Sephardic law and customs refer to the practice of Judaism by the Sephardim, descendants of the medieval Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula. Some definitions of “Sephardic” include Mizrahi Jews, many of whom follow the same worship traditions but have separate ethno-cultural traditions. Sephardi Rite is not a denomination or movement like Orthodox, Reform, or other Ashkenazi Rite liturgical traditions. As a result, Sephardim are a group with distinct cultural, legal, and philosophical traditions.

Sephardim are predominantly the descendants of Iberian peninsula Jews. They can be classified into two groups: those who fled during the 1492 Expulsion and those who remained in Spain as crypto-Jews before emigrating in the following centuries. In religious jargon, and by many in modern Israel, the term refers to all Jews of Ottoman or other Asian or North African ancestry, whether or not they have any historical ties to Spain, but some prefer to distinguish between Sephardim proper and Mizrai Jews.

There is no need to distinguish between Iberian Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews for the purposes of this article because their religious practices are fundamentally similar: whether or not they are “Spanish Jews,” they are all “Jews of the Spanish rite.” There are three explanations for this convergence, which are discussed more below:

Both communities adhere to universal Jewish law, with the exception of Ashkenazic customs.
The Spanish ritual was an offshoot of the Babylonian-Arabic family of Jewish rites, and it shared many similarities with the other members of that family. Following the expulsion, Spanish exiles assumed a leadership role in the Jewish communities of Asia and Africa, modifying their ceremonies to bring them even closer to the Spanish rite, which was by then considered the norm.

LAW

The Torah is the foundation of Jewish law, as interpreted and supplemented by the Talmud. The final version of the Babylonian Talmud comes from the Sassanian period and was produced by a number of institutions in Babylonia.

THE GEONIC PERIOD
Sura and Pumbedita, the two main colleges, lasted well into the Islamic period. The Abbasid Caliphs recognized their presidents, known as Geonim, together with the Exilarch, as the primary authority over the Arab world’s Jews. The Geonim gave written replies to inquiries about Jewish law from all over the world, which were published in responsa collections and held great authority. The Geonim also wrote handbooks, such as Yehudai Gaon’s Halachot Pesuqot and Simeon Kayyara’s Halachot Gedolot.

SPAIN
The Geonim’s knowledge was passed down to Spain via the academics of Kairouan, most notably Chananel Ben Chushiel and Nissim Gaon, and was utilised by Isaac Alfasi in his Sefer ha-Halachot (code of Jewish law), which took the form of an edited and condensed Talmud. This, in turn, served as the foundation for Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah. The willingness to study both the Jerusalem Talmud and the Babylonian was a trait of these early Tunisian and Spanish schools.

France and Germany saw somewhat distinct developments. They, too, obeyed the Geonim’s rulings, but they also had strong local customs of their own. The Tosafists did their utmost to explain the Talmud in accordance with these traditions. There was some Talmudic support for the thesis that custom overrides law (see Minhag), but it was not quite as prevalent in Arabic countries as it was in Europe. Special volumes about Ashkenazic custom, for example, were authored by Yaakov Moelin. Further examples of Ashkenazic custom were provided by Eleazar of Worms’ penitential handbook and some further stringencies on sheitah (animal slaughter) articulated in Jacob Weil’s Sefer Sheitot u-Bediqot.

Tosafist learning, but not Ashkenazic customs literature, was transferred into Spain by Asher ben Yeiel, a German-born scholar who became head rabbi of Toledo and author of the Hilchot ha-Rosh – an extensive Talmudic commentary that became the third great Spanish authority after Alfasi and Maimonides. His son, Jacob ben Asher, wrote a more popular résumé, known as the Arba’ah Turim, albeit he did not always agree with his father.

The Tosafot were also employed by Catalan school academics like Nahmanides and Solomon ben Adret, who were known for their interest in Kabbalah. For a time, Spain was divided between schools: in Catalonia, the decisions of Nahmanides and Ben Adret were accepted, in Castile, those of the Asher family, and in Valencia, those of Maimonides. (Maimonides’ judgements were also accepted in most of the Arab world, including Yemen, Egypt, and the Land of Israel.)

AFTER THE EXPULSION
Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Joseph Caro defined Jewish law in his Bet Yosef, which was a commentary on the Arba’ah Turim, and Shulan Aruch, which was a practical abridgement of the same results. He consulted the bulk of the authorities at his disposal, but generally came at a practical judgment by following the majority among the three main Spanish authorities, Alfasi, Maimonides, and Asher ben Yeiel, unless the majority of the other authorities were against them. He did not want to omit non-Sephardi scholars on purpose, but he believed that Asher sufficiently represented the Ashkenazi school on general Jewish law as opposed to specifically Ashkenazi custom.

However, because Alfasi and Maimonides generally agreed, the overall result was overwhelmingly Sephardi in flavor, though Caro set aside the result of this consensus in a number of cases and ruled in favor of the Catalan school (Nahmanides and Solomon ben Adret), some of whose opinions had Ashkenazi origins. Today, Sephardim regard the Bet Yosef as the supreme authority in Jewish law, with slight variations based on later rabbinic judgments approved in specific communities.

