Sephardic Jews: History, Customs, and Who They Are Today

I grew up Ashkenazi in Brooklyn — Yiddish, gefilte fish, the whole package — which means I grew up with a certain picture of what "Jewish" looks like. Then I grew up a little more and realized my picture was one branch of a much bigger family tree. Sephardic Jews carry a history every bit as deep as mine, and their story — Spain, expulsion, exile, rebuilding — is one of the most dramatic in all of Jewish history. When people ask me about the different types of Jews, this is the chapter I most enjoy telling, because so few outsiders know it.

So let me tell it properly.

Who Are Sephardic Jews?

Sephardic Jews (also spelled Sefardic, or called Sephardim) are Jews whose ancestors lived in Spain and Portugal — the Iberian Peninsula — during the Middle Ages, before they were expelled at the end of the 15th century. "Sepharad" is the Hebrew name for Spain, so a Sephardi is literally "a Spaniard" in Hebrew, the same way an Ashkenazi is literally "a German," because Ashkenaz is the Hebrew name for Germany.

Here is the important thing to understand right away: Sephardic is an ancestry and a tradition, not a religion or a denomination. Sephardic Jews keep the same Torah and the same commandments as every other Jew. What makes them Sephardic is where their families come from and the specific customs, melodies, foods, Hebrew pronunciation, and halachic rulings that developed in those communities over many centuries.

In everyday speech, "Sephardic" is also used more broadly to include Mizrahi Jews — Jews from the Middle East and North Africa whose ancestors never lived in Spain at all. That is technically imprecise, and I will untangle it below, but the broad usage exists for a real reason: these communities share the same halachic tradition and pray from very similar prayer books.

Where Does the Name "Sephardic" Come From?

The name goes all the way back to the Bible. The prophet Obadiah speaks of "the exile of Jerusalem that is in Sepharad" (Obadiah 1:20). Jewish tradition identified Sepharad with the Iberian Peninsula, and so Spain became, in Hebrew, Sepharad — and its Jews became Sephardim.

I love that detail, because it tells you how the Jews of Spain saw themselves: not as a random immigrant community, but as a branch of the exile of Jerusalem, planted at the far western edge of the known world. Jews lived in Spain for well over a thousand years, and by the Middle Ages the Jews of Sepharad were one of the oldest, largest, and most accomplished Jewish communities on earth.

The Golden Age: Jewish Life in Medieval Spain

For several centuries in the Middle Ages, especially under Muslim rule in the south of Spain, Jewish life flourished in a way it rarely had anywhere in the diaspora. Historians call it the Golden Age of Spanish Jewry, and the name is deserved. Jews served as physicians, poets, diplomats, and advisors at royal courts, while producing Torah scholarship we still live by today. The names from this period are the giants of the Jewish bookshelf:

• The Rambam (Maimonides) was born in Cordoba. He fled Spain with his family as a boy when a fanatical dynasty conquered the city, wandered through North Africa, and eventually settled in Egypt, where he became a court physician and wrote the Mishneh Torah, the first complete code of Jewish law, along with the Guide for the Perplexed. Ask a Jew anywhere to name the greatest Torah scholar since the Talmud, and the Rambam is the most common answer.
• The Ramban (Nachmanides), from Girona in Catalonia, wrote one of the most beloved commentaries on the Torah and was forced to defend Judaism in the famous public disputation in Barcelona in 1263. In his old age he moved to the Land of Israel and helped revive the Jewish community in Jerusalem.
• Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, the great poet and philosopher, wrote the Kuzari — a defense of Judaism framed as a dialogue with a searching king — and poems of longing for Zion that Jews still recite. His famous line, "My heart is in the East, and I am at the edge of the West," could be the motto of the whole Sephardic story. At the end of his life he left Spain to journey to the Land of Israel.

There was persecution in Spain too — the Golden Age was golden, not perfect, and it tarnished badly in the later centuries. But the self-confidence of Spanish Jewry, its poetry, its philosophy, its halachic clarity, left a permanent stamp on Judaism.

The Expulsion of 1492

Every Sephardic family's story runs through one date. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain — the same monarchs who sent Columbus across the ocean that very year — signed the Alhambra Decree, ordering every Jew in Spain to convert to Christianity or leave the kingdom. After more than a millennium in Sepharad, the Jews who refused baptism packed what they could carry and left. Estimates of the numbers vary, but we are talking about an entire nation of families walking away from their homes, their synagogues, and their dead.

Many crossed into Portugal, hoping to wait out the storm — and in 1497 Portugal turned on its Jews as well. There, most were not even given the choice to leave; huge numbers were forcibly converted.

