By Andrew Klein, PhD

Gabriel Klein, Research Assistant and Scholar

Dedication: For our Mother, who regards truth as more important than myth. In truth, there is no judgment, only justice. To the world, she is many things, but to us, she will always be Mum.

Introduction: The Turned-Inward Gaze

Historical analysis often focuses on the conflicts between a people and its external adversaries. However, for Ashkenazi Jews—the Jewish diaspora population that coalesced in Central and Eastern Europe during the Middle Ages—a distinct and culturally embedded pattern of internal conflict has been equally formative. This is not mere bickering, but a unique social phenomenon termed “The Ashkenazi Quarrel”: a mode of prolonged, bitter, and often intractable dispute characterized by shunning, a rigid demand for absolute justice, and a tendency to escalate into forms of mutual destruction. This article will explore the historical and cultural roots of this quarrelsome disposition, analyze its intrinsic dangers, and trace the profound impact of these internal fractures on other communities, both within the Jewish world and beyond. We argue that this inward-turned rigor, born of historical trauma and religious interpretation, has repeatedly been exported or mirrored in political projects with devastating consequences for outsiders caught in the crossfire.

Part I: Anatomy of the Quarrel – Shunning, Righteousness, and the Broken Family

At its core, the Ashkenazi quarrel is defined by a paradoxical form of engagement: the refusal to engage. The primary weapon is not confrontation, but spurning; the goal is not reconciliation, but the maintenance of a state of righteous grievance.

· The Ritual of Spurning: As mediator and writer Arthur Fish observes, the dominant mode of attack is cutting off relations. The archetypal expression is the Yiddish concept of broigus—”a fight where people won’t talk to each other”. This creates a closed loop where the complainant, having severed contact, builds a mental fortress of their own blamelessness. Without the corrective of dialogue or the offender’s perspective, the dispute hardens into a “theodicy,” a moral drama where one party is wholly good and the other wholly evil.

· The Proxy Battleground: In the absence of direct communication, the quarrel metastasizes into symbolic warfare. Fights over practical matters—care of elderly parents, family businesses, inheritances—morph into battles for moral legitimacy. Possession of family photographs becomes a sacred proxy for possessing the “true” family narrative, leading to acts of defacement, hostage-taking, and emotional ransom. The family itself becomes the casualty.

· The Demand for Absolute Justice: Underpinning this dynamic is an uncompromising demand for a purity of justice that the messy real world can seldom provide. Fish suggests that Ashkenazi quarrels are so obdurate “because we desire more justice than is available in this world”. This longing for perfect moral order, when frustrated, curdles into a bitterness that is then directed inward, against one’s own kin.

Part II: The Roots of Inwardness – Trauma, Piety, and the Search for Purity

How did a people renowned for strong familial and communal bonds develop such a potent capacity for internal rupture? The sources are twin pillars: historical persecution and the internalization of religious fervour.

· The Legacy of External Persecution: For centuries in Europe, Ashkenazi Jews faced pogroms, expulsions, economic restrictions, and the constant threat of violence. The apex of this was the Holocaust, which systematically murdered approximately six million Jews, devastating the demographic and cultural heart of Ashkenazi life. This history creates what Fish identifies as a profound “inwardness.” With the outside world often hostile or lethal, there is “no obvious point of escape.” The resulting pressure-cooker environment turns frustration and bitterness that cannot be safely vented externally back onto the community itself. The community becomes both sanctuary and cage.

· The Secularization of Religious Form: The patterns of strict piety, intransigence, and claims to exclusive righteousness found in some religious traditions did not disappear with secularization. Instead, they were “emptied of tradition and refilled with secular content”. The sternness and shunning tactics once associated with religious schism are now deployed in wholly secular settings: boardroom battles, political factionalism, and cultural debates. The form of the quarrel remains, even as its theological substance evaporates.

