Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: lezione di storia per Gideon Levy

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/7/22/main-feature/1/the-loyalties-of-the-sephardim
July 22, 2011
The Loyalties of the Sephardim
By Aryeh Tepper
Yemenite Jews.
In a recent Haaretz column, Gideon Levy, the radical leftist
polemicist, sounded the warning that Israel's religious Zionists—"the
knitted skullcaps"—have joined hands with the ultra-Orthodox and the
Sephardim to form "a united tribe of zealots." Why have the ultra-
Orthodox and the Sephardim formed this coalition? In Levy's telling,
both groups are responding to the history of discrimination they've
suffered at the hands of the Zionist Left.
Like every piece of demagoguery, Levy's is built on a kernel of truth:
Sephardi and ultra-Orthodox Jews have, at various times and for
various reasons, been discriminated against, both by the state and by
what is conventionally called in Israel "the left-wing, Ashkenazi,
secular elite." This generalization is itself a little silly, but it's
a sufficient basis for Levy's attack.  The moral of Levy's fanciful
story is that as the Israeli Right is becoming "a united tribe of
zealots" thanks to the discrimination of the Israeli Left, then across
the board, from right to left, Israel has become—hold on to your hats—
a racist, bigoted society!
Alas, collectively smearing Israeli society isn't Levy's only game. By
reducing the nationalism of Israeli Sephardim to a kind of "false
consciousness" attributable to leftist discrimination, Levy (a German
Jew) high-handedly dismisses the authentic, historically-rooted Jewish
nationalism of the Sephardim—thus embodying the paternalistic racism
he claims to deplore. He also misses the tensions that, at present,
characterize relations between the Sephardi and ultra-Orthodox sectors
of Israeli society. Ultimately, reality is far richer and more
interesting than Levy's simplistic anti-Zionist polemic.
The roots of that reality go back to the Sephardi Jews who helped
pioneer the Zionist idea, such as poet Emma Lazarus, Rabbi Henry
Mendes, and Sarajevo-born Rabbi Yehuda Alkalai (1798–1878), a proto-
Zionist whose book, Minhat Yehuda (The Offering of Judah) interpreted
the traditional vision of redemption in earthly terms. Decidedly ahead
of his time, Alkalai called for reviving Hebrew as a spoken language
and for the election of a Jewish constituent assembly in the land of
Israel, where he himself moved at the end of his life.
While there's no denying that European and Russian Jews constituted
the early engine of the modern Zionist movement, equally undeniable is
the tremendous appeal that Zionism held to masses of Jews in North
Africa and the Middle East.
Consider the case of Yemenite Jewry. We know from documents in the
Cairo Genizah that Yemenite Jews had ties with the Jews in the land of
Israel during the medieval period, while Rabbi Ovadia Bartinoro, a
leading 15th-century jurist, also mentioned the aliyah of Yemenite
Jewry. These waves of immigration to Israel continued up through the
20th century.  Between the two world wars, approximately 15,000
Yemenite Jews arrived in Israel—a remarkable figure, as the Zionist
movement was only beginning to set up shop in Yemen at that time.
The independent character of Yemenite Zionism was vigorously
articulated by the Yemenite scholar, jurist, and translator, Rabbi
Joseph Kapach, in a 1982 speech he gave before the Knesset.  The
occasion was a Knesset-sponsored celebration of 100 years of Yemenite
immigration to Israel, but Kapach began by making it clear that
Yemenite aliyah was much more than a century old. He even noted that
the term "Zionism" was unknown in Yemen, because "the Zionist movement
was created as a remedy against the hostility [among European Jews] to
aliyah, but without a sickness there's no need for a remedy."
As Kapach's autarchic spirit makes clear, no left-wing discrimination
was or is necessary to fuel the Zionist desires of Yemenite Jews.
Kapach's forceful reclamation of this deeply-rooted Zionist identity
has recently been echoed in the attack launched by rebel Shas MK Rabbi
Haim Amsalem against the ultra-Orthodox leadership of the Shas party.
According to Amsalem, Shas, by aping Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox norms,
is turning Israeli Sephardim, natural nationalists, into anti-
Zionists. So much for Levy's "united tribe of zealots."
Perhaps the most interesting polemic against the Ashkenazi ultra-
Orthodox establishment was launched by the late Chief Sephardi Rabbi
of Jerusalem and Chief Rabbi of Morocco, Shalom Messas. In his
commentary on the episode of the spies from the book of Numbers,
Messas compared the Sephardim to the Biblical figure of Caleb, who
possessed a natural love of the land.  In contrast, he likened the
ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazim to the figure of Joshua, who over-
intellectualized his connection to the land as a consequence of the
years he spent studying Torah with Moses—and who, as a result,
required divine assistance to be saved from the sin of the spies. In
light of the positions articulated by Rabbis Kapach, Amsalem, and
Messas, Gideon Levy's clumsy lumping of the Sephardim and the ultra-
Orthodox into the same category appears to be twice removed from the
truth.
Of course, we must be wary of painting with Levy's broad brushstrokes,
and recognize that the sartorial choice of a knitted skullcap can
represent a variety of ideological positions.  Wearers of knitted
skullcaps range from the religious-nationalist bourgeois, who often
loathe kippah-wearing radical nationalists, to students and followers
of the line dictated by the influential Har HaMor yeshiva, who would
sooner profane the Sabbath than raise a hand against a police officer.
But Levy is familiar with the ignorance of his target audience outside
of Israel, who sadly but predictably hailed his article as
"phenomenally provocative."  Levy's article was nothing of the sort,
but it did aptly demonstrate that anti-Israel passion blinds otherwise
intelligent people, both in Israel and abroad, from seeing what is in
right front of their noses—or under other people's skullcaps.

 Israel during the medieval period, while Rabbi Ovadia Bartinoro,
BErtinoro, mi è corregionale
. Se si vuole fare la lezione di storia, è meglio farle bene le
ricerchine...