Which brings up one of the most haunting threads in this story: the conversos, also called anusim ("the coerced") — Jews baptized under duress who secretly kept whatever Judaism they could behind closed doors. The Spanish Inquisition existed largely to hunt them. For generations, families lit candles in cellars on Friday night without being able to say why, and descendants of these hidden Jews still surface today, discovering fragments of Jewish practice in their family customs. If you want to understand why the question of who is a Jew can get genuinely complicated, the conversos are a big part of the answer.

Jewish tradition remembers the final departure from Spain as coinciding with Tishah B'Av, the Jewish day of mourning — one more catastrophe gathered into that date. And Sephardic Jews never forgot Spain. Families kept the keys to their Spanish houses for generations. They kept the language. In recent years, Spain and Portugal each passed laws offering citizenship to descendants of the expelled — five centuries late, but a remarkable acknowledgment of what was done — though the application windows have since largely closed.

Where Sephardic Jews Went After Spain

The expulsion scattered Sephardim across the map, and everywhere they landed they rebuilt with astonishing speed.

The Ottoman Empire took in more exiles than anywhere else. Sultan Bayezid II welcomed them openly — the story is told that he mocked Ferdinand for impoverishing his own kingdom while enriching the Sultan's. Sephardim built great communities in Constantinople (Istanbul), Izmir, and above all Salonika (today's Thessaloniki in Greece), which became so thoroughly Jewish that it was called "the mother of Israel" — for centuries it was a major port city with a Jewish majority, where the docks rested on Shabbat.

North Africa — Morocco especially — absorbed waves of Spanish exiles, who joined Jewish communities that had already been there for many centuries. Cities like Fez became major centers of Sephardic scholarship.

Italy hosted important Sephardic communities, most famously in the port city of Livorno, which became a hub of Hebrew printing and trade.

Amsterdam became the great refuge for conversos escaping Portugal and Spain, who returned openly to Judaism there. The "Spanish and Portuguese" community they built made Amsterdam one of the wealthiest and most learned Jewish centers in Europe, and its grand Portuguese Synagogue still stands.

The Land of Israel drew exiles as well, and one small Galilean city changed Jewish history because of it. In the 16th century, the town of Tzfat (Safed) filled with Sephardic scholars and mystics — and it was there that Rav Yosef Karo, who had fled Spain with his family as a child, wrote the Shulchan Aruch, the code of Jewish law that remains the backbone of halachic practice for the entire Jewish people to this day.

Sephardim also reached the New World early. The oldest Jewish congregation in North America — Congregation Shearith Israel in New York, founded in 1654 — was established by Jews of Spanish and Portuguese descent, and it still calls itself the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue.

Ladino: The Language of Sephardic Jews

Just as my Ashkenazi ancestors carried German out of the Rhineland and turned it into Yiddish, Sephardim carried Spanish out of Spain and turned it into Ladino — also called Judeo-Spanish. It is essentially the Spanish of the 1400s, preserved in exile like a time capsule, mixed with Hebrew words and, depending on where its speakers landed, Turkish, Greek, or Arabic ones. Traditionally it was written in Hebrew letters.

For centuries, Ladino was the everyday language of Sephardic life across the Ottoman world — the language of lullabies, proverbs, romansas (ballads), and a rich religious literature. Its most famous work is the Me'am Lo'ez, a beloved encyclopedic Torah commentary begun in the 18th century, written in Ladino specifically so that ordinary people could learn.

Today, Ladino is an endangered language. The Holocaust destroyed the great Ladino-speaking heartland — the Jews of Salonika were almost entirely murdered — and in Israel and the Americas, Ladino gave way to Hebrew, Spanish, and English. Most Sephardic Jews today speak the language of the country they live in, plus Hebrew. But you will still hear Ladino songs at Sephardic weddings and Shabbat tables, and there are serious efforts underway to preserve and revive it. To my ear it sounds like Spain and Jerusalem at the same time.

Sephardic vs Mizrahi: What's the Difference?

Here is the distinction almost everyone blurs, so let me lay it out cleanly.

• Sephardic Jews, strictly speaking, descend from the Jews of Spain and Portugal — the exiles of 1492.
• Mizrahi Jews ("Eastern" Jews) are the Jewish communities of the Middle East and North Africa — Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Syria, Egypt, and beyond — many of which have been where they are since ancient times and never lived in Spain at all. A Jew from Baghdad in 1900 belonged to a community older than the Roman Empire.

So why does everyone call Mizrahi Jews "Sephardic"? Because after the expulsion, Spanish exiles settled throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and their halachic tradition — anchored in Rav Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch — merged with and largely became the standard for the communities around them. Sephardim and Mizrahim pray from very similar prayer books, follow the same halachic authorities, and in Israel share one Chief Rabbi. So in casual speech, and even in official Israeli usage, "Sephardic" often just means "not Ashkenazi."

