Differences Between Mizrahi And Ashkenazi

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It is now more than fifty years since the State of Israel was established. It has passed the initial stages of nation-building and is today, in many respects, a Western, technological society. It was built on the experience of ideologically driven Jewish settlement which began in the nineteenth century. Israel has a background of the Holocaust, ongoing military struggle with neighboring countries, and the necessity of absorbing unprecedented numbers of new immigrants from very different culture. It has a multiethnic population, comprising groups that vary widely in their degree of Jewish cultural traditionalism as well as their level of modernization. While the challenges of immigration, absorption, and the external threat of war served …show more content…
Both Ashkenazi and Mizrahi have separate heritage. Mizrahi Jews came from Middle Eastern ancestry meanwhile, Ashkenazi came from Eastern European descendants. Beginning in the 1880s, Ashkenazi Jews migration to Israel were moved by a nationalist ideology and aspired to find better life conditions, to establish a Hebrew culture in a modern, predominantly secular, atmosphere. The Ashkenazim soon became the majority of Jews in Israel, and by 1948, they were 80% of the Jewish population of Israel. Ashkenazi Jews established most of the social, political, and economic institutions that would come to form the Israeli social system. Following the Independence of Israel in 1948, Arab violence added with the religiously derived desire to return to the ‘holy land’ had inspired Mizrahi to leave their native countries and migrate to Israel in huge numbers. The contrasting cause of immigration and background caused the expectations and dreams of the Mizrahi tended to differ from those of the Ashkenazim who had preceded them. This contrariety factor leads to a massive social and economic disparities between them and in effect, a different level of educational attainment and occupational …show more content…
This reflected a high proportion with low or no education, and a low proportion of people with academic training. By the end of the first decade of independence, it had become painfully clear that children whose parents had come from Arab countries fell far behind their peers of native or western parentage on almost every index of the school achievement: such as dropout and continuation rates, part-time or full-time secondary school attendance, enrollment in vocational or academic high schools, eligibility for the matriculation certificate, university attendance, and others. By the end of the decade of the 1960s, more than half of the children entering the first grade were from families whose origins were in non-western societies. As a matter of fact, Ashkenazi Jews have considerably more education than Mizrahi Jews. Even as late as 2000, about half of Ashkenazim, 48% have a college degree, compared with 18% of Mizrahi

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