Why we need Mizrahi heritage month

Growing up in Sydney in the 1970s and ’80s, I’d never heard of a Mizrahi Jew. Instead, the word Sephardi was used as a catch-all to describe all non-Ashkenazim. But the term Mizrahi has been commonly used in Israel – initially, unfavourably – since the 1950s.

And since 2014, the stories of Mizrahi Jews have been formally recognised, with Sydney being the first in the diaspora to hold a community-wide event commemorating the expulsion of Jews from Arab Lands and Iran. Internationally, November is also the annual celebration of Mizrahi Heritage Month.

Meaning eastern, the term Mizrahi refers to Jews from the Middle East, North Africa and Asia; countries such as Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Morocco, Syria, Libya, Yemen, India, China and Singapore. The stories of the once-thriving Jewish communities in these countries – as a collective, as well as by individual country – has to a large extent been unknown, and for many years went unrecognised.

But ten years ago, the Israeli government enacted a law designating November 30 as an annual, national day of commemoration for the one million Jewish refugees who were displaced from Arab countries and Iran in the 20^th century. After the 2014 Israeli legislation was passed, JIMENA – Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa; a not-for-profit organisation based in the San Francisco Bay Area – saw an opportunity to dedicate a whole month to honouring and promoting the heritage, history and rights of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews. With that, Mizrahi Heritage Month was born.

Around the same time, the term Mizrahi, as distinct from Sephardi, started gaining traction in diaspora communities. As Hen Mazzig, an Israeli-Mizrahi writer, educator and commentator writes in his 2022 book, The Wrong Kind of Jew: A Mizrahi Manifesto, the term Sephardi (from the word Sfarad, or Spain, in Hebrew) primarily refers to the Jews who left the Iberian Peninsula around the time of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions (1492 and 1536 respectively) and ended up in the Middle East and North Africa.