The "Second Israel" Comes of Age

By Pico Iyer

No longer a minority, the Sephardim gain political clout

It is a sad but all too classic pattern. At one end of society are the rich, whose money buys them opportunities and whose opportunities bring them more money. At the other are the poor, caught in a downward spiral in which nothing, it seems, can come of nothing. College graduate and illiterate cannot find a common language, high liver and low achiever cannot see eye to eye. The northerners scoff at the warm passions and expansiveness of their compatriots to the south, the southerners scorn the icy rationalism and inhibitions of their countrymen to the north.

In Israel, all those contrasts and conflicts were for decades embodied by the Sephardim*-- (who flocked to Israel from southern European countries, North Africa and the Middle East) and the Ashkenazim (who came from Central and Eastern Europe). For 30 years the more cosmopolitan Ashkenazim have been at the top of their nation's political, financial and cultural worlds, while most Sephardim have been relegated to a "Second Israel," an underclass accustomed to deprivation and often associated with crime.

In the process, Israel's melting pot has, on occasion, become a cauldron of hostilities. The Ashkenazim have lampooned what they see as the less disciplined and sophisticated Sephardim, and the Sephardim, in turn, have scorned the standoffish Ashkenazim. In a few particularly ugly instances, the Sephardim have been dubbed "Khomeinis"; they have responded by calling their antagonists "Aske-nazis." Even Prime Ministers, including European-born David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, have spoken darkly of the dangers of "mob rule" and sweepingly written off "the primitive Arab mentality" of the Sephardim.

The word Arab is in effect the heart of the matter: the majority of the Sephardim have their roots in the Islamic world. Though they know their Arab neighbors better, and like them less, than do their compatriots of European origin, they are often lumped by association with Israel's sworn enemy. For their part, the Sephardim point out that Judaism is a Semitic creed and that the Torah was originally handed down in the Sinai.

Culturally, too, the Sephardim often feel more at home in an Arabic environment. But the Middle Eastern Jews who arrived in Israel 36 years ago found that Jews from Poland, Germany and the Soviet Union had created a land in the image of their old European homes. Speaking the Judeo-Spanish language of Ladino, the Sephardim could not follow the cadences of its Central European equivalent, Yiddish. Accustomed to Middle Eastern pastimes, they were little taken with cafes based on the coffeehouses of Vienna and Budapest and filled with Hapsburg-era music. Raised on couscous, they had no taste for gefilte fish. Even their religious customs differed from those of the Europeans: at Passover, for example, the Sephardim are allowed to eat rice and legumes, which are forbidden the Ashkenazim. They also sometimes indulge in exuberant rites, energetically re-enacting the Exodus and slapping each other with onions as a reminder of the Egyptians' lashing of the Jews.

Only recently have those discrepancies started to fade. "Now we preach social integration. We are busing our children. We have about 25% mixed marriages," says Eliezer Shmueli, a Sephardi who is director general of the Ministry of Education. "There is a renaissance of Sephardic culture and ethnic pride." A record 29 Sephardim sit in the 120-member Knesset; three are in Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's 19-man Cabinet. Chief of Staff Moshe Levy is a Sephardic Jew, as is Israel Kesar, secretary-general of the 1.1 million-member General Federation of Labor. The second in command of both major political parties, Yitzhak Navon of Labor and David Levy of Likud, are Sephardim of Moroccan descent.

Even more important, the Second Israel has become, numerically, the first. Now that the Sephardim account for more than half of Israel's population, they enjoy a considerable say, although not yet a proportional share, in the running of their homeland. As this was happening, they found an unlikely spokesman in the quintessentially Ashkenazic person of Menachem Begin (some even pronounce his name Ray-geen to give it a Middle Eastern ring). The right-wing former Prime Minister appealed to the downtrodden Sephardim both because of his fierce nationalism and because of previous neglect of their basic needs. In the 1977 and 1981 elections, the Sephardim helped bring Begin to power by delivering an overwhelming majority of their vote. This year, however, their political party preferences remain uncertain, and ethnic divisions have been largely eclipsed by ideological differences.

That may be true for almost the first time since 1948, when the new nation of Israel suddenly became a Babel-like meeting place for Jews from about 100 countries speaking 70 languages. Religious-minded and often untrained, the newly arrived Sephardic immigrants (including 260,000 from Morocco, 120,000 from Iraq and 50,000 from Yemen between 1948 and 1958) found that their new home had been built on the principles of secular Zionism. Israel's schools, its bureaucracy, its kibbutzim had all been set in place by Europeans.

