One specific menace, mentioned abroad until recently as possibly the greatest danger to Israel's integrity, is the ethnic divide between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. What has become of it? It still exists in housing ownership and education and in many economic indicators. It also generates plenty of heated social-protest verbiage -- e.g., the "mistakes of the 1950s" and the missing Yemenite immigrant children. No longer, however, do most Israelis consider it a grave internal threat. Two factors have defused it: Shas and exogamy.

Shas
For centuries, "Shas" has had a pregnant meaning in the Jewish world: It is an acronym for SHisha Sedarim -- the six orders of the Mishna and, by extension, the entire Talmud. To "know Shas" means to have a command of this intricate and timeless literature to be authentically, historically, rootedly Jewish. In the early 1980s, the word began to appear on posters and graffiti on the dumpsters and tenement facades of Bene Beraq, urban slums, and "development towns" that haven't developed anything except slums in their two generations of existence: Shas. Shas. Shas. There it stood for something new that proposed to make the same point: SHomerey torah Sephardim -- Sephardi Torah Guardians, the first Israeli political party to incorporate an ethnic group into its name and do well very well.

Shas has held a pivotal position in the past two governments, built the country's fastest growing school system, alleviated the misery in hard-core slums by orchestrating a return to the faith movement and left a confused Ashkenazi dominated establishment wondering what kind of country Shas wants Israel to be.

Shas itself is of two minds. Its birth was assisted with a dose of Ashkenazi patronizing: an intent to reconstruct the original Sephardi religious culture, ostensibly strangled by secular Zionism, by grafting moribund matter from the glorious Sephardi past (and glorious it was) onto the norms of Ashkenazi yeshiva culture. Ashkenazi patronization has faded, as the Shas leadership declared its independence. The party's firmly haredi leadership contrasts with its three-fourths non-haredi electorate. A Shas supporter can still live the mizrahi stereotype, holding a blue-collar job and observing the Sabbath by participating emotionally in morning worship and then taking in an afternoon soccer match.

Today, even though the party's ecclesiastical orientation is gaining strength, Shas activists are not clones of Ashkenazi haredim. Their beards are cropped, their sidelocks clipped and tucked behind their ears, their black suits cut in Western, not Eastern European rabbinical, fashion. Shas's attitudes about peacemaking are close enough to Labour's to have permitted the party to join the secularist Labour-Left coalition in 1992. Some thought that action would cost Shas the support of most mizrahim in the Greater Israel camp. The results of the 1996 elections, when Shas doubled its 1992 vote total and emerged the third largest party in the Knesset, revealed what issues really move the mizrahi masses who cannot or do not want to escape their mizrahi identity.

Shas's mission is reconstructive. The reconstruction begins locally and with kids. Shas invests most of its resources in a countrywide school system that receives State funding and offers a long school day, free transportation, hot lunches, and schooling in the Sephardi tradition as the State school system cannot. In slums and development towns Shas activists refer the down-and-out to jobs, arrange eligibility for social benefits, and lure the criminally oriented back to the faith and respectability. Naturally they keep the recipients mindful of who their benefactors are.

The Menace Fades
Statisticians count endogamy marriages where both partners belong to the same community but the story they tell is exogamy. Either way, the ethnic menace is vanishing because of a short age of identifiable ethnics. The Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) began measuring endogamy in 1952, categorizing grooms into two origin groups: Europe-America and Asia-Africa. These do not fully correspond to Ashkenazim and Sephardim, but they're close enough.

The year 1965 was counted twice because the CBS found that, with increasing numbers of native-born Israelis, the birthplaces of brides and grooms as defined previously was no longer useful. So that year it began to base ethnicity on the birthplace of the groom's father. Even so, the endogamy ratio continued to slump as Israelis increasingly "out-married."

In 1981 the CBS introduced a new index, including Israeli-born who marry other Israeli-born. Since this created three approximately equal-sized groups that could in or out-marry, the new index was even lower than the old one. By the mid-1980s, more than half of marrying Israelis married into different ethnicities. After 1985, the CBS junked the endogamy index altogether.