Arab Jews, a phrase that is rarely used today, was once also the common designation for the Mizrahim. The most prominent language associated with the Mizrahim are the various Judæo-Arabic dialects, though other languages may also be associated with them, as in the case of Judeo-Persian for the Mizrahim original to Iran. See also Mizrahi Hebrew language.
In reaction to the events leading up to and following the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, citizens of Arab countries acted violently against their local Jewish populations in what they viewed as retaliation for both the creation of the Jewish state of Israel, and for their brethren being turned into refugees as a result. Further anti-Jewish actions by Arab governments in the 1950s and 1960s, incuding the expulsion of 25,000 Mizrahi Jews from Egypt following the 1956Suez Crisis, led to the overwhelming majority of Mizrahim becoming refugees. Most of these refugees fled to Israel.
Today, of the few remaining Mizrahi communities still residing in Arab countries, with a combined population of fewer than 1,000 individuals, a trickle of emigration to Israel continues and is encouraged by the Jewish state.
When Shlomo Bar started making music professionally in the mid-1970s, there was no such thing as “world music.” So he helped create it.
Bar, a Moroccan-born Israeli, founded Habrera Hativit in the late Â’70s as a band whose music would be a creative fusion of the many different sounds of Sephardic and Mizrahic music.
Thirty years and 11 albums later, Habrera Hativit is still one of the most dynamic ensembles in world music, energetic purveyors of a unique kind of Sephardic funk whose origins span the entire Mediterranean and points much farther east, as their Los Angeles appearance on June 25 at the Scottish Rite Auditorium will undoubtedly prove.
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