While acknowledging the Shulan Aruch’s strengths, the Polish rabbi Moses Isserles felt it did not do honor to Ashkenazi study and practice. As a result, he wrote a series of glosses outlining all of the ways in which Ashkenazi practice differs, and the resulting work is now regarded as the definitive work on Ashkenazi halachah. Isserles felt free to disagree with Caro on specific questions of law, but in general he agreed with Caro that the Sephardic approach outlined in the Shulan Aruch constitutes conventional Jewish law, whereas the Ashkenazi method is merely a local custom.

So far, speaking of “Sephardic custom” is meaningless: all that is intended is Jewish law without the Ashkenazim’s specific customs. As a result, the law followed by other non-Ashkenazi communities, such as Italian and Yemenite Jews, is essentially the same as that of the Sephardim. Of course, there are practices unique to specific countries or groups within the Sephardic world, like as Syria and Morocco.

An important body of customs arose in the Kabbalistic circle of Isaac Luria and his supporters in Safed, and many of these have spread to Sephardi communities around the world: this is covered further in the Liturgy section below. In rare circumstances, Greek and Turkish Sephardim and Mizrahi Jews accept them, whereas Western communities such as Spanish and Portuguese Jews do not. These are actual customs: a L symbol distinguishes them in the list of usages below.

LITURGY

ORIGINS
See the articles on Siddur and Jewish services for an overview and early history of Jewish liturgy. As these were the two main centers of religious power at the time, a distinction was made between the Babylonian ritual and that employed in Palestine: there is no complete text of the Palestinian rite, however some pieces have been discovered in the Cairo Genizah.

Most scholars believe that Sephardic Jews are the inheritors of the religious traditions of the great Babylonian Jewish academies, and that Ashkenazi Jews are the ancestors of those who followed the Judaean or Galilaean Jewish religious traditions originally. Others, such as Moses Gaster, argue the exact reverse. To put things into perspective, all Jewish liturgies in use today are in essence Babylonian, with only a few Palestinian usages surviving the process of standardization: in a list of variances preserved from the time of the Geonim, most of the Palestinian usages are now defunct.

(In the list below, Sephardic usages inherited from Palestine are designated P, while situations where the Sephardic usage corresponds to the Babylonian but the Ashkenazic usage is Palestinian are marked B.) By the 12th century, as a result of the efforts of Babylonian leaders such as Yehudai Gaon and Pirqoi ben Baboi, the communities of Palestine and Diaspora communities such as Kairouan, which had historically followed Palestinian usages, had adopted Babylonian rulings in most respects, and Babylonian authority was accepted by Jews throughout the Arabic-speaking world.

Early attempts at standardizing the liturgy that have survived include those of Amram Gaon, Saadia Gaon, Shelomoh ben Natan of Sijilmasa (in Morocco), and Maimonides. All of these were based on Geonim judicial judgements but show a discernible progression towards the current Sephardi text. The liturgy in use in Visigothic Spain is likely to have been part of a Palestinian-influenced European family, together with the Italian and Provençal, and more distantly, the Old French and Ashkenazi rites, but we cannot be certain because no liturgical documents from the Visigothic era survive. According to references in subsequent treatises such as Rabbi Abraham ben Nathan ha-Sefer Yari’s ha-Manhig (c. 1204), the Spanish ritual kept certain European idiosyncrasies that have since been abolished in order to correspond to the rules of the Geonim and the official writings based on them. (However, it appears that the surviving versions of those manuscripts, particularly those of Amram Gaon, have been modified to reflect some Spanish and other local usages.) As a result, the current Sephardic liturgy should be viewed as the result of progressive convergence between the original local ritual and the North African branch of the Babylonian-Arabic family, as it existed in Geonic times in Egypt and Morocco. Following the Reconquista, David Abudirham (c. 1340) commented on the particularly Spanish liturgy, concerned with ensuring adherence with halachah decisions as understood by authorities up to and including Asher ben Yehiel. Despite this convergence, there were differences between the liturgies of the Iberian peninsula: for example, the Lisbon and Catalan rites differed from the Castilian ritual, which served as the foundation for the subsequent Sephardic tradition. The Catalan rite was intermediate in type between the Castilian and the Provence rites, and Haham Gaster included the rites of Oran and Tunis in this category.

POST EXPULSION

Following their departure from Spain, the Sephardim took their liturgy with them to countries throughout the Arab and Ottoman worlds, where they quickly rose to rabbinic and communal leadership posts. They developed their own communities, frequently retaining peculiarities based on their Iberian peninsula of origin. In Salonica, for example, there were more than twenty synagogues, each of which followed a different rite from a different region of Spain or Portugal (as well as one Romaniot and one Ashkenazi synagogue).

