Picture a family in Baghdad in the early twentieth century: the father a merchant, the mother reading prayers in Judeo-Aramaic, the children growing up fluent in Arabic, eating the same food as their Muslim neighbours, shaped by the same river and the same sky, yet bound by a faith and a lineage stretching back more than two thousand years. This family would have called themselves Jews, and perhaps Sephardi, but almost certainly not Mizrahi. That word did not yet exist for them.

Mizrahi Jews are the Jewish communities that lived for centuries across the Muslim world: in Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and further east into Central Asia and the Caucasus. The word Mizrahi means simply 'Easterner' in Hebrew, and it was coined not by the communities themselves but by Israeli officials in the nineteen-fifties who needed a category. It was a label applied from the outside, and from the beginning it carried the weight of that imposition.

The roots of these communities reach back to the sixth century BCE, when the Babylonian empire conquered Jerusalem and carried a large part of the Jewish population into captivity in Mesopotamia. Some Jews fled to Egypt. Others spread into Persia, Yemen, and the North African coast. These early diaspora settlements grew into distinct communities over centuries, each absorbing the language, food, and daily customs of the lands around them while maintaining a separate religious identity and a sense of belonging to the wider Jewish people.

As Islam spread across the Middle East and North Africa from the seventh century CE onward, Jewish communities came to live as dhimmis, a protected but subordinate status under Islamic law. Because Jews were considered 'People of the Book', they were permitted to practise their faith. But they paid special taxes, faced legal restrictions, and occupied a position clearly below that of the Muslim majority. The relationship was neither simple persecution nor full equality: it was a negotiated, often uneasy coexistence that lasted more than a millennium.

Within that long coexistence, these communities became deeply rooted. The Jews of Morocco spoke Arabic and Berber dialects. Kurdish Jews in the mountains of what is now Iraq, Turkey, and Iran spoke a form of Aramaic descended directly from the ancient language of the Talmud. Iranian Jews maintained Judeo-Persian. Bukharian Jews in Central Asia built communities in Samarkand and Tashkent and spoke their own Bukhori dialect. Each group was distinct, and none of them thought of themselves as a single people called Mizrahim.

Then came 1492, and a rupture that would reshape the Jewish world. The Spanish crown issued the Alhambra Decree, expelling all Jews from Spain and Portugal. Around two hundred thousand Sephardi Jews, communities who had flourished in Iberia for centuries, scattered across the Mediterranean. Many settled in North Africa, in Syria, in the Ottoman Empire, and in lands where older Jewish communities already lived. Over the following generations, the newcomers and the established communities intermarried, and the Sephardi religious rite, perceived as more prestigious, gradually absorbed or displaced older local customs. This is why most Mizrahi communities today follow Sephardi religious practice, even when they carry no Spanish ancestry at all.

The linguistic and cultural diversity that resulted was extraordinary. Across these communities, Jews wrote philosophy, poetry, and legal commentary in Arabic, Persian, and Aramaic. The Talmud itself is written in a mixture of Hebrew and Aramaic, and the Kaddish prayer, recited at Jewish funerals and services worldwide, is in Aramaic. The Hebrew alphabet that Jews everywhere use today was in fact borrowed from Aramaic script. The Eastern communities were not peripheral to Jewish civilisation. In many centuries, they were its centre.

The category of Mizrahi Jews as a distinct, official grouping was first formally sketched during the Second World War, when the Jewish Agency drew up what it called the One Million Plan, a blueprint for Jewish immigration to Palestine that identified Eastern Jewish communities as a distinct wave. When the State of Israel was established in 1948, and war immediately broke out with its Arab neighbours, the lives of Jewish communities across the Muslim world changed overnight.

The nineteen-forties and fifties brought a mass displacement on a scale that is still not widely known. Following the 1948 war, and accelerating through the nineteen-fifties and sixties, around eight hundred and fifty thousand Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews were expelled by Arab governments or chose to flee. The exodus from Egypt accelerated sharply after the 1956 Suez Crisis, when twenty-five thousand Jews left in a matter of months. Communities that had existed for two thousand years emptied in a decade. Most went to Israel. Many Moroccan and Algerian Jews went to France. Thousands of Syrian, Lebanese, and Egyptian Jews reached the Americas.

Arrival in Israel was not a rescue without cost. The Israeli government, then dominated by Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European origin, placed new Mizrahi arrivals in hastily built tent cities on the outskirts of towns, in places called ma'abarot. Settlement on cooperative farming villages was pressed on communities that had historically been craftsmen and traders, not farmers. Most immigrants had left their property behind. Many suffered a sharp fall in social and economic standing. The scholar Ella Shohat wrote that in a generation or two, millennia of rooted Eastern civilisation had been wiped out. It was not only a migration. It was a rupture.

The label Mizrahi, applied by Israeli officials to all these arrivals, flattened enormous differences. An Iraqi Jewish merchant from Baghdad, a Yemenite rabbi, a Moroccan scholar, and a Georgian Jewish family from the Caucasus were placed under the same bureaucratic heading. The writer Sami Michael, himself from Iraq, rejected the term entirely, arguing that it was a fiction invented to keep Eastern Jews below the European-origin elite in Israel's social hierarchy. He pointed out that the real 'Easterners', by geography, were the Eastern European Jews who had arrived before them, yet they had not been given this label.