Sephardic Approaches to Teaching and Learning

• School from an early age. Boys typically began with the Hebrew alphabet in a small school, often called a heder, attached to a synagogue or held in a teacher's home. Yemenite children could begin learning to read at age three.
• Reading aloud and by heart. In Yemenite schools, for example, students read sacred texts aloud and memorized them, trusting that deeper understanding would follow once they could read accurately.
• Learning with a sage. Advanced students sought out a hakham and, in medieval times, often traveled to study each subject with a specialist.
• Learning through song. Poems, prayers, and the chanted melodies of Torah reading taught Hebrew, values, and music all at once.
• Learning at home. Formal schooling was mostly for boys. Mothers and grandmothers taught daughters, and whole families, through songs, stories, food, and holiday customs.

The tree and the web

Scholar Vanessa Paloma Elbaz describes two paths of Sephardic transmission after 1492. The tree is the orderly line of teacher to student, through synagogues and study halls. The web spreads sideways through homes, gatherings, and women's songs, without one center.

She stresses that neither path belongs to one gender, and that tradition is strongest where the two meet. She calls the whole system “Sontinuity,” continuity carried by sound.

The neighborhood school

Children learned in a synagogue school or a teacher's home, starting with the alphabet and then letters with vowels. Cairo Geniza documents even preserve outlines of letters for children to color in.

In Yemen, a teacher called a mori taught young boys. In southern Morocco, a boy's first day of school, Liktahb, was marked with a symbolic “wedding” to the Torah.

The hakham as teacher

The hakham taught, ruled on Jewish law, and guided the community. Rabbi Yosef Haim of Baghdad, known as the Ben Ish Hai, wrote sermons and rulings meant for broad audiences, not only scholars.

Educator Tamar Zaken highlights sages who saw Jewish law as a way to improve people, such as the Ben Ish Hai's concern for the dignity of the poor.

Midrash Bet Zilkha, Baghdad

Founded in 1840 and long led by Hakham Abdallah Somekh, the most prominent Baghdad rabbi of the nineteenth century, this rabbinical college trained generations of scholars. Its graduates served as rabbis in many communities.

Baghdad's Jewish schools later served thousands of students, with more than 13,000 pupils in 1950, before the community's mass departure in 1950 and 1951.

Torah and the wider world

In medieval Muslim Spain and Egypt, advanced students studied Bible and Talmud alongside mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, and, in Spain, Hebrew and Arabic poetry. Boys learned Arabic early, sometimes alongside Muslim boys.

Around 1160 to 1180, Judah ibn Tibbon urged his son to study Torah and medicine and to care for the family's large library of Hebrew and Arabic books.

Learning through song

Syrian Jews learn pizmonim, religious songs sung at prayers and celebrations, and assign each week's prayers a musical mode, or maqam, matched to the Torah portion.

In Aleppo, Morocco, and Jerusalem, communities gather very early on winter Sabbath mornings to sing poems called baqashot.

Women's transmission at home

Little is known about girls' schooling in earlier centuries; in Yemen, for example, mothers taught their daughters at home. Scholar Vanessa Paloma Elbaz shows how women's songs carried tradition. In medieval Spain, some women hired teachers and endowed schools.

Alliance Israélite Universelle

Founded in Paris in 1860, the Alliance opened its first school in Tetuan, Morocco, in 1862, followed by Baghdad (1865) and Tehran (1898). By 1914 it ran 183 schools in 90 cities, teaching French, Hebrew, and job skills, and educating girls as well as boys.

Some rabbis, including Baghdad's Hakham Shimon Agassi, worried it weakened Hebrew learning. Three Alliance schools in Casablanca still serve Jewish and Muslim children.

Sephardic schooling in America

In Seattle, about 120 children from Ladino speaking families attended the Sephardic Talmud Torah, founded in 1933, after public school. Today at least half of Seattle Hebrew Academy's students come from Sephardic families.

JIMENA's Toolkit. The Sephardi & Mizrahi Education Toolkit, launched in 2024 and designed mainly for Jewish day schools, helps schools include families of every Jewish background and give all students a broader picture of Jewish life worldwide. It holds that inclusion should run through all of school life, takes the whole community, and benefits everyone. It offers guidance for school leaders, teachers, and families, plus subject pages for teaching across the curriculum.

Voices from Distinctions. In JIMENA's 2025 education issue, educators including Denise Zami Samstein, Elana Riback Rand, and Stephanie Ives explore how schools can help Sephardic and Mizrahi students feel they belong and why Sephardic customs enrich every school. Sarah Sassoon and Etan Basseri show how picture books help children see their own traditions.

Common misconceptions

• “Sephardic learning was only religious.” Many communities prized science, medicine, and poetry alongside Torah.
• “Girls learned nothing.” Formal schooling was mostly for boys, but women were central teachers of tradition at home, and Alliance schools educated girls.
• “A heritage day is enough.” The Toolkit recommends weaving Sephardic content into the regular curriculum all year.
• “Only schools with Sephardic students need this.” Without it, every student gets an incomplete picture of Jewish history.

These traditions suggest habits any teacher can borrow:

• Learn out loud and together. Reading aloud, chanting, and singing together were at the heart of traditional learning.
• Let music carry meaning. Songs helped children remember language, history, and values. A melody can still anchor a lesson.
• Make families partners. Much of this heritage lives at home, in recipes, stories, and lullabies. Invite families to share it.
• Connect learning to the wider world. The Sephardic ideal joined sacred study with science, languages, and poetry.
• Lead with respect. Tamar Zaken's lessons on Sephardic sages stress that learning should make people better, and that respect and connection come first.

A first day to remember

In many Jewish communities, a child's first day of school was a celebration. In the Tafilalt region of southern Morocco, a boy of about five was symbolically “married” to the Torah, sometimes with a parade and a festive dinner, to show his lifelong bond with learning.

Teachers today can borrow the spirit of this custom by marking the start of a new year or a new book with a small celebration.

In the public school classroom

• Compare how children learned in a Yemenite heder, a medieval Cairo classroom, and an Alliance school with how students learn today.
• Read Judah ibn Tibbon's letter about caring for books as a primary source, then have students write their own advice about learning.
• Play recordings of pizmonim or baqashot and discuss how songs teach language and values. Listen and analyze; do not have students sing prayers.
• Explore the Alliance schools to discuss how modern education changed communities, including the debates it sparked.
• Have students interview a grandparent about how they learned as a child, in any culture.

In Jewish schools and communities

• Start the year by asking every student about their roots, as the Toolkit recommends.
• Hang portraits of Sephardic and Mizrahi sages, such as the Ben Ish Hai, beside other Jewish leaders, and stock Sephardic siddurim.
• Teach with Sephardic texts: try Zaken's lessons on the Ben Ish Hai's blessing for “new” secondhand things, or her lesson on Rav Yosef Messas.
• Audit your library for Sephardic and Mizrahi picture books, and use the Toolkit's subject pages to add one Sephardic text to every unit.

At home and with family

• Share where your family comes from through stories, recipes, and songs, and ask children what they learn at school.
• Record an elder singing a family song or lullaby, and share it with JIMENA's oral history project.
• Read picture books together and ask, “Do you see anything our family does?”
• On back to school night, notice whose faces and stories appear on classroom walls.

Watch and listen

Read

Explore online

From Distinctions, JIMENA's journal

From JIMENA