The Ashkenazi Revolution

68community in Germany. Furthermore: During the approximately 500years between the expulsion of the Jews from France and the modern age,contact between the two groups had become limited to where it was merelya symbolic minimum. The Jews of Spain and the Jews of Germany are twopeoples whose only similarity is their shared religion and their hatredtoward foreign peoples. It is not easy to find, among the peoples ofEurope, two peoples whose differences are so acute as that between theJews of Spain and the Jews of Germany. The wish to specifically viewthese two peoples as two centers is the result of an arbitrary wish to defend,at any cost, the opinion that holds the Jews to be one people, while ignoringclear and evident historical facts.The basic difference between Ashkenaz and Sepharad, and also betweenAshkenaz and all other Jewish peoples, is rooted in that none of the Jewishpeoples, except Ashkenaz, ever established large Jewish settlements outsideof the Mediterranean area. The Jews are a classic Mideastern nation. Theirhistorical arena encompassed the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, Egypt and theEastern shore of the Mediterranean. After the destruction of the SecondTemple, the Jewish peoples remained faithful to this basic geographicalframework and the change that was made to it expressed itself in theformation of Jewish settlements on the Southern shore of the MediterraneanSea, along with a westward expansion. The Jewish community in Spaindwelt in a Mediterranean land, whose climate was very similar to theclimate of the Land of Israel, and even the vast majority of its agriculturalproducts are known also to do well in the Land of Israel. The singulargeographical accomplishment of the Jews of Spain, in contrast to the othernon-Ashkenazic peoples, is rooted in that it went further west than any ofthem and struck roots in the land of Europe. But even it didn’t veer fromthe boundaries of the Mediterranean Sea and it remained in its owngeographical world.The geographical campaign of the Jews of Germany was mighty beyondmeasure. The Ashkenazi People escaped the framework of theMediterranean Sea, which the Jews had clung to for millennia, andestablished great settlements in the frontiers of Eastern Europe, in areas of