Musta'arabi Jews


Musta'arabi Jews are Arabic-speaking Jews, largely Mizrahi and Maghrebi Jews, who lived in the Middle East and North Africa prior to the arrival and integration of Ladino-speaking Sephardi Jews of the Iberian Peninsula following their expulsion from Spain in 1492. Following their expulsion, Sephardi exiles moved into the Middle East, and settled among the Musta'arabi.
In many Arab countries, the Sephardi immigrants and the established Musta'arabi communities maintained separate synagogues and separate religious rituals, but often had a common Chief Rabbinate. The general tendency, however, was for both the communities and their customs to amalgamate, adopting a mostly Sephardic liturgy and identity. This pattern was found in most Musta'arabi communities in Arab countries. A typical example is in the History of the Jews in Syria, described in more detail in the rest of this article.
In contrast, in Tunisia there was a strong and enduring social distinction between Tuansa and L'grana.

Background

The word "Musta'arabi" itself, and its Hebrew equivalent mista'arevim, meaning "those who live among the Arabs", are derived from the Arabic "musta'rib", meaning “arabized”. Compare with the term "Mozarab" to refer to Arabized Christian Spaniards in Arab ruled Islamic Spain. "Musta'arabi" was also used by medieval Jewish authors to refer to Jews in North Africa, in what would become the modern states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.
Following the Muslim conquest of Syria, Syria and the surrounding region was brought under Arab rule in the first half of the 7th century, and the Jews of the land, like the Christian majority at that time, became culturally Arabized, adopting many of the ways of the new foreign elite minority rulers, including the language.
Musta'arabim, in the Arabized Hebrew of the day, was used to refer to Arabic-speaking Jews native to Greater Syria who were, "like Arabs" or "culturally Arabic-oriented". These Musta'arabim were also called Murishkes or Moriscos by the Sephardi immigrants. This may be either a corruption of "Mashriqis" or a Ladino word meaning "like Moors" or "Moorish".

In Israel

The Musta'arabi Jews in the Land of Israel constituted one of the three main components of the Old Yishuv, together with the Sephardi Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews. The latter were a minority whose numbers shrank further due to intermarriage with Sephardim. The Musta'arabi Jews in Israel were descendants of the ancient Hebrews, who never left the Land of Israel, instead remaining there from the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE to the First Aliyah in 1881, prior to the onset of Zionist immigration.
Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-16th century, there were no more than 10,000 Jews divided between numerous groups of congregations in all of Palestine. Within the Jewish community at this time, there was some conflict between the Musta'arabim and Jews who had immigrated to Israel from Spain and Sicily. Later on, there was also conflict between Jewish citizens of the Ottoman Empire and those who held foreign passports. From 1839 onward, Jewish subjects of the Ottoman Empire, including the Musta'arabim, were represented by a locally nominated rabbi, whose appointment to serve as a hakham bashi or "chief rabbi" required approval from the Ottoman authorities. This hierarchical system paralleled one previously established for Christian bishops in the empire.
Due the persecution of the rural Jewish population since the Islamic period into the Crusader, Mamluk and Ottoman periods, the Musta'arabim decreased from a majority of the Galilee's population to its smallest minority.. In many of them, there were indigenous Jewish villagers until the Ottoman period. Only in Peki'in there was a Musta'arabi population that has survived. Due to the Arab revolt in the '30s they were forced to evacuate their ancestral historic village and to move to Hadera, where most of them are living today. The synagogues and cemeteries of Musta'arabi Jews, as in Peki'in, are considered the oldest in the Jewish world and can be dated largely to the Talmudic period but also to Mishnaic and Second Temple period.
Unlike the majority of the Jewish communities, Musta'arabi Jews of Israel remained mostly rural farmers as in the ancient periods of Israel.

Roman and Byzantine era

In Roman Palestine, the vast majority of those indigenous Jews who would come to be known as Musta'arabim lived in small villages, especially in the north or Galilee, but also many around Jerusalem, and even toward Ramalah. They suffered extreme oppression and frequent massacres under the Byzantines. They continued to speak Aramaic, but many were illiterate.

