The Ashkenazi Revolution

133post-Herzl Zionist thinking was almost entirely an odd bastard child of thewonderful clarity that characterized Herzl, and of the darkness andfuzziness that characterizes anybody who places his feet upon the ricketyand hazardous foundation whose name is the Confederacy of JewishPeoples. The weakness of post-Herzl Zionist thought does not come from alack of internal strength or from cowardice, but first and foremost from thefact that it is based upon the rickety foundation whose name is theConfederacy of Jewish Peoples.3The transition of Zionist thought, after the death of Herzl, from the domainof the Ashkenazi People to that of the Confederacy of Jewish Peoples,brought with it results that could not be imagined. Yiddish, the greatworldly language, was discredited, and in its place began the infantileattempt at creating a new language – Modern Hebrew. At the same timethere were fantasies regarding the cultural stock value of the “golden age”in Spain. This culture was disappointing even within its own borders andthe Sephardo-Mizrahi peoples who nursed from it descended, for the mostpart, to low levels. But its very position upon the foundation of theConfederacy of Jewish Peoples forced it to attribute exaggerated greatnessto the writings of this “golden age”. For this approach, in its very nature,enthusiastically seeks the amalgamation of the cultural values of all theJewish peoples in order to emphasis the diversity of this amalgamation.From its clear intuition that a presentation of unity lacks power, it seeks topresent a façade of diversity instead of unity, to consolidate, upon onebookshelf, the writings of half a dozen Jewish cultures and, at the sametime, to settle in one immigrant village, those who have arrived from half adozen lands. In its giving up the great power and strong solidarity of pureAshkenazi identity, it seeks for itself a multicultural alternative approach ofthe Confederacy of Jewish Peoples, which struggles to unite under a fewstrong symbols of one religion, one land and one language.This change, which accompanied the transition from an Ashkenazi outlookto an outlook of the Confederacy of Jewish Peoples, was also tied to the