The Ashkenazi Revolution

158Would you consider the entire great congregation of liberal professions,the entire congregation of doctors, builders, engineers, and techniciansetc. to be parasites?Would you consider all those merchants, negotiators, middlemen – allthose whom you call, with such disdain, by the name “go-betweens” –would you call all these parasites? (David Shimoni, “chapters ofmemories” page 273).Brenner was much more inclined to spew curses than to clarify if they arecorrect. Therefore Shimoni’s letter was not published. Even the literarymethod was not able to explain the curses whose true meaning ispathological; therefore it avoided testimony and defined Brenner as a“prophet”.Hidden behind the tempest of Brenner’s curses was the profound politicalplan of his great patron, Beryl Katzenelson. Beryl, the great builder of theadministrative world between the two world wars, was, at first, close toterritorialism and dreamt about saving the Jewish masses, but he gave up inthe end, for he found no partners. His territorialist streak was expressed inhis stance regarding languages. Until the spiritual crises that visited Beryl,when he failed to find partners for his territorialist ambition, he absolutelyrejected Hebrew and championed Yiddish, as his words testify in hispamphlet “My Path to the Land of Israel”:I never spoke Hebrew my whole life. On the contrary, I saw the use ofHebrew in speech as unnatural to the extent that I had a teacher, a manvery dear to me – and I caused him great pain – for he spoke to me inHebrew and I spoke to him in Yiddish, for I thought that Hebrew is not aspoken tongue. When I came to the Land of Israel, I did not know how toput together a natural sentence in Hebrew.Beryl bundled his relinquishment of territorialism, and his migration to theLand of Israel, not only with the casting aside of his self-identity with the