The Ashkenazi Revolution

existence on the basis of mediocrity. The Sephardic leaders opened a wideaccount, signed above it “backward lands” and on this account they, andthe foolish Ashkenazim who get dragged after them, list all the social illsthat plagued Sepharad in Northwest Africa, all the shocking human andsocial situations that we witnessed, with our own eyes, when the waves ofimmigrants arrived from those lands. But is it only the backward amongthe inhabitants of those lands who are guilty in this situation? TheSephardic neighborhoods, that arose in the beginning of the 19 th century inJerusalem, are, to this day, backward, even as similar Ashkenazineighborhoods blossom. We cannot claim that the situation in Jerusalem,from the beginning of the 19 th century until today, should be defined as abackward land. We should also not forget that from the beginning of the1880’s, the Jews of these Sephardic neighborhoods in Jerusalem receivedever increasing educational, social, and financial aid. Nevertheless, thepopulation of these neighborhoods is defined, to this day, as backward.This is convincing proof that it is not the external conditions, whichprevailed in Northwest Africa, or the Mideast, that caused thisbackwardness, but first and foremost the basic internal weakness of the“golden age” culture. And let not the Sephardim mix Ladino culture withthe culture of the golden age. The latter was a Judeo-Arabic culture, andthis was the great Judeo-Sephardic culture that the Sephardic Jews created.The culture of the Ladino is something else. When it adopted a Europeanlanguage, it acquired a new fate for itself. The political and socialfoundation of this culture is solid, as evidenced by the social blossoming ofthe Jews of Bulgaria and Thesaloniki. The weakness of this culture islinked to its limited scale. The opposite is true with the Judeo-Arabculture, whose cultural components are huge, but whose social-politicalfoundation is weak. This foundation completely crumbled during the lastfew centuries, and the result was a shocking social, and human, decline ofall those found within its walls. This civilization has no right to existtoday, just as a building that is about to collapse has no right to exist. The“house”, whose name is the Sephardic Jewish culture, deserves to have itsinhabitants evacuated from it in a rescue campaign, and then to bedemolished. But it is not Ashkenazim who are allowed to make this call,not in any way or form. This is strictly a Sephardic matter. The problem201