The word Sephardic — or Sephardi — is used in at least four different ways, and they do not describe the same people. That is not a quibble. It is the reason two people can have the same conversation and reach opposite conclusions, and it is why this page exists.
This site uses the word in one specific sense, and we set it out below so that you know what we are and are not talking about.
What do I need to know first?
Jews are both a religion and a people. You can be Jewish by descent without being religious, and you can become Jewish by conversion. Both are recognised. This dual character — faith and ancestry together — is unfamiliar to people from most other backgrounds and it is the source of a good deal of confusion.
In traditional Jewish law, Jewish status passes through the mother. A child of a Jewish mother is Jewish; a child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not, unless they convert. Some modern movements take a different view, but this is the classical rule and it matters for genealogy.
Jews have lived almost everywhere, for a very long time, and communities separated by distance and centuries developed different customs, different pronunciations of Hebrew, different foods, different melodies and different versions of the prayer service. These bodies of custom are called minhag — the plural is minhagim — and the different versions of the service are called nusach, or rite.
The two largest of these groupings are the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim. They are not denominations and they are not sects; they are regional traditions.
Where does the word come from?
From a place-name in the Bible that nobody can identify.
Sepharad (ספרד) appears once in the Hebrew Bible, in the book of Obadiah, verse 20, as the name of a place where exiles from Jerusalem were living. Nobody knows for certain what place the writer meant.
By the early medieval period, Jews were using Sepharad to mean Spain — and the Iberian peninsula more broadly, including Portugal. So a Sephardi is, literally, a Spanish Jew.
Jews did the same with other biblical place-names. Ashkenaz (Genesis 10:3) came to mean Germany, and hence the Jews of the German lands and their descendants in eastern Europe. Tzarfat came to mean France, Yavan Greece, Edom Christendom.
These are Hebrew names for regions, repurposed. They are not ancient ethnic labels.
What are the four meanings?
1. The descent meaning — Jews of Iberian origin
Sephardim are the Jews of Spain and Portugal and their descendants.
Jews had lived in Iberia since Roman times, possibly earlier. They were expelled from Spain in 1492 and forcibly converted in Portugal in 1497. Those who left settled around the Mediterranean, in North Africa, in the Ottoman Empire, in Italy, in the Netherlands and eventually across the Atlantic world.
This is the narrowest, oldest and most precise meaning, and it is the one this site uses.
2. The liturgical meaning — Jews who follow the Sephardi rite
Over the centuries, the Sephardi prayer rite and the legal rulings of Sephardi authorities were adopted by many Jewish communities that had no Iberian connection whatever.
The most important reason is a book. Rabbi Joseph Caro, himself a child of the expulsion who settled at Safed in the Galilee, compiled the Shulchan Aruch in the sixteenth century — the code of Jewish law that became authoritative across the Jewish world. Sephardi communities follow it directly; Ashkenazi communities follow it with the glosses of Rabbi Moses Isserles.
So, in this sense, “Sephardi” means “not Ashkenazi” — and it includes the ancient Jewish communities of Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Kurdistan, Bukhara, Georgia, India, the Caucasus and elsewhere, most of which are far older than the Spanish community and none of which descends from it.
This meaning is entirely legitimate. It is how the word is used in most synagogues and by most Jews. It is simply not a statement about ancestry.
3. The Israeli social and institutional meaning
After 1948, Israeli society divided broadly into Ashkenazim — Jews from Europe — and everybody else. The Chief Rabbinate of Israel has two Chief Rabbis, one Ashkenazi and one Sephardi (the Rishon LeZion), which gives the division institutional force.
In Israeli usage, “Sephardi” therefore often means something closer to “Jews from Muslim countries”, regardless of whether the family ever saw Spain. The term Mizrahi — “Eastern” — emerged partly to describe this population more accurately, and is itself contested: some prefer Sephardi, some Mizrahi, some the name of the country their family came from.
4. The loose popular meaning
In casual use, “Sephardic” is sometimes stretched to mean any Jew who is not visibly of eastern European origin, or is used as shorthand for a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern appearance.
This has no content and we do not use it. It is worth naming only because it is common.
Which meaning does this site use?
The descent meaning: Sephardim are Jews descended from the Jews of Spain and Portugal.
We say so plainly because it determines everything else. The records we work with are the records that Iberian-descended communities created — the congregational registers of Amsterdam and London, the ketubot of Livorno, the circumcision registers of Morocco, the Inquisition files of Lisbon and Madrid. Those documents exist because those communities existed, and they will not help you trace a family from Baghdad or Sana’a.
That is not a judgement about anybody. It is a statement about archives.
What are the three Iberian branches?
The descendants of the Iberian Jews divided by route, and the divisions are still visible in the records four hundred years later.
Western Sephardim — “the Nation”
Also called the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, or in their own documents a Nação, the Nation.
These are descendants of those who converted in Iberia and left later — often much later, sometimes generations later — and returned to open Judaism once beyond Spanish and Portuguese jurisdiction. They founded the communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Bordeaux, Bayonne and Livorno, and from there the Atlantic world: Curaçao, Suriname, Barbados, Jamaica, Recife, New York, Charleston.
Their working language was Portuguese, not Spanish, and their records are in Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew and English. They are the principal subject of this site, because their records are the best kept and most accessible in the Sephardi world.
Eastern Sephardim
Descendants of those who left in 1492 and went east — to the Ottoman Empire, and to Salonica, Constantinople, İzmir, the Balkans, the Levant and Egypt.
