The Ashkenazi Revolution

52Persian Empire. Not so the Samaritans. This nation is a mixture ofremnants of the tribes of Israel, who had attached themselves to a space anddid not abandon it, and of peoples who had been conquered by theAssyrians and banished to the vicinity of Samaria. After itsmaterialization, this nation became a Jewish nation that derived its strengthfrom its continuous habitation in the land its founders and formers haddwelt upon – the remnants of the tribes of Israel. This last element, thearistocracy of Samaria, dwelt in the land continuously from the time it wasconquered in the 13 th century B.C.E., and this was the source of its pride.So it turns out that between the two dimensions, the dimension of spaceand the dimension of time, the Jews and the Samaritans are dividedaccordingly. Concerning the Samaritans, the continuous habitation of theirspace and land is their sole faith, and only their continuous habitationallows them to cling to the Torah of Israel. The Samaritans are a people ofspace. They cling to their land like nobody else and they cannot maintaintheir independence outside of it. They were exiled by the Romans, but theydid not form a diaspora, as did the Jews, rather they assimilated. They hada small local language, and just as they revealed their extreme stubbornnessregarding their faithfulness to their land, so too did they show a lack ofability to exist in lands outside its boundaries. The opposite is true with theJews, whose faithfulness to their land was weaker than that of theSamaritans, but in contrast to this their ability to attach themselves to time,and to nourish themselves from it, was far greater. The result is that thehistory of the Samaritans is splendid but, at the same time, it had noinfluence on the culture of the world, but the history of the Jews is a seriesof great worldly cultural creations that had a decisive influence onmankind. Furthermore: The Samaritans are a tribe that is alwaysdiminishing in number while the Jews are a nation of millions.3The basic attitudes that characterize “Sabra-ness” and “Canaanite-ness” aregiven to change their principles to give impressions that fall in line with thespirit of the day and the needs of the hour. But if we remove all the outerlayers of propaganda and commercialism, we will find that they are based