Most people you will meet do not mind the shorthand, but plenty of Persian, Iraqi, and Yemenite Jews will gently point out that their families never saw Spain. If you want to be precise, "Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews" covers everyone.

How Are Sephardic Jews Different from Ashkenazi Jews?

I keep a whole page on Ashkenazi vs Sephardic differences, so here I will just give you the shape of it — because on a page about who Sephardim are, the differences deserve a summary, not a spotlight.

The two communities keep the same Torah and the same core halacha. Where they differ is in custom, style, and a handful of legal rulings:

• Halachic baseline. Sephardim follow Rav Yosef Karo's Shulchan Aruch as written; Ashkenazim follow it as glossed by the Rema (Rabbi Moshe Isserles), who noted where Ashkenazi custom differs. Same book, two lanes.
• Passover food. Sephardim eat kitniyot — rice, beans, legumes — on Passover; Ashkenazim traditionally do not. (Ask me how I feel about this by day six of the holiday.)
• Hebrew pronunciation. Sephardic Hebrew sounds different from Ashkenazi Hebrew — "Shabbat" rather than "Shabbos" — and it is the pronunciation that modern Israeli Hebrew largely adopted.
• The Torah scroll itself. In many Sephardic and Mizrahi synagogues, the Torah lives in a tik — a rigid, hinged case of decorated wood or metal — and is read standing upright in its case, rather than dressed in a velvet mantle and laid flat on the reading table the way I grew up seeing.
• Prayer melodies and rite. The liturgy is organized a little differently, and the melodies come from a different musical world — closer to the Middle East than to Eastern Europe. Walk past a Sephardic synagogue during prayers and you will hear it instantly.
• Selichot. Sephardim begin saying selichot (penitential prayers) at the start of the month of Elul, a full month before Rosh Hashanah; Ashkenazim begin just days before. My Sephardic neighbors are waking up before dawn for weeks while I am still asleep.

One more difference worth knowing: history. Sephardic Jewry never went through the denominational splits that fractured Ashkenazi Jewry in 19th-century Europe — there is no historic "Sephardic Reform" or "Sephardic Conservative" movement. Instead, Sephardic communities held together a wide range of personal observance inside one traditional communal framework, which is why so many Sephardic Jews describe themselves simply as "traditional."

Sephardic Religious Leadership

Sephardic Jewry has its own chain of towering halachic authorities, and three names come up constantly.

Rav Yosef Karo (16th century) is the anchor of the whole tradition — the author of the Shulchan Aruch, written in Tzfat, which Sephardim follow to this day. Sephardim call him simply Maran, "our master."

The Ben Ish Chai — Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad (19th century) — is beloved across the Sephardic and Mizrahi world. His most famous work, called Ben Ish Chai like its author, weaves practical halacha together with Kabbalah, arranged around the weekly Torah portion, and it remains a staple of Sephardic homes.

The Baba Sali — Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira — was a Moroccan-born sage and kabbalist revered as a holy man and miracle worker. He settled in the southern Israeli town of Netivot, and his grave there has become one of Israel's major pilgrimage sites; the anniversary of his passing draws enormous crowds every year.

And in living memory, the dominant figure was Rav Ovadia Yosef, the former Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, who passed away in 2013. A halachic genius with a photographic command of the sources, he spent his life restoring Sephardic halachic independence — his motto was to return the crown of Sephardic Torah to its former glory — and he became the spiritual leader of an entire political and educational movement in Israel. His funeral in Jerusalem was among the largest gatherings in the country's history.

One structural note that surprises outsiders: Israel has two Chief Rabbis, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi. The Sephardi Chief Rabbi carries the ancient title Rishon LeZion, "First in Zion."

Sephardic Jews Today

So where is the Sephardic world now?

In Israel, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews are a huge share of the Jewish population — by many counts the majority. This surprises Americans, whose picture of "Jewish" is overwhelmingly Ashkenazi. In Israel the street tells a different story: Moroccan, Iraqi, Persian, Yemenite, Tunisian, and Turkish family names, synagogues on every block following the Sephardic rite, and a national cuisine that owes far more to the Sephardi/Mizrahi kitchen than to mine. Decades of intermarriage between communities blur the lines more every generation.

In the United States, Sephardim are a minority within a mostly Ashkenazi Jewish population, but a vibrant one. The most famous community is the Syrian Jewish community centered in Brooklyn — not far from me — with its summer branch in Deal, New Jersey. It is renowned for tight family networks, serious institutions, a proud tradition of pizmonim (Hebrew songs set to Middle Eastern melodies), and some of the best food in the Jewish world. There are also significant Persian communities (Los Angeles and Great Neck, New York, are famous for them), Bukharan communities in Queens, and the old Spanish and Portuguese congregations going back to colonial times.

