Shas Yosef received strategic help and guidance from Rabbi Elazar Shach, leader of Israel's non-Hasidic Haredi Ashkenazi Jews. Yosef founded the party in 1984 on the platform of a return to religion, and as a counter to an establishment dominated by Ashkenazi Jews of European extraction. Not all Shas voters are themselves ultra-Orthodox. Many of its voters are Modern Orthodox and traditional Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews, due to its alignment with the promotion of an "authentic Middle Eastern" Israeli culture, which fits with traditional Zionist beliefs of a revival of authentic, non-Europeanized Jewish culture. However, it still represents the Sephardi and
Sephardi Hebrew the Ashkenazi pronunciation was derived from that of Palestine in Geonic times (7th-11th centuries) and that the Sephardi pronunciation was derived from that of Babylonia. The theory was supported by the fact that in some respects, Ashkenazi Hebrew resembles the western dialect of Syriac, and Sephardi Hebrew resembles the eastern dialect: Eastern Syriac "Peshitta" as against Western Syriac "Peshito". Ashkenazi Hebrew, in its written form, also resembles Palestinian Hebrew in its tendency to "malē" spellings (see Mater lectionis). Others, including Abraham Zevi Idelsohn, believed that the distinction is more ancient and represents the distinction between the Judaean and Galilean dialects