States of Exile

The War Nerd makes an underappreciated point in his article about the Israelis who fired on Palestinian marching into the Golan Heights: For every squeamish Euro descendant of socialist kibbutzim in those ranks, I’d bet there are ten Sephardim or Falasha with lots of juicy family stories about what it was like living in Muslim countries who’d be willing to empty their magazines into the crowd coming down the hill. To wit, the Sephardim are the more right-wing, conservative sub-race of Jews. In North America there are relatively few Sephardim, so Jews get fairly stereotyped as bourgeois liberals. But in Israel, Sephardim comprise at least half the Jewish population, so the country tilts to the right. Interestingly, Benjamin Netanyahu (though himself Ashkenazi) dismissed the Israeli "tent city" protestors as "Ashkenazi leftists eating sushi and smoking nargilas." Clearly then, Ashkenazi functions in Israel as Jewish does in certain North American circles: as a signif...

Antonio Vieira, a Jesuit missionary, one of the greatest writers of Portugal . . . believed that the Jews should be recalled to his country (which between 1580 and 1640 lost its dynasty and freedom and became a Spanish kingdom) because they could re-create the wealth and greatness of his much-suffered and beloved land. He also believed that the Jews could be converted and that the Ten Tribes could be found in America. Vieira persuased King John IV in 1649 to found a Jewish company, exempt from the Inquisition and provided with a fleet which would ultimately recover Brazil. In a truly Messianic work he prophesied that the new pro-Jewish kingdom of Portugal would be the Biblical fifth universal monarchy and rival the power of the ancient Babylonian kings. - Paul Tabori, The Anatomy of Exile Is it too late to make this happen?

You like us because, being Portuguese and Comtadins, we do not form part of the accursed race. And we do not. We had nothing to do with the judicial crime committed against Christ. . . . you Latins have good reason to like us Latin Jews, because we are as much part of the Latin race as the Greeks and Saracens were in Provence and Sicily. Nor are we half-breeds, any more than those heterogeneous individuals who were mixed with the Romans during the great invasions. Furthermore, we are the best propagators of Latinity. After all, is not Spanish, for the most part, the language spoken in the Jewish areas of Bulgaria and Tunisia? - Apollinaire, "The Latin Jew"