Sephardic law and customs Sephardic law and customs Sephardic law and customs means the practice of Judaism by the Sephardim, the descendants of the historic Jewish community of the Iberian Peninsula. Some definitions of "Sephardic" also include Mizrahi Jews, many of whom follow the same traditions of worship but have different ethno-cultural traditions. Sephardi Rite is not a denomination or movement like Orthodox, Reform, and other Ashkenazi Rite worship traditions. Sephardim thus comprise a community with distinct cultural, juridical and philosophical traditions. Sephardim are, primarily, the descendants of Jews from the Iberian peninsula. They may be divided into the families that left in the
Sephardic law and customs Lurianic-Sephardic rite extended even to countries outside the Ottoman sphere of influence such as Iran, where there were no Spanish exiles. (The previous Iranian rite was based on the Siddur of Saadia Gaon.) The main exceptions to this tendency were: There were also Kabbalistic groups in the Ashkenazic world, which adopted the Lurianic-Sephardic ritual, on the theory of the thirteenth gate mentioned above. This accounts for the "Nusach Sefard" and "Nusach Ari" in use among the Hasidim, which is based on the Lurianic-Sephardic text with some Ashkenazi variations. From the 1840s on a series of prayer-books was published in Livorno,