As Israel’s October 2026 election approaches, Shas remains one of the most distinctive parties on the country’s political landscape. Aryeh Deri has long been its public face, but reducing Shas to its leader would miss the point. Shas – a Hebrew acronym for Shomrei Torah Sfaradim, “Sephardi Guardians of the Torah” – is at once a religious party, a social movement, an educational and communal network, and the political expression of a Sephardi identity long pushed to the margins.

Since its founding in 1984, the party has achieved something rare: it has given an autonomous and lasting political voice to a population that long felt it was not fully recognized by the state. Shas entered the Knesset with four seats, peaked at 17 in 1999, and still won 11 in 2022.

Yet more than 40 years after its creation, an unavoidable question arises: Is Shas still the great movement of Sephardi empowerment it claims to embody, or has it become primarily a sectoral party devoted to defending the interests of the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox world?

A Sephardi revolution

To understand Shas, one must return to Israel’s early decades. Many Jews from North Africa and the Middle East felt they had paid a high price for integration. Their traditions were often treated with condescension by Ashkenazi elites, secular and religious alike, while the Lithuanian model held sway even within the leading institutions of Torah study.

Shas was an answer to that frustration.

Under the spiritual authority of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the party insisted that Sephardi Judaism had no reason to see itself as a lesser tradition: It had its own sages, its own body of religious law, and its own legitimacy.

For its voters, then, Shas did more than win seats in the Knesset. It restored dignity. In development towns and working-class neighborhoods, citizens long excluded from the centers of power suddenly saw representatives who spoke their social, religious and cultural language.

That historic achievement is difficult to dispute.

Far more than an ultra-Orthodox party

The most common mistake is to place Shas in the same category as United Torah Judaism, which primarily represents the Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox community.

Sociologically, however, the two parties are very different.

Shas does rest on a core constituency of Sephardi Haredim, but its electorate extends far beyond that milieu. It includes many traditional and observant Jews who are not ultra-Orthodox, who work, serve in the army and........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)