Rabbi Aryeh Deri, the ultra-Orthodox leader of Israel's third largest political party, was yesterday convicted of bribe-taking, fraud and breach of trust. He was a key pro-peace moderate in both the Yitzhak Rabin's cabinet and the current hardline Netanyahu government.
The devastating culmination of a case that began nine years ago, yesterday's conviction signals the end of the rabbi-politician's remarkable career in public office. But it also marks a moment of truth for many members of Israel's vast Sephardi community - Jews of Middle Eastern and North African origin whom Rabbi Deri's Shas party represents.
They must choose now between the continued championing of their criminal hero or a reluctant acceptance of the rule of law.
Israeli police had been braced for possible riots or attempts to march on the Supreme Court in the wake of the verdict. But although Shas supporters decried the verdict as racist there was no violence and just one report of tyres burned in a pro-Shas neighbourhood.
The consensus among the increasingly Orthodox hard core Shas supporters was that Rabbi Deri, who was again proclaimed innocent yesterday by the most respected sage in the Sephardi world, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, had been judged, wrongly, by lesser mortals.
"The judges are mere men," explained Mr Benny Elbaz, a prominent Shas activist. "Rabbi Yosef is a little higher than they are."
Rabbi Deri, while continuing to proclaim his innocence and vowing to exercise his right of appeal, helped lead the pleas for public calm and restraint. However, two of the three District Court judges who heard the case have received death threats, and security for them is now being redoubled.
The 917-page verdict, broadcast on national radio as the (ironically Sephardi and Orthodox) Judge Ya'akov Tzemach delivered it to a packed courtroom, found that Rabbi Deri had pocketed $155,000 in bribes, used to purchase homes and finance trips abroad, and that he had illegally funnelled larger sums of government cash to Shas institutions.
The court also found that Rabbi Deri and his colleagues had fought a virtual war to prevent conviction - resorting to illegal obstruction of the investigation and attempts at witness intimidation.
Because of the gravity of the upheld charges it is hard to envisage a formal political future for the man who was appointed Minister of the Interior in 1988, at the age of 29, and earmarked as a possible first ultra-Orthodox prime minister of Israel.
Hearings on sentencing are scheduled for next week, with legal precedent suggesting that the Moroccan-born politician will be jailed and barred from public office for years after his release. His bribery conviction alone carries up to a seven-year term.
His party said yesterday that Rabbi Deri would still lead the Shas party into May's elections. Shas could benefit hugely at the polls if it persuades potential voters that Rabbi Deri has been unfairly targeted by the legal establishment. Rabbi Deri himself began the attempt last night at an emotional press conference, detailing the years of arduous investigation he had suffered, claiming that he had been unfairly targeted by prosecutors. He described the judgment as "a test set for me by the Almighty," and asserted that the Supreme Court would overturn the verdict. The elderly Rabbi Yosef, sitting alongside Rabbi Deri, interrupted angrily that, "According to (Jewish) law, he is innocent."
But the sheer gravity of the verdict may prompt erstwhile supporters to dissociate themselves from Shas - a party that holds 10 seats in the outgoing 120-member Knesset, having risen meteorically since Rabbi Deri helped found it to revitalise the Sephardi community, and spread Orthodoxy there, just 15 years ago. If voters do abandon Shas, they could head for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud, or for the new Centrist Party, led by another Sephardi politician, Kurdistan-born Mr Yitzhak Mordechai.
Mr Netanyahu, for whom Rabbi Deri has been a close ally, said that his heart went out to the Deri family, "on what is probably their darkest day." But the rule of law was paramount, the Prime Minister stressed. "Without it, we have no life in this country."