Muslim conquest

After the Muslim conquest of the Levant conditions for the Jews greatly improved. The Jews still remained very pious and poor farmers. A slow decline of population happened, both because of intermarriage and conversion to Islam. But the number of Jews remained stagnant. The Jews also started to speak Arabic, or in some cases Judeo-Arabic, to converse more easily with their Arab neighbors.

Crusades

The Jews in Palestine defended against the Crusaders with Arabs, especially at Haifa in 1100. The Crusaders, occupying most of Palestine, from 1099 to 1291, murdered the native Jewish and Muslim populations. Many were forced to convert but instead opted to commit suicide. At Ashkelon, 1191, the Jews were forced out by the crusaders, many of them move to Jerusalem.

Mamluks

During the Mamluk period, the Jews generally saw a decline in status and demographics. Jews started to move out of small villages and into larger ones such as:
Safed, Tiberias, and the area that surrounds them saw an increase in population, in 1500 it is estimated that over 10,000 Jews were living in the Safed Region. Jews started to move towards etrog exportation, and Rabbinic studies.

Galilee Revival

In 1492 the Alhambra Decree and in 1497 King Manuel I Decree converted or expelled all Jews from Iberia. Many of these settled in the 2 main cities of the Galilee, Safed and Tiberias, notable Jewish Scholars such as Yosef Caro settled in Eretz Yisrael. This caused 2 main things, the adoption of Sephardic practices, and the start of a golden age of Jewish life in Palestine. This golden age happened almost exclusively in the Four Holy Cities, Jerusalem, Safed, Tiberias, and Hebron. Along with the Musta'arabim adopting some Sephardic practices, they also intermarried heavily with the new Sephardim. In some terms the Musta'arabim in the big 4 holy cities ceased being a distinct group, only in rural areas the Musta'arabi Jews remained dominant such as Peki'in.

Ottoman Era

The main Jewish population center moves away from the Galilee and towards Jerusalem. Still, the Ladino-speaking Jews dominate Jewish life. New arrivals from the Balkans, North Africa, and Iraq also cemented Sephardic traditions over the Musta'arabim's.

Zionism

The arrival of mainly socialist and secular Zionists from Eastern Europe soured relations between the long-established Jewish communities and the Arabs. The relations between the Old Yishuv and the New Yishuv was also quite bad. Some Palestinian Jews started to identify more with the Arabs than the secular Ashkenazi Jews who had established Moshavim and Kibbutzim. Along with the continued impoverished state of many Musta'arabim, the souring relations with both Arabs and Zionists, Musta'arabim either joined sides with the Zionists, fighting in Haganah or Irgun. They migrated to Jordan, Syria, or Lebanon, or left the Ottoman Empire entirely, joining the waves of Syrian Jews immigrating to America.

Today

The Musta'arabim have assimilated into mainstream Sephardic Israeli life that it is unknown how many Musta'arabim there are. In America, they follow the general Syrian traditions, and have mainly settled in New York, California, and Washington.

Syrian Musta'arabi rite

Old Aleppo rite

The Aleppo Musta'arabim in Syria originally had a distinct way of worship, set out in a distinct prayer book called Maḥzor Aram Soba. This ritual is thought to reflect Eretz Yisrael rather than Babylonian traditions in certain respects, in particular in the prominence of piyyut. In a broad sense, it falls within the "Sephardi" rather than the "Ashkenazi" family of rituals, but has resemblances to non-standard Sephardi rites such as the Catalan rather than to the normative Castilian rite. It also contains some archaic features which it shares with the Siddur of Saadia Gaon and Maimonides' laws of prayer.
The following are some of the differences that stand out in the Aram Soba Maḥzor.
On March 9, 2009, the posted a scanned PDF of the 1560 Venetian edition of the "Maḥzor Aram Soba" to the "Archives" section of its site. A of the work is also available. For further links to both the 1527 and 1560 editions, see [|below]. In addition, a weekday version of Maḥzor Aram Soba 1560 can be found .
A facsimile edition has recently been published by Yad HaRav Nissim, using pages from the best surviving copies of the 1527 edition.

