The Ashkenazi Revolution

65spend some time discussing the conflicts between the Jewish peopleswithin the Diaspora.Chapter 4A Congregation of peoples in the Diaspora1The People of Israel was born as a confederacy of peoples, as an alliance ofpeoples. It has maintained this character ever since; in the era of thePatriarchs, in the Egyptian Exile, in the First Temple and in the SecondTemple. In the latter era there were two Israelite peoples, the Jews and theSamaritans, between whom was waged a war of destruction. Thedestructive Roman-Jewish wars and the doctrine of Yohanan Ben-Zakaigave great impetus for the reinforcement of the classic pluralistic characterof the People of Israel. Yohanan Ben-Zakai’s avoidance of hostilities withthe Romans, who were destroying the Temple, diminished the sanctity ofthe land and transferred this sanctity to the assets of the Torah, which wereanchored in time and not in space. The reduced sanctity of the landstrengthened the tendency to found diasporas and to entrench Jewishcivilizations within them. Each Jewish diaspora was an organism untoitself and an independent piece of history, that is to say, a Jewish People,and between these peoples was waged a war of competition, similar to thestate of war that existed among the peoples-tribes in the days of the FirstTemple. The first struggle of this kind took place between the Jewishsettlement in the Land of Israel and the diaspora of Babylon. The Jews ofthe Land of Israel fled to Babylon and the people of Babylon would returnto the Land of Israel. The Jewry of Babylon stood by the Jewry of theLand of Israel, after the terrible holocausts that visited her, and she offeredher aid. But at the same time, the Babylonian congregation sought toinherit the place of the congregation of the Land of Israel and to have thehighest authority of all the Jewish diasporas. “In the year 135, after thedestruction of Betar, a high court was founded, in Nahar-Paqud in Babylon,that demanded for itself the basic privileges of the Sanhedrin” (The General