⚠ AN UNIDENTIFIED PLACE whose misidentification became the name of a people — which is why it has no confident pin. Obadiah 1:20 says the exiles of Jerusalem are 'in Sepharad.' The best scholarly guesses are SARDIS, the Lydian capital in western Asia Minor (a bilingual Aramaic inscription found there names a place 'Sfrd'), or a Median district the Assyrians recorded as Saparda. ⚠ But the Aramaic Targum, paraphrasing the verse centuries later, rendered Sepharad as SPAIN (Aspamia) — and that single translator's guess stuck so hard that the Jews of Spain and their descendants have been called SEPHARDI ever since, and are to this day, as against the ASHKENAZI Jews of the Rhineland (Ashkenaz being another obscure biblical place-name, Genesis 10:3, reassigned to Germany the same way). A guess about one unknown word became an ethnonym for half of world Jewry.