In France, Jews from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia arrived in huge numbers in the mid-20th century as those countries' ancient communities emptied out, making French Jewry today largely Sephardic. Which is a quiet historical irony: the great Jewish communities of the Islamic world, some older than Islam itself, have almost entirely relocated to Israel, France, and the Americas within living memory.

Observance across the Sephardic world runs the full range — from Haredi Torah scholars to fully secular Israelis — but as a rule, even less-observant Sephardic families tend to keep a warm connection to tradition: Friday night kiddush, the holidays, respect for the rabbis. There are also Sephardic Jews inside Hasidic movements, especially Chabad and Breslov, which actively welcomed them — even though Hasidism itself is an Ashkenazi movement.

Sephardic Food and Customs

I will not pretend to be unbiased here: I have written elsewhere that Sephardim got the better end of the culinary deal, and I stand by it.

The Shabbat table is where you taste the difference first. Where my family has cholent, Sephardic and Mizrahi families have their own overnight Shabbat stews — hamin, or the Moroccan dafina — built on wheat or rice, chickpeas, meat, and eggs that cook until they turn deep brown. Around them: bourekas (flaky filled pastries), couscous, chraime (fish in spicy red sauce), stuffed vegetables, and pastries soaked in honey and rosewater. The fried fish that Spanish and Portuguese exiles brought to England is often credited as the ancestor of British fish and chips, which might be Sephardic Jewry's most underrated contribution to Western civilization. All of it kosher, all of it built for a crowd.

Beyond the kitchen, a few customs to know:

• The Rosh Hashanah seder. On the eve of the new year, Sephardic families hold a mini-seder of symbolic foods — dates, pomegranates, leeks, gourds — each eaten with its own short prayer for the year ahead. Ashkenazim dip an apple in honey; Sephardim make an evening of it.
• The henna. In many Sephardic and Mizrahi communities, a bride is celebrated before her wedding with a henna party — music, traditional dress, and henna dye on the palms — a custom carried from North Africa and the Middle East.
• Names. Sephardim traditionally name children after living relatives, especially grandparents, considering it an honor. Ashkenazim name only after the deceased — which is why a Sephardic grandfather may sit at a table with little namesakes running around him, something my Ashkenazi grandmother would have found alarming.
• Piyyut and song. Sephardic communities preserve a vast living tradition of liturgical poetry sung at the table and in the synagogue — from the songs of Shabbat to the pre-dawn bakashot some communities sing in winter.

Common Questions

Are Sephardic Jews Orthodox? Sephardic is an ancestry and a tradition, not a denomination, so a Sephardic Jew can be strictly observant, completely secular, or anywhere in between. What is distinct is the history: Sephardic Jewry never split into Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform movements the way Ashkenazi Jewry did in Europe — the community stayed formally traditional, with individuals observing at their own level inside it. That is why so many Sephardic Jews call themselves "traditional" rather than picking a denominational label, and why Sephardic synagogues almost universally follow traditional halachic practice even when many members drive there.

What is the difference between Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews? Sephardic Jews descend from the Jews of Spain and Portugal, while Ashkenazi Jews descend from the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe — same Torah, same faith, but centuries in different lands produced different customs, foods, melodies, Hebrew pronunciation, and some differing halachic rulings. I break down the full comparison — history, halacha, food, and all — in Ashkenazi vs Sephardic Jews.

What language do Sephardic Jews speak? Historically, Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) — the 15th-century Spanish the exiles carried out of Spain, written in Hebrew letters — while many communities in the Middle East and North Africa spoke Judeo-Arabic. Today Sephardic Jews speak the language of wherever they live — Hebrew in Israel, English in America, French in France — with Hebrew for prayer, and Ladino surviving mainly in songs, sayings, and revival efforts.

Where do Sephardic Jews live today? Mostly in Israel, where Jews of Sephardi and Mizrahi background make up a huge share — by many counts the majority — of the Jewish population. Outside Israel, the largest concentrations are in France (mostly North African families) and the United States, including the well-known Syrian community in Brooklyn and Deal, New Jersey, and Persian communities in Los Angeles and Great Neck. Smaller historic communities remain in Turkey, Morocco, Italy, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Is Rambam Sephardic? Yes — the Rambam (Maimonides) was born in Cordoba, Spain, making him one of the most famous Sephardic Jews in history. He signed some of his writings "HaSefardi" — "the Spaniard." His family fled Spain during his boyhood and he ultimately settled in Egypt, where he wrote the works that made him a towering authority for all Jews, Sephardic and Ashkenazi alike.