Mizrahi

Mizrahi, meaning Easterner, is a later Hebrew term for the Jews of the Muslim Middle East; in the fourteenth century these were the Arabic-speaking communities of Egypt and the Levant, settled there since before Islam and living as dhimmis. In Fustat, beside Cairo, they kept the Cairo Geniza; Maimonides settled there in 1166 and wrote the Mishneh Torah in 1180.

The Sephardic expulsions of 1492 and 1498 brought many exiles to Egypt and the Levant, and after the Ottoman conquest of 1517 the newcomers' rites largely absorbed the older ones. Safed became a centre of Jewish mysticism.

Druze wars ruined Safed and Tiberias in 1660, immigrants rebuilt the Galilean communities in the eighteenth century, and the Galilee earthquake of 1837 destroyed Safed and shifted the centre to Jerusalem.