for more change and mobility between sections or actual economic markets. An important distinction offered by Tsur in this context is that of 'Westernized' individuals, whose preferred means of communication are one or multiple European languages, as opposed to the Maskil, a type still within the native camp, but adamantly promoting modernization by means of native mediums of communication such as the shared language of high culture, Hebrew, as well as a local Judeo-Arabic dialect. After successfully testing his model on North African soil, Tsur has used it to probe pre-colonial Jewish societies that still functioned within an imperial setting, i.e. the Ottoman Empire. He has also utilized it in order to gain fresh insight into the strained relations that existed between Mercantile (especially Western) Sephardi satellite communities and local Arabized ones. Israel's Ethnic problem Not surprisingly, Tsur is equally keen to find out how contacts between European and non-European within the Jewish polity have been transformed during the Zionist era, as well as on the ground in Jewish Palestine. Accordingly, he finds complexity where more rigid post-colonial minded scholars would prefer to concentrate solely on rigid dichotomies. According to Tsur's findings, if in the pre-state Yishuv Zionist technocrats were already directing non-European arrivals to fulfill menial roles and peripheral niches, all the more so when already in 1949 Ashkenazi spokesmen sounded doomsday warnings of how the Western seeming success story of the New Hebrew state would be permanently damaged by the Asiatic hordes now nocking at Israel's doors. To be sure, previous (and mostly apologetic) interpretations of the curbing of the mass Aliyah from French North Africa, first and foremost Morocco, by means of a medical selective process and series of quotas, rested solely on economic considerations that had been articulated by representative bodies of the absorbing apparatus such as relevant departments of the Jewish agency. Tsur, however, has successfully examined things afresh and introduced into the equation naked cultural fears, and even panic publicly voiced by the Ashkenazi leadership of the Jewish state. He has originally tracked the subsequent history of Israeli ethnic strife as being a two-sided conflict; occasionally exacerbated discretely by the Ashkenazi elite (1949 and 1984) and in other times (1959 and 1971) openly ignited by the Mizrahi subaltern class. In so doing Tsur identifies two, partly contradictory world forces at play, nationalism and colonialism, constantly shaping and reshaping relations between European Jews and the