The native Jewish communities of most Arab and Ottoman countries changed their pre-existing liturgies, many of which already had a family resemblance to the Sephardic, to follow the Spanish rite in as many ways as possible from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Some of the causes for this include:

1. The Spanish exiles were regarded as an elite and supplied many of the Chief Rabbis to the countries in which they settled, so that the Spanish rite tended to be favored over any previous native rite;
2. The invention of printing meant that Siddurim were printed in bulk, usually in Italy, so that a congregation wanting books generally had to opt for a standard “Sephardi” or “Ashkenazi” text: this led to the obsolescence of many historic local rites, such as the Provençal rite;
3. R. Joseph Caro’s Shulḥan Aruch presupposes a “Castilian rite” at every point, so that that version of the Spanish rite had the prestige of being “according to the opinion of Maran”;
4. The Hakham Bashi of Constantinople was the constitutional head of all the Jews of the Ottoman Empire, further encouraging uniformity. The North Africans in particular were influenced by Greek and Turkish models of Jewish practice and cultural behavior: for this reason many of them to this day pray according to a rite known as “minhag Ḥida” (the custom of Chaim Joseph David Azulai).
5. The influence of Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah, see the next section.

LURIANIC KABBALAH

The Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria and ayim Vital were the most important theological, rather than practical, motivation for harmonization. Luria himself always held that it was every Jew’s obligation to follow his ancestral heritage in order for his prayers to reach the gate in Heaven appropriate to his ethnic identity. He did, however, construct a system of usages for his own followers, which Vital documented in his Sha’ar ha-Kavvanot as comments on the Venice copy of the Spanish and Portuguese prayer book. The belief soon developed that this composite Sephardic rite possessed exceptional spiritual strength and opened a “thirteenth gate” in Heaven for persons who did not know their tribe: prayer in this form may thus be delivered in total confidence by anyone.

Later rabbinic texts, such as the 18th century emdat Yamim, recorded additional Kabbalistic embellishments (anonymous, but sometimes attributed to Nathan of Gaza). The most elaborate version of these can be found in the Siddur published by the 18th century Yemenite Kabbalist Shalom Sharabi for the use of the Bet El yeshivah in Jerusalem: it contains only a few lines of text on each page, with the rest filled with intricate meditations on the letter combinations in the prayers. Other scholars, notably ayim Azulai and ayim Palaggi, remarked on the liturgy from both a halachic and a kabbalistic standpoint.

The Lurianic-Sephardic ritual had an impact on countries outside the Ottoman sphere of power, such as Iran. (The old Iranian rite was based on Saadia Gaon’s Siddur.) The following were the significant exceptions to this trend:

• Yemen, where a traditionalist sect known as “Baladi” upheld their ancestral heritage based on Maimonides’ teachings (and hence do not consider themselves Sephardi at all), and
• Western Spanish and Portuguese Jews who accepted a number of Kabbalistic usages piecemeal in the 17th century but eventually abandoned them since the Lurianic Kabbalah was thought to have led to the Shabbetai Tzvi calamity.

On the theory of the thirteenth gate, there were also Kabbalistic organizations in the Ashkenazic world that adopted the Lurianic-Sephardic rite. This explains the Hasidic terms “Nusach Sefard” and “Nusach Ari,” which are based on the Lurianic-Sephardic text with some Ashkenazi variants.

19TH CENTURY

Tefillat ha-odesh, Bet Obed, and Zechor le-Abraham were among the prayer books published in Livorno beginning in the 1840s. These included practice notes and Kabbalistic embellishments to prayers, but not Shalom Sharabi’s meditations, as the books were intended for general congregational use. They quickly became the norm in practically all Sephardic and Oriental communities, with only oral tradition preserving any local variances. Many additional Sephardic prayer books were published in Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were principally directed at the Judaeo-Spanish communities of the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey, and so featured Ladino rubrics, although they were also widely distributed.

The late 19th century Baghdadi rabbi known as the Ben Ish ai, whose work of the same name contained both halachic decisions and insights on Kabbalistic custom based on his contact with Eliyahu Mani of the Bet El yeshivah, had a significant influence on Sephardic prayer and tradition. These decisions and observations constitute the foundation of the Baghdadi rite: both the language of the prayers and the associated usages deviate from the Livorno editions in some ways. The Ben Ish ai decisions have been adopted by various other Sephardic and Oriental communities, including Jerba.

PRESENT DAY

Today, in the Sephardic world, particularly in Israel, many popular prayer-books feature this Baghdadi rite, which is now known as Minhag Edot ha-Mizra (the custom of the Oriental congregations). Other authorities, particularly older rabbis from North Africa, reject them in favor of a more orthodox Oriental-Sephardic text, such as that published in the 19th century Livorno editions; the Shami Yemenite and Syrian rites are among these. Others, again following R. Ovadia Yosef, prefer a form stripped of some Kabbalistic elements and closer to what R. Joseph Caro would have known, and aim to establish this as the traditional “Israeli Sephardi” ceremony for use by all communities. The liturgy of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews differs from all of them (more than the Eastern groups differ from one another), because it represents an older form of the text, has significantly less Kabbalistic embellishments, and is influenced by Italian culture. However, the distinctions between all of these groups arise at the level of precise phrasing, such as the addition or exclusion of a few more passages: fundamentally, all Sephardic rites are essentially similar.