Their language was Judeo-Spanish, called Ladino — a form of fifteenth-century Spanish written in Hebrew characters and still spoken, just, today.
Maghrebi Sephardim
Those who crossed to North Africa — Morocco above all, and Algeria, Tunisia and Libya.
There they met Jewish communities already thousands of years old. The newcomers were called the Megorashim, the expelled; the existing population the Toshavim, the residents. They kept separate synagogues, separate customs and sometimes separate courts for centuries, and in northern Morocco the Megorashim spoke Haketía, the Judeo-Spanish of the Maghreb.
What they called each other
The two branches were perfectly aware of the distinction, and the terms are reciprocal. To the Western Sephardim, the Easterners were Levantinos. To the Eastern Sephardim, the Westerners were Francos.
Who is not Sephardi in the descent sense?
This is not a ranking and it is not a judgement. These are ancient and distinguished communities, several of them older than the Jewish presence in Spain. They are simply a different subject, with different records in different archives and different languages — and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
- Mizrahi Jews of Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Kurdistan, Bukhara, Afghanistan, the Caucasus and Central Asia. Babylonian Jewry is the oldest continuous Jewish community in the world and its influence ran to Spain, not from it.
- Romaniote Jews — the Greek-speaking Jews of the Byzantine world, with their own rite and their own liturgical language, Yevanic. Many were absorbed by arriving Sephardim after 1492; Istanbul’s community is substantially Romaniote beneath a Sephardi surface.
- Italkim — the Italian Jewish communities, neither Sephardi nor Ashkenazi, with their own ancient rite.
- Beta Israel of Ethiopia; the Bene Israel and Cochin Jews of India.
- Karaites, who follow a different form of Judaism altogether.
- Ashkenazim — and one specific confusion is worth naming, because it produces a great many mistaken family traditions. Nusach Sefard is not the Sephardi rite. It is an Ashkenazi liturgy with kabbalistic additions, used by Hasidim, who are entirely Ashkenazi. A family whose synagogue in Poland or Lithuania was “Sephardic” was almost certainly Nusach Sefard.
Many people in these communities describe themselves as Sephardi, and in the liturgical sense they are right. If that is you, you are welcome here — but the records you need are mostly not the ones we work with, and we would rather say so than waste your time.
Who counts as Sephardi in Jewish law?
This is asked often, and the answer has two parts that are frequently run together.
Jewish status passes through the mother. Whether a person is a Jew at all is determined by the mother, or by conversion.
Which minhag a person follows passes through the father. A Jew follows the customs, rite and legal authorities of their father’s tradition. A woman customarily adopts her husband’s minhag on marriage, and the children follow the father.
So the everyday rule is: your minhag is your father’s. A man whose father was Sephardi and whose mother was Ashkenazi is, for religious purposes, Sephardi — he prays in the Sephardi rite, follows Sephardi rulings, and eats rice at Passover, which Ashkenazim traditionally do not.
But notice what that rule is and is not. It is a rule about practice. It says which prayer book you open and whose rulings you follow. It says nothing about descent. A man with three Ashkenazi grandparents and one Sephardi paternal grandfather follows Sephardi minhag and is, genealogically, seven-eighths Ashkenazi.
Genealogy asks a different question from halacha. Halacha asks which tradition you belong to. Genealogy asks who your ancestors were — all of them, on both sides, equally. A family can be halachically Sephardi and genealogically mostly something else, and the reverse is just as common.
Both questions are legitimate. This site answers the second one.
Why does the definition matter practically?
Four consequences, and they are the reason we have written this page at all.
It determines which records exist. Sephardi congregations kept ketubot, circumcision registers, minute books and burial registers of a particular kind. Iraqi, Yemeni and Persian communities kept different records, in different languages, and they are held elsewhere.
It determines which archives. Amsterdam, London, Lisbon, Madrid, Livorno and The Hague for Western Sephardim. Istanbul, Jerusalem, Sofia and Thessaloniki for Eastern. Rabat, Aix-en-Provence and Jerusalem for Maghrebi. Searching the wrong set produces nothing, and it is easy to spend a year doing it.
It determines whether the Spanish and Portuguese nationality routes could ever have applied. Those schemes were for descendants of the Iberian expulsions. The liturgical meaning of “Sephardi” was never sufficient.
And it determines what a DNA result can mean. Ashkenazi and Sephardi populations share a great deal of ancestry, because both descend ultimately from the same Levantine source. A test showing “Jewish” ancestry cannot tell you which. Our DNA page treats this properly.
A note on how we use words
We are not the language police. People describe themselves as they wish, and the liturgical use of “Sephardi” is centuries old, entirely correct in its own terms, and used by millions of people.
What we cannot do is let a word mean four things at once in the same sentence and still expect to trace anybody. So on this site, “Sephardi” means Iberian descent, and where we mean something else we say so.
If your family is from Baghdad, Sana’a, Isfahan or Cochin and you have always called yourself Sephardi, you are not wrong. You are simply looking for a different set of records than the ones we describe, and we will happily point you to the people who work on them.
Research services
If you are not sure which of these your family is, that is a reasonable question and often the first one worth answering. We are glad to say so before you commit to anything. If you would like help, including for a Portuguese or Spanish nationality application, you can hire a professional Sephardic genealogist.
If you have found this page useful, please consider making a small donation to support this site.
See also
Sephardic Surnames · Crypto-Judaism, New Christians and Bnei Anusim · Ashkenazim with Sephardic Ancestry · DNA and Sephardic Ancestry · Genealogical Standards · Glossary · Getting Started in Sephardic Genealogy