Sephardic law and customs Spain or Portugal (as well as one Romaniot and one Ashkenazi synagogue). In a process lasting from the 16th through the 19th century, the native Jewish communities of most Arab and Ottoman countries adapted their pre-existing liturgies, many of which already had a family resemblance with the Sephardic, to follow the Spanish rite in as many respects as possible. Some reasons for this are: The most important theological, as opposed to practical, motive for harmonization was the Kabbalistic teachings of Isaac Luria and Ḥayim Vital. Luria himself always maintained that it was the duty of every Jew to abide by
Cuisine of the Sephardic Jews and from these places elsewhere. Although Mizrahi Jews, being the pre-existing Jews of the Greater Middle East (who are of non-Spanish and non-Portuguese origins), are sometimes called Sephardim in a broader sense due to their style of liturgy, and although there is some overlap in populations due to the Sephardic Diaspora, the Sephardic Jews also settled in many other countries outside the Greater Middle East as well. As such, this article deals only with the cuisine of the Jewish populations with ancestral origins in the Iberian Peninsula, in whichever regions they settled, not just the Greater Middle East. For Cuisine