Following their expulsion, Sephardi Jewish exiles moved into the Middle East and North Africa (among other countries around the Mediterranean Basin), and settled among the Musta'arabi.
"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[1] (which also underwent cultural and linguistic Arabization following the Muslim conquest there).
Following the Muslim conquest of the Levant, Syria and the surrounding region was brought under Arab rule in the first half of the seventh 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.
[citation needed] 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 Ottoman-Syria.
[3][verification needed] 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.
[citation needed] Due to the Arab revolt in the 1930s they were forced to evacuate their ancestral historic village and to move to Hadera, where most of them are living today.
[citation needed] In late 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 Ramallah.
This had two major outcomes: the adoption of Sephardic practices,[13] and the start of a golden age of Jewish life in Palestine.
In some respects, the Musta'arabim in the four holy cities ceased being a distinct group; only in rural areas such as Peki'in did the Musta'arabi Jews remain dominant.
On March 9, 2009, the Sephardic Pizmonim Project posted a scanned PDF of the 1560 Venetian edition of the "Maḥzor Aram Soba" to the "Archives" section of its site.
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 (and specifically Castilian) 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.
(For example, Ḥacham Abraham Hamaoui of Aleppo commissioned a series of prayer-books from Livorno, which were printed in 1878: these were "pan-Sephardic" in character, with some notes referring to "minhag Aram Soba".)
The earliest piyyutim however, were “overwhelmingly [from] [Eretz Israel] or its neighbor Syria, [because] 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.”[20] 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.
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.
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.
According to Joey Mosseri, a Sephardic historian living in the Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn (USA), 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.