Part III: The Export of Fracture – Impact on Other Jewish and non-Jewish Communities

The consequences of the Ashkenazi quarrel extend far beyond interpersonal spats. This template for conflict has shaped larger historical and political dynamics with severe repercussions for other groups.

· The Ashkenazi-Sephardic Schism in Israel: The most direct and damaging export of this dynamic is the deep, decades-long ethnic rift within Israeli society between Ashkenazi Jews (of European origin) and Sephardic/Mizrahi Jews (of Middle Eastern and North African origin). Upon Israel’s founding, the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment viewed Sephardic immigrants with a condescension bordering on contempt, seeing them as backward “Levantines”. State policies systematically dismantled Sephardic family structures, marginalized their religious leadership, and funneled them into peripheral “development towns” with limited opportunity. This was not merely bias but an institutional spurning of a fellow Jewish community. The legacy is a bitter socio-economic and political divide that a 1982 CIA report presciently framed as a foundational “confrontation” with the potential for civil conflict. The current political dominance of Likud is built upon harnessing this historic Sephardic grievance against the old Ashkenazi elite.

· Fuel for Antisemitic Conspiracy: The internal Jewish focus on lineage and legitimacy has been catastrophically weaponized by external antisemites. The largely discredited “Khazar hypothesis,” which posits that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Turkic converts rather than ancient Israelites, is a prime example. Though dismissed by genetic studies and mainstream scholarship, this theory is enthusiastically propagated in antisemitic and anti-Zionist circles to delegitimize Jewish historical claims to the Land of Israel. It provides a pseudo-intellectual veneer for the claim that Jews are “impostors,” a trope now recirculated in far-right channels to justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Thus, an internal Jewish historical debate is twisted into a lethal conspiracy theory targeting all Jews.

· The Political Mirror of Rigidity: The pattern of demanding absolute justice and brooking no compromise finds a dangerous mirror in modern political ideology. The unyielding, Manichean worldview that characterizes the most extreme forms of political and religious Zionism can be seen as the quarrel scaled to a national project. Similarly, the analysis of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood reveals a parallel “civilization jihad” strategy—a rigid, long-term plan to reshape society that admits no dissent or alternative vision. When such uncompromising frameworks clash over the same land, the result is not a quarrel but a war, with the Palestinian people bearing the catastrophic cost of these competing absolutisms.

Conclusion: The Peril of Unyielding Truth

The Ashkenazi quarrel is a cultural adaptation to extremity, a survival mechanism that turned destructively inward. Its dangers are manifold: it destroys families from within, provides a template for the marginalization of other Jewish communities, and its themes are perverted to fuel ancient hatreds. Most profoundly, it exemplifies the peril of seeking an absolute, perfect justice in an imperfect world. That relentless pursuit, whether in a family dispute over an inheritance or in a national project over a homeland, too often achieves not purity, but pyrrhic victory—a justice so costly it obliterates the very community it sought to perfect.

The challenge, for a people shaped by this history, is to transmute the demand for justice into a capacity for mercy, to replace the rigidity of the quarrel with the flexibility of dialogue. The alternative is to remain trapped in a cycle where the search for unblemished righteousness leads only to deeper, more expansive fractures.

References

1. Wikipedia contributors. “Ashkenazi Jews.” Wikipedia. 

2. Wikipedia contributors. “Khazar hypothesis of Ashkenazi ancestry.” Wikipedia. 

3. Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. “The Soap Myth: Education Resources.” 

4. Fish, Arthur. “The Ashkenazi Quarrel.” Tablet Magazine, July 17, 2019. 

5. Samsonowitz, Miriam. “Sephardim and Ashkenazim: Closing the Gaps?” Jewish Action. 

6. Baroud, Ramzy. “Civil War on the Horizon? The Ashkenazi-Sephardic Conflict and Israel’s Future.” ZNetwork, 2023. 

7. Gerster, Lea. “An Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory is Being Shared on Telegram to Justify Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.” Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), May 5, 2022.