Outnumbered and outclassed, the Sephardim quickly drifted to the bottom of the social hierarchy. There they remained, thanks in large part to the shortage of housing: with rental accommodations almost nonexistent and mortgages scarce, the ill-qualified immigrants who longed to settle in Jerusalem, the city of their prayers, found themselves herded instead into cheerless prefabricated tent towns, remote villages precariously close to Arab positions or the Negev wilderness. The more fortunate families that managed to stay in Jerusalem did well to find single rooms, in abandoned Arab houses. There was little work to be found and little food. Often young boys lived off what they could pick from the pockets of Ashkenazim.

The founders of Israel hoped that children from both Sephardic and European families could be taught together, and in the process learn togetherness. In practice, however, classrooms only increased the sense of separation. Run in the main by Ashkenazim, Israeli schools concentrated on Western poetry and European history; their liturgies were the Ashkenazic ones. Not surprisingly, students from Ashkenazic homes with book lined shelves easily outperformed Sephardic children. "We achieved nothing," says Yehuda Amir, director of the Institute of Integration at Tel Aviv's Bar-ilan University. "The Sephardic children came from large families, lived in crowded quarters and could make little or no progress. Their drop-out rate was high. And it was impossible to have good schools in poor neighborhoods.''

Such inequities were aggravated by the open disrespect in which many Ashkenazic leaders held their compatriots. In 1950 one Ashkenazic writer in the Tel Aviv daily Ha 'aretz cavalierly described North African immigrants as "completely ruled by primitive and wild passions" and warned that "in their camps you will find dirt, cardgames for money, drunkenness and fornication." Though the Sephardim regarded Ben-Gurion as a messianic deliverer, he declared in a 1965 interview that " the Jews from Morocco have no education. They love their wives, but they beat them. The culture of Morocco I would not like to have here." Golda Meir hardly bothered to conceal her distaste for those from "countries that have not developed intellectually, industrially and culturally."

The first major eruption of those long-simmering tensions came on a hot summer's day in 1959 in the squalid Wadi Salib area of Haifa, where 15,000 people, mostly Moroccans, were crammed into tenements. After a policeman wounded a Moroccan, crowds of Sephardim unleashed their pent-up anger. They pelted policemen with stones, wrecked some 25 local shops, burned two buildings and, in the process, sent a shudder through the nation.

As recently as December 1983, when a policeman shot a Sephardi in a rundown area of Tel Aviv, local Sephardim ran riot, painting swastikas all around. Two months later, when the Peace Now movement, dominated by Ashkenazim, took to the streets of the capital to call for the retirement of former Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, his supporters, mostly Sephardim, stormed the rally, screaming obscenities and tearing up placards. One demonstrator was killed. In explaining why he forsook a career as a distinguished archaeologist to enter politics, the late former Deputy Premier Yigael Yadin of the Likud coalition said, "I thought [the ethnic trouble] was the greatest danger to Israel, more than all the Arabs put together."

Despite such outbursts, time, assisted by hard work, has helped heal some of the divisions, and the conditions of the Sephardim have substantially improved. Although 90% of Israel's slum dwellers are still Sephardim, a $400 million program has rehabilitated 84 depressed neighborhoods, nearly all of them Sephardic. Although the Sephardim still constitute barely a fifth of the nation's undergraduates and around a tenth of its postgraduate students, they account for more than 60% of its elementary school pupils. Thanks to educational reforms, illiteracy has been slashed from nearly 13% in 1969 to 5%. Many Sephardim have also managed to pursue success without forfeiting their own heritage. Just last month, a formerly disaffected Sephardi publicly unveiled a labor of ethnic pride on which he and a team of neighborhood kids had been working for a year: a model of a Moroccan village.

The Sephardim have also grown more vocal in demanding better social welfare programs, homes and jobs. Many of the early Sephardic settlers were superstitious to the point of fatalism. Their destinies, they held, would be determined not by their own efforts but by kismet, or fate. That self-fulfilling belief was only confirmed by the practices of a centralized government, which handed down its decisions in peremptory fashion from Jerusalem. "The more Sephardim shout, demonstrate, claim discrimination, demand better conditions, the healthier it is for us all," says Yair Levin, a Ministry of Education director. "It means they are taking the future into their own hands."

Meanwhile, the growing presence of "Ashkesephards" (as the children of mixed marriages are jokingly called) bears witness to the gradual confluence of the groups. Already it is becoming difficult to distinguish between the two cultures, and today's young may not in any case care to do so. Most Israelis age 36 or younger have grown up under the same sun and in a climate where the historical hostilities of their forebears seem less and less relevant. "While other areas of our society are getting worse, the problem of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim is much less serious than it used to be," concludes Professor Amir. "Within the next generation, the ethnic problem will be of minor importance."

-- By Pico Iyer

-- Reported by Martin Levin/Jerusalem

* "The Hebrew term once referred to Jews of Spanish and Portuguese origin, but it later came to include non-European Jews.

With reporting by Martin Levin