Shas: The Revenge of the Forgotten Faces the Test of Power

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 participate fully in Israeli society.

Shas thus has one foot in the Haredi world and another in traditional, working-class Israel. It represents not only a religious way of life, but also a collective memory and sense of belonging. This helps explain why much of its electorate relates to the state, the army and national identity in ways markedly different from the Ashkenazi Haredi community.

Nor was Shas founded as an ideological party of the territorial right. Under Ovadia Yosef, territorial concessions could be contemplated if they genuinely saved lives. The party’s place on the right emerged gradually, through the sociology of its electorate, its cultural conservatism and its enduring alliance with Likud.

A formidable communal machine

One of Shas’s greatest successes was recognizing that electoral representation alone was not enough. The movement built a vast network of schools and social organizations – foremost among them El Hama’ayan – that played a major role in reconstructing an autonomous Sephardi religious identity.

Its critics call this patronage; its defenders call it communal solidarity.

There is truth in both readings.

It would be simplistic to dismiss as illegitimate every budget Shas has secured for the institutions it represents. All political parties defend the constituencies that elect them. But it would be equally naive to ignore how the close relationship between political power, religious institutions and social assistance helps retain the loyalty of voters who are, in part, dependent on the very system Shas has built.

Protecting the poor – or helping them escape poverty?

Here lies one of the party’s most uncomfortable questions.

Shas was founded in the name of disadvantaged communities. But after four decades of near-continuous participation in Israeli governments, it is fair to examine its record on social mobility.

The party has consistently fought for child allowances and support for large families. Those causes can certainly be defended. But protecting the poor is not necessarily the same as giving them the means to escape poverty.

Should a movement of empowerment not also enable its children to gain full access to mathematics, science, English, higher education and the most productive sectors of the Israeli economy?

By defending a Haredi educational model in which core secular subjects sometimes receive too little attention, Shas risks keeping some of the people it represents in lasting economic dependence.

The paradox is troubling: A party born to fight marginalization may be helping preserve some of the conditions that perpetuate it.

Sephardi in identity, ultra-Orthodox in social model

This contradiction is all the more striking because traditional Sephardi Judaism was historically not identical to the Ashkenazi Haredi model of Eastern Europe.

In many North African and Middle Eastern communities, religious observance, professional life and participation in society naturally went hand in hand.

Yet Shas has gradually helped construct a Sephardi ultra-Orthodox world whose social model sometimes resembles the Lithuanian yeshiva world more than that historic tradition.

The paradox is stark: Shas restored Sephardi pride culturally and halachically, while sometimes adopting, sociologically, the very model from which it sought to break free.

Did Shas restore Sephardi identity, or did it gradually reshape that identity to fit the ultra-Orthodox mold?

Conscription: The contradiction turns explosive

Today, that tension is most acute over military service.

For decades, Israel tolerated the exemption of a growing share of ultra-Orthodox young men. After October 7, with reservists serving hundreds of days and the IDF saying it is short thousands of soldiers, that arrangement has become far harder to justify. Exempting yeshiva students now strikes directly at the principle of equal national obligation.

For Shas, the problem is even sharper than it is for United Torah Judaism.

Part of Shas’s traditional electorate is fully integrated into Israeli society. Their sons serve in the IDF; some fight in combat units, while some fathers endure lengthy periods of reserve duty. These voters may reasonably ask why their own sons must interrupt their studies, careers or family lives while other young men of the same age are exempted as a matter of principle.

This tension is no longer theoretical. In July 2025, with no law in place regulating the status of yeshiva students, Shas’s ministers resigned from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government while the party remained in the parliamentary coalition. In October, Shas relinquished its Knesset committee chairmanships, but stopped short of bringing down the government.

The party leadership thus made its priority unmistakably clear.

But does that priority still reflect the interests of its entire electorate?

Does Shas still represent the traditional Sephardi Israel that carried it to power, or primarily the ultra-Orthodox community whose exemptions it now defends?

Deri, political effectiveness and the price of power

Aryeh Deri is, of course, inseparable from this story. A seasoned tactician and formidable negotiator, he has spent decades turning a relatively small number of Knesset seats into considerable political influence.

But his legal record has left a lasting mark on the party’s image. Convicted of corruption in 1999, he served a prison sentence; a further conviction for tax offenses in 2022 preceded the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to strike down his ministerial appointment.

Shas is also an extremely top-down party, with no genuine primaries. Its electoral slate is largely determined by the political leadership and rabbinic authority. No woman has ever appeared on it, a policy Deri himself has defended on the basis of his view of ultra-Orthodox women’s role.

For the movement’s loyalists, this structure reflects deference to the authority of Torah sages. For its critics, it exposes a democratic deficit that is especially paradoxical in a party founded in the name of underrepresented communities.

When a revolution becomes the establishment

This may be Shas’s ultimate paradox.

The party still speaks in the name of the forgotten, but it has not stood outside the system for decades. It has governed, controlled ministries and wielded influence over enormous budgets.

It can therefore no longer plausibly present itself solely as the victim of the old elites. Israel, moreover, has changed: Mizrahi Jews are now present at every level of politics, the military, the economy and culture.

Shas’s great historic battle – restoring Sephardi dignity – has, to a large extent, been won.

Its challenge is now different: Will it remain the protector of a sector intent on preserving its institutions, budgets and exemptions, or can it once again become a movement of empowerment, capable of reconciling religious identity with economic achievement, civic participation and national responsibility?

After winning 11 seats in 2022, Shas now polls at around eight to ten mandates in several recent surveys. It is too early to speak of a lasting collapse, but this relative erosion suggests that the extraordinary loyalty of its electorate may no longer be entirely assured.

Shas was created to overturn a status quo.

Four decades later, it must confront a more uncomfortable question: Has it itself become one of that status quo’s principal guardians?