Judaism – Rabbinic, Ashkenazic, Sephardic | Britannica
admin | January 13, 2024
The two major branches Despite the fundamental uniformity of medieval Jewish culture, distinctive Jewish subcultures were shaped by the cultural and political divisions within the Mediterranean basin, in which Arabic Muslim and Latin Christian civilizations coexisted as discrete and self-contained societies. Two major branches of rabbinic civilization developed in Europe: the Ashkenazic, or Franco-German, and the Sephardic, or Andalusian-Spanish. Distinguished most conspicuously by their varying pronunciation of Hebrew, the numerous differences between them in religious orientation and practice derived, in the first instance, from the geographical fountainheads of their culturethe Ashkenazim (plural of Ashkenazi) tracing their cultural filiation to Italy and Palestine and the Sephardim (plural of Sephardi) to Babyloniaand from the influences of their respective immediate milieus