Influence of the Sephardic rite

After the immigration of Jews from Spain following the expulsion, a compromise liturgy evolved containing elements from the customs of both communities, but with the Sephardic element taking an ever-larger share. One reason for this was the influence of the Shulchan Aruch, and of the Kabbalistic usages of Isaac Luria, both of which presupposed a Sephardic prayer text; for this reason a basically "Sephardic" type of text replaced many of the local Near and Middle Eastern rites over the course of the 16th to 19th centuries, subject to a few characteristic local customs retained in each country.
In Syria, as in North African countries, there was no attempt to print a Siddur containing the actual usages of the community, as this would not generally be commercially viable. Major publishing centres, principally Livorno, and later Vienna, would produce standard "Sephardic" prayer books suitable for use in all communities, and particular communities such as the Syrians would order these in bulk, preserving any special usages by oral tradition.
As details of the oral tradition faded from memory, the liturgy in use came still nearer to the "Livorno" standard. Nevertheless, a distinction persisted between the "Sephardic" rite and the "Musta'arabi" rite.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the "Sephardic" rite was almost universal in Syria. The only exception was a "Musta'arabi" minyan at the Central Synagogue of Aleppo, but even their liturgy differed from the "Sephardic" in only a few details such as the order of the hymns on Rosh Hashanah. Some differences between the two main prayer books published in Aleppo in the early twentieth century may reflect Sephardi/Musta'arabi differences, but this is not certain: current Syrian rite prayer books are based on both books.

Use of Piyyut

Approximately 30% of the Mahzor Aram Soba is composed of piyyutim.
The use of piyyutim, which was very prominent on the holidays and Shabbat, was not limited to the Syrian Musta'arabi community, but occurred in most Jewish communities. The earliest piyyutim however, were “overwhelmingly or its neighbor Syria, only there was the Hebrew language sufficiently cultivated that it could be managed with stylistic correctness, and only there could it be made to speak so expressively.” The earliest Eretz Yisrael prayer manuscripts, found in the Cairo Genizah, often consist of piyyutim, as these were the parts of the liturgy that required to be written down: the wording of the basic prayers was generally known by heart. The use of piyyut was always considered an Eretz Yisrael speciality: the Babylonian Geonim made every effort to discourage it and restore what they regarded as the statutory wording of the prayers, holding that "any who uses piyyut thereby gives evidence that he is no scholar". Accordingly, scholars classifying the liturgies of later periods usually hold that, the more a given liturgy makes use of piyyutim, the more likely it is to reflect Eretz Yisrael as opposed to Babylonian influence. This, if correct, would put the Mahzor Aram Soba firmly in the Eretz Yisrael camp. However, the piyyutim in the Mahzor Aram Soba resemble those of the Spanish school rather than the work of early Eretz Yisrael payyetanim such as Eleazar Kalir: for example, they are in strict Arabic metres and make little use of Midrash. Also, they are generally placed in a block at the beginning of the service, like today's Baqashot, rather than expanding on and partially replacing core parts of the prayers. Accordingly, the prevalence of piyut does not of itself establish a link with the old Palestinian rite, though such a link may be argued for on other grounds.
Following the dominance in Syria of the Sephardic rite, which took the Geonic disapproval of piyyut seriously, most of these piyyutim were eliminated from the prayer book. Some of them survive as pizmonim, used extra-liturgically.

Today

The Syrian Musta'arabim have completely assimilated with the Sephardic Jews and are no longer a distinct entity. Certain families identify as "Sephardim" in the narrower sense, and are distinguished by their practice of lighting an extra candle on Hanukkah.
According to Joey Mosseri, a Sephardic historian living in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn, the last time the Musta'arabi liturgy was officially used was during the 1930s. Shelomo Salem Zafrani, of Aleppo, held daily services in the Musta'arabi Jewish rite, until his departure to the British Mandate of Palestine in the early 1930s. After his departure, there is no known public usage of this liturgy even in Aleppo itself. Today, Syrian Jews, with the exception of a few individuals living in Damascus, live outside of Syria, and do not distinguish between Musta'arabi and Sephardic Jews.

Prayer books