Sephardic law and customs
Sephardic law and customs are the law and customs of Judaism which are practiced by Sephardim or Sephardic Jews ; the descendants of the historic Jewish community of the Iberian Peninsula, what is now Spain and Portugal. Many definitions of "Sephardic" also include Mizrahi Jews, most of whom follow the same traditions of worship as those which Sephardic Jews follow. The Sephardi Rite is not a denomination nor a movement like Orthodox Judaism, Reform Judaism, and other Ashkenazi Rite worship traditions. Sephardim are communities with distinct cultural, juridical and philosophical traditions.
Sephardim are the descendants of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. They may be divided into the families that left Spain during the Expulsion of 1492 and those families that remained in Spain as crypto-Jews, fleeing in the following few centuries. In religious parlance as well as in modern Israel, the term is broadly used for all Jews who have Ottoman or other Asian or North African backgrounds, whether or not they have any historical link to Spain, but some prefer to distinguish Sephardim proper from Mizrahi Jews.
Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews have similar religious practices. Whether or not they are "Spaniard Jews", they are all "Jews of the Spanish rite". There are three reasons for this convergence, which are explored in more detail below:
- Both groups follow the Halakha, without those customs specific to the Ashkenazi tradition.
- The Spanish rite was an offshoot of the Babylonian-Arabic family of Jewish rites and retained a family resemblance to the other rites of that family.
- Following the expulsion, the Spanish exiles took a leading role in the Jewish communities of Western Asia and North Africa, who modified their rites to bring them still nearer to the Spanish rite, which by then was regarded as the standard.
Law
The Gaonic period
The two principal colleges of Sura and Pumbedita survived well into the Muslim world. Their presidents, known as Geonim, together with the Exilarch or Leader of the Jews of Lower Mesopotamia, were recognised by the Abbasid Caliphate as the supreme authority over the Jews of the Arab world. The Geonim provided written answers to questions on Halakha worldwide published in collections of responsa and enjoyed high authority. The Geonim also produced handbooks such as the Halachot Pesuqot by Yehudai ben Nahman and the Halachot Gedolot by Simeon Kayyara.Spain
The learning of the Geonim was transmitted through the scholars of Kairouan, notably Chananel ben Chushiel and Nissim ben Jacob, to Spain, where it was used by Isaac Alfasi in his Sefer ha-Halakhot, which took the form of an edited and abridged Talmud. This, in turn, formed the basis for the Mishneh Torah of Maimonides. A feature of these early Tunisian and Spanish schools was a willingness to use the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian.Developments in France and Germany were somewhat different. They respected the rulings of the Geonim but also had strong local customs. The Tosafists did their best to explain the Talmud in a way consistent with these customs. A theory grew that custom trumps law : this had some Talmudic support but was not nearly so prominent in Arabic-speaking countries as it was in Europe. Books on Ashkenazi custom were written by authors such as Yaakov Moelin. Further instances of Ashkenazi custom were contributed by the penitential manual of Eleazar of Worms and some additional stringencies on sheḥitah formulated in Jacob Weil's Sefer Sheḥitot u-Bediqot.
The learning of the Tosafists, but not the literature on Ashkenazi customs as such, was imported into Spain by Asher ben Jehiel, a German-born scholar who became chief rabbi of Toledo and the author of the Hilchot ha-Rosh - an elaborate Talmudic commentary, which became the third of the great Spanish authorities after Alfasi and Maimonides. A more popular résumé, known as the Arba'ah Turim, was written by his son, Jacob ben Asher, though he did not agree with his father on all points.
The Tosafot were also used by scholars of the Catalan school, such as Nahmanides and Solomon ben Adret, who were also noted for their interest in Kabbalah. For a while, Spain was divided between the schools: in Catalonia the rulings of Nahmanides and ben Adret were accepted, in Castile those of the Asher family, and in Valencia those of Maimonides.
After the expulsion
Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Jewish law was codified by Yosef Karo in his Bet Yosef, which took the form of a commentary on the Arba'ah Turim, and Shulḥan Arukh, which presented the same results in the form of a practical abridgement. He consulted most of the authorities available to him but generally arrived at a pragmatic decision by following the majority among the three great Spanish authorities Alfasi, Maimonides, and Asher ben Yeḥiel, unless most of the other authorities were against them.Karo did not consciously intend to exclude non-Sephardi authorities. Still, he considered that the Ashkenazi school, so far as it had anything to contribute to Halakha as opposed to purely Ashkenazi custom, was adequately represented by Asher. However, since Alfasi and Maimonides generally agree, the overall result was overwhelmingly Sephardi in flavour, though in several cases, Karo set the result of this consensus aside and ruled in favour of the Catalan school, some of whose opinions had Ashkenazi origins. Today, the Bet Yosef is accepted by Sephardim as the leading authority in Jewish law, subject to minor variants drawn from the rulings of later rabbis accepted in particular communities.
