The spiritual leader of Israel’s ultra-orthodox Shas party, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has provoked outrage with a sermon calling for the annihilation of Arabs[…]

The child victims of this shocking episode were not actually Sephardic; that term refers to Jews from Spain and Portugal. In the late 1400s, the Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain and settled in Turkey and the Balkans, especially Salonika, Greece and Smyrna, (today known as “Izmir”). These child victims were in fact racial Arabs whose ancestors had practiced Judaism for thousands of years. They are the descendants of ancient Israel. They speak Arabic and come from Arab countries, where their ancestors had lived in surprising harmony with the majority Muslim population. Israelis often refer to these Arabic-speaking Jews as “Sephardic” to divert attention from what some Israelis regard as an inconvenient fact: that these Arabic-speaking Jews are actually the real descendants of ancient Israel. Moses did not look like most of today’s Isralis who came from Eastern Europe.

Actual Sephardic Jews were wealthy and educated enough to resist being treated like Guinea pigs; the Arabic-speaking Jews were not.

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Letters from South Africa…

Journal of Palestine Studies, issue 141, published in Fall 2006 This article, excerpted and adapted from the early chapters of …

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