemen, and Iraq as they underwent similar experiences of immigration. But precisely because those experiences were so humiliating, the term has its opponents. In The Arab Jews: A Postcolonial Reading of Nationalism, Religion, and Ethnicity (2006), Yehouda Shenhav translates Mizrahi as “Oriental,” succinctly capturing the affects and attitudes that he and other opponents hear in it.
As an alternative, “Arab Jews” has a subversive quality.
More here.
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