The name Edot HaMizrach, the communities of the East, is an Israeli coinage, and it names a consolidation as much as a tradition. Before the twentieth century there was no single eastern rite but a constellation of local ones: Aleppo with its ancient usages, Baghdad with the Ben Ish Hai's rulings, the Moroccan communities with their own piyyut and Andalusian music, Yemen apart with its distinctive Baladi rite, Persia, Bukhara and Cochin each with local custom.
The mass immigration to Israel in the 1950s threw these communities together, and the printed siddur did the rest: editions labelled Edot HaMizrach, following the Baghdadi standard, became the common denominator of Sephardic synagogues, and the rulings of Ovadia Yosef, the dominant Sephardic halakhist of the era, deliberately promoted a unified Sephardic practice as a matter of communal restoration. The consolidation has its critics and its exceptions. Moroccan congregations increasingly print and defend their own nusach; the Yemenite rites were never absorbed; and liturgical scholars note that the standard text's Lurianic layer is itself a late addition that some older Spanish communities, notably the Spanish and Portuguese congregations of London, Amsterdam and New York, never adopted, their sober pre-Lurianic rite forming yet another branch. The eastern rite on the Israeli shelf is therefore a living compromise, one that made a shared public worship possible for a million immigrants while the older local traditions continue underneath it, remembered, revived and argued over.