The Polish rabbi Moses Isserles, while acknowledging the merits of the Shulḥan Arukh, felt that it did not do justice to Ashkenazi scholarship and practice. He accordingly composed a series of glosses setting out all respects in which Ashkenazi practice differs, and the composite work is today accepted as the leading work on Ashkenazi halakha. Isserles felt free to differ from Karo on particular points of law. In principle, he accepted Karo's view that the Sephardic practice set out in the Shulḥan Arukh represents standard Jewish law while the Ashkenazi practice is essentially a local custom.
So far, then, it is meaningless to speak of "Sephardic custom": all that is meant is Jewish law without the particular customs of the Ashkenazim. For this reason, the law accepted by other non-Ashkenazi communities, such as the Italian and Yemenite Jews, is basically similar to that of the Sephardim. There are of course customs peculiar to particular countries or communities within the Sephardic world, such as Syria and Morocco.
An important body of customs grew up in the Kabbalistic circle of Isaac Luria and his followers in Safed, and many of these have spread to communities throughout the Sephardi world: this is discussed further in the [|Liturgy] section below. In some cases they are accepted by Greek and Turkish Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews but not by Western communities such as the Spanish and Portuguese Jews. These are customs in the true sense: in the list of usages below they are distinguished by an L sign.
Liturgy
Origins
For the outline and early history of the Jewish liturgy, see the articles on Siddur and Jewish services. At an early stage, a distinction was established between the Babylonian ritual and that used in the land of Israel, as these were the two main centres of religious authority: there is no complete text of the Palestinian rite, though some fragments have been found in the Cairo Genizah.Most scholars maintain that Sephardic Jews are inheritors of the religious traditions of the great Babylonian Jewish academies, and that Ashkenazi Jews are descendants of those who initially followed the Judaean or Galilaean Jewish religious traditions. Others, such as Moses Gaster, maintain precisely the opposite. To put the matter into perspective, it must be emphasized that all Jewish liturgies in use in the world today are in substance Babylonian, with a small number of Palestinian usages surviving the process of standardization: in a list of differences preserved from the time of the Geonim, most of the usages recorded as Palestinian are now obsolete. By the 12th century, as a result of the efforts of Babylonian leaders such as Yehudai ben Nahman and Pirqoi ben Baboi, the communities of Palestine, and Diaspora communities such as Kairouan that had historically followed Palestinian usages, had adopted Babylonian rulings in most respects, and Jews accepted Babylonian authority throughout the Arabic-speaking world.
Early attempts at standardizing the liturgy that have been preserved include, in chronological order, those of Amram Gaon, Saadia Gaon, Shelomoh ben Natan of Sijilmasa and Maimonides. All of these were based on the legal rulings of the Geonim but show a recognisable evolution towards the current Sephardi text. The liturgy in use in Visigothic Spain is likely to have belonged to a Palestinian-influenced European family, together with the Italian and Provençal, and more remotely the Old French and Ashkenazi rites, but as no liturgical materials from the Visigothic era survive we cannot know for certain. From references in later treatises such as the Sefer ha-Manhig by Rabbi Abraham ben Nathan ha-Yarḥi, it appears that even at that later time the Spanish rite preserved certain European peculiarities that have since been eliminated in order to conform to the rulings of the Geonim and the official texts based on them. The present Sephardic liturgy should therefore be regarded as the product of gradual convergence between the original local rite and the North African branch of the Babylonian-Arabic family, as prevailing in Geonic times in Egypt and Morocco. Following the Reconquista, the specifically Spanish liturgy was commented on by David Abudirham, who was concerned to ensure conformity with the rulings of halakha, as understood by the authorities up to and including Asher ben Yehiel. Despite this convergence, there were distinctions between the liturgies of different parts of the Iberian peninsula. For example, the Lisbon and Catalan rites were somewhat different from the Castilian rite, which formed the basis of the later Sephardic tradition. The Catalan rite was intermediate between the Castilian rite and that of the Hachmei Provence: Hakham Moses Gaster classified the rites of Oran and Tunis in this group.