Sephardic Jews

Sephardic Jews are a Jewish diaspora community descended from the Jewish population of the Iberian Peninsula, whose name derives from Sepharad, the Hebrew term for Spain, and who developed distinct liturgical, culinary and linguistic traditions, most notably Ladino, or Judeo-Spanish, over centuries of settlement there before the Spanish expulsion of 1492 and the Portuguese expulsion of 1497. Expelled Sephardic communities resettled chiefly across the Ottoman Empire, North Africa and the Netherlands, and Sephardic religious practice, governed by its own rabbinic authorities and legal rulings distinct from the Ashkenazi tradition, remains one of Judaism's two major liturgical traditions today. Substantial Sephardic communities live in Israel, France, Turkey and the Americas, and both Spain and Portugal enacted laws in the 2010s offering citizenship to descendants of Jews expelled five centuries earlier.