United States or Togo ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In the century of which I am speaking, the Hebron community consisted entirely of Sefardim, and it was not till the sixteenth century that Ashkenazim settled there in large numbers. I have already mentioned the visit of David Reubeni. He was in Hebron in 1523, when he entered the Cave of Machpelah on March tenth, at noon.
Spanish Jews, earliest arrivals by way of Holland, after the Restoration, are a class apart, and look down on the later imported Ashkenazim, embracing both Poles and Dutchmen in their impartial contempt. But this does not prevent the Pole and the Dutchman from despising each other.
From everywhere they came "to pour water on the hands and sit at the feet" of the great ones of the second Palestine. For Jewish solidarity was more than a word in those days. "Sefardim" had not yet learned to boast of aristocratic lineage, nor "Ashkenazim" to look down contemptuously upon their Slavonic coreligionists.
Even if we take the Jewish race, which seems to show extraordinary fixity and stability of type, there is not one dominant Jewish type; there are fully fifty different Jewish types. There is hardly any resemblance between the Jew of Tiflis and the Jew of Tangier, between democratic Ashkenazim and the aristocratic Sephardim. Race is not a cause, but an effect.
Word Of The Day