Jewish ethnic divisions

The Jewish population in ancient Israel was severely reduced by the Jewish–Roman wars and by the later hostile policies of the Christian emperors[4] against non-Christians, but the Jews always retained a presence in the Levant.

After the Arab conquest in the seventh century, the large Jewish agricultural communities in Babylonia were progressively wrecked by high taxation, so that there too the Jews drifted into towns and became craftsmen, tradesmen, and dealers.

Everywhere these urban Jews, the vast majority literate and numerate, managed to settle, unless penal laws or physical violence made it impossible.

"[5] Jewish communities continued to exist in Palestine in relatively small numbers: during the early Byzantine 6th century there were 43 communities; during the Islamic period and the intervening Crusades there were 50 (including Jerusalem, Tiberias, Ramleh, Ashkelon, Caesarea, and Gaza); and during the early Ottoman 14th century there were 30 (including Haifa, Shechem, Hebron, Ramleh, Jaffa, Gaza, Jerusalem, and Safed).

The majority of the Jewish population during the High Middle Ages lived in Iberia (what is now Spain and Portugal) and in the region of Mesopotamia and Persia (what is now Iraq and Iran), the former known as the Sefardim and the latter known as the Mizrahim.

Johnson notes that in the Arab-Muslim territories, which included most of Spain, all of North Africa, and the Near East south of Anatolia in the Middle Ages, the Jewish condition was easier as a rule, than it was in Europe.

[citation needed] In the middle Byzantine period, the khan of Khazaria in the northern Caucasus and his court converted to Judaism, partly in order to maintain neutrality between Christian Byzantium and the Islamic world.

This event forms the framework for Yehuda Halevi's work The Kuzari (c.1140), but how much the traces of Judaism within this group survived the collapse of the Khazar empire is a matter of scholarly debate.

At the same time, rule under Islam, even with dhimmi status, resulted in freer trade and communications within the Muslim world, and the communities in Iberia remained in frequent contact with Jewry in North Africa and the Middle East, but communities further afield, in central and south Asia and central Africa, remained more isolated, and continued to develop their own unique traditions.

[22] The 1492 expulsion from Spain by the Catholic Monarchs however, made the Sephardic Jews hide and disperse to France, Italy, England, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, parts of what is now northwestern Germany, and to other existing communities in Christian Europe, as well as to those within the Ottoman Empire, to the Maghreb in North Africa and smaller numbers to other areas of the Middle East, and eventually to the Americas in the early 17th century.

In northern and Christian Europe during this period, financial competition developed between the authority of the Pope in Rome and nascent states and empires.

[23] Historically, European Jews have been classified as belonging to two major groups: the Ashkenazim, or "Germanics" (Ashkenaz meaning "Germany" in Medieval Hebrew), denoting their Central European base, and the Sephardim, or "Spaniards" (Sefarad meaning "Hispania" or "Iberia" in Hebrew), denoting their Spanish and Portuguese base.

[25] The term constitutes a third major layer to some, and following the partition of Mandatory Palestine and Israeli independence, the Mizrahim's often-forced migration, led to their establishment of communities in the newly constructed Israel.

"[1] Researchers expressed surprise at the remarkable genetic uniformity they found among modern Jews, no matter where the diaspora has become dispersed around the world.

Fernández noted that this observation clearly contradicts the results of the 2013 study led by Richards that suggested a European source for 3 exclusively Ashkenazi K lineages.

One set of genetic characteristics which is shared with modern-day Europeans and Central Asians is most prominent in the Levant among "Lebanese, Armenians, Cypriots, Druze and Jews, as well as Turks, Iranians and Caucasian populations".

Levant populations in this category today include "Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, as well as North Africans, Ethiopians, Saudis, and Bedouins".

"[45]A 2013 study by Doron M. Behar, Mait Metspalu, Yael Baran, Naama M. Kopelman, Bayazit Yunusbayev et al. using integration of genotypes on newly collected largest data set available to date (1,774 samples from 106 Jewish and non-Jewish populations) for assessment of Ashkenazi Jewish genetic origins from the regions of potential Ashkenazi ancestry:(Europe, the Middle East, and the region historically associated with the Khazar Khaganate) concluded that "This most comprehensive study... does not change and in fact reinforces the conclusions of multiple past studies, including ours and those of other groups (Atzmon and others, 2010; Bauchet and others, 2007; Behar and others, 2010; Campbell and others, 2012; Guha and others, 2012; Haber and others; 2013; Henn and others, 2012; Kopelman and others, 2009; Seldin and others, 2006; Tian and others, 2008).

Concerning the similarity of South Caucasus populations to Middle Eastern groups which was observed at the level of the whole genome in one recent study (Yunusbayev and others, 2012).

This claim is clearly not valid, as the differences among the various Jewish and non-Jewish populations of Mediterranean Europe and the Middle East predate the period of the Khazars by thousands of years".

[21][46] A 2014 study by Carmi et al. published by Nature Communications found that the Ashkenazi Jewish population originates from an approximately even mixture of Middle Eastern and European ancestry.

Many immigrants from these communities coming to Israel were met with harsh living conditions, as the fledgling state's did not yet have sufficient financial resources to house the influx of its residents.

Aspects of these differing experiences among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi Jewry still linger a half-century later, according to studies which were conducted by the Adva Center,[71] a think tank on social equality, and by other Israeli academic research[72] Every Israeli prime minister has been Ashkenazi, although Sephardim and Mizrahim have attained the presidency, generally considered a ceremonial position,[73] and other high positions.

The student bodies of Israel's universities remain overwhelmingly European in origin, despite the fact that roughly half the country's population is non-European.

Scattered over areas on the border of the Negev Desert and the Galilee, far from Israel's major cities, most of these towns never had the critical mass or ingredients to succeed as places to live, and reports have emerged that document their residents suffering from high unemployment and inadequate schools.

Lavie connects intra-Jewish racial and gendered dynamics to the 2014 Gaza War in her widely reviewed book, Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture,[74] and analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in the State of Israel from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March to the 2014 New Black Panthers.

In recent generations, however, the barriers were lowered by the state-sponsored assimilation of all of the Jewish ethnic groups into a common Sabra (native-born Israeli) identity, a policy which facilitated extensive mixed-marriages.