The Ashkenazi Revolution

94darkness” or of “rebels against light” that formed the image of Jewishghetto life, but the Jewish-Roman arrangement that was reached in thesecond century of the Christian calendar, after Jewish-Romanconfrontations that persisted for a hundred years. The Enlightenmentrebelled against this arrangement but did not offer any other arrangement totake its place.Just as there was little understanding, within the New Hebrew Literature,regarding the historical background of the relationship between Jews andnon-Jews, so too was there a lack of understanding of the roots of Jewishlife itself. The leader of Jewish life was the rabbi by virtue of his being thegeneral and field marshal of the ranks of Jewish martyrs. Every culture hasan obligation for political death, that is to say, a moment when a faithfulperson is expected to prefer death to life. This moment is, in Judaism, themoment of martyrdom and the preference for death over forced conversion.The rabbi went, at the head of his congregation, to a martyr’s death and thispower made him ruler over Jewish life. The Ashkenazi rabbinate was whatlead Ashkenaz and it was what formed and established the giant that isAshkenaz. By ignoring this great truth, the authors of the Enlightenment,and later their successors, lead a total war against the Ashkenazi rabbinateduring the “Renaissance” era and, citing occasional distortions, blamedthem on the fact that rabbinical law depends on a formal framework, whichis the case with every human law. A great and wonderful historicalcreation, and a whole way of life, the product of the Ashkenazi rabbinate,was discredited and defamed through Hebrew Literature which dependedon ridiculous and baseless accusations that were invented out of thin air.The way that Hebrew Literature related to the Ashkenazi rabbinate, andtoward the Jewish religion, was fixed largely from a typical personalperspective. Almost all of the important Hebrew authors, during thegeneration before the last, were yeshiva students who were destined to begreat rabbis and Torah luminaries. Yehuda Leib Gordon was a brilliantTorah scholar and so was Bialik, who was a student in a famous andnoteworthy yeshiva. Under the influence of the spirit of the Enlightenment,these yeshiva students, the Hebrew authors of the future, rebelled against