Jewish Diaspora

The Greek term diaspora, meaning "dispersion," has been used since ancient times as a means of describing the Jewish experience as well as the fact of Jewish settlement outside of the Jewish homeland to the present day. Originally, the term diaspora was used with respect to only three groups whose populations were dispersed in classical times: the Greeks, the Jews, and the Armenians. More recently, the term diaspora has been applied to a variety of other groups throughout the world who have endured dispersion from their original homelands. To the extent recent usage has changed the term's original connotation, its continued use to characterize the Jewish historical experience in its entirety can be misleading.

Classical scholars distinguish the forced exile of the Jews following the destruction of the First and Second Temples at Jerusalem (586 b.c.e. and 70 c.e., respectively) from the voluntary emigration out of the Jewish state that first occurred on a large scale under Persian rule after 538 b.c.e. and lasted through the escalating Roman occupation and administration of Judea after 6 c.e. Only voluntary emigration, by their analysis, truly falls under the heading of "diaspora." Forcible expulsion is more appropriately characterized by the Hebrew terms galut or golah, both referring to the state of living in exile. Part of the confusion between "diaspora" and "exile" arose after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e., when the two kinds of dispersion became inextricably intertwined and the terminology merged. The terms were not again seen to be separate and distinct until the creation of the modern State of Israel in 1948, when the creation of a central Jewish polity ended the enforced exile of Jews while many Jews elected to remain in diaspora—that is, living in areas outside the new Jewish state. After 1948, Israeli scholars began to apply the Hebrew term tefutsoth, which does not carry the connotation of forcible expatriation, to refer to the Jewish diaspora.

The Jewish diaspora is said by classical scholars to have begun during the First Temple period, with the establishment of a community of Jewish mercenaries within the military outpost of Elephantine (Southern Egypt) and with the removal of Jewish captives from the conquered Hebrew kingdom of Israel by the Assyrians in 722 B.C.E. However, the notion of diaspora as "exile" is theologically tied to the destruction of the First Temple and the sacking of Jerusalem by the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar in 586 b.c.e. As part of their conquest of the Hebrew kingdom of Judah, the Babylonians exiled the Jewish elite to Babylon, where they were said to have remained for three generations. Although the Assyrian captives had also been exiled by force, it was only during the Babylonian captivity that Jews developed the institutional structures that would later allow Judaism to survive without a homeland in the nineteen centuries following the destruction of the Second Temple and the complete suppression of a Jewish polity in Judea. In Babylon, exiled Jewish scholars completed the compilation of the written Torah, to which they added some prophetic writings and chronicles. The innovation of the synagogue for small group devotions changed the practice of public worship significantly by putting scholars at the forefront in place of the High Priest of the Temple at Jerusalem. It was during the Babylonian exile that scholarly debates over the meaning of scripture began to evolve into the study networks of rabbinic Judaism that would sustain Jewish life and traditions without access to the Temple, the central focus of all Jewish religious life where the holy Ark of the Covenant was housed.

The Babylonian exile ended in 538 b.c.e. when the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon and issued an edict that permitted the Jewish captives to return to their homeland. Although the exiles then had the freedom to return to Judah and re-establish the Temple under Persian rule, most chose to remain in Babylon where they had adapted to life in exile. This represented the beginning of a pronounced shift within Jewish culture with respect to the relationship between individual Jews and the Jewish state. The structures developed by the exiles in Babylon to maintain their commitment to Judaism while absent from the Jewish polity meant that it was now possible, for the first time, to sustain Jewish life without having to live in the Jewish homeland. Following the example of the former Babylonian captives, a growing number of Jews began to embrace the capacity created by the new and portable forms of Jewish ritual life to reside in places were there were better opportunities. In the years after the completion of the Second Temple in 515 b.c.e., a growing proportion of the Jewish population lived outside the Jewish polity, some through forcible exile, and some voluntarily in pursuit of economic ventures outside the Jewish state. By the first century b.c.e., the Greek geographer Strabo noted that the Jewish diaspora had penetrated nearly every part of the known world.

Hellenism and the Jewish Diaspora

Voluntary dispersion from the Jewish homeland in the kingdom of Judah, and later Judea, was sparked by the development of a plastic Hellenistic culture, of which Judea itself would become a part, which formed following the conquests of Alexander the Great in 333 b.c.e. As Hellenistic political rule expanded throughout the Mediterranean world, the colonies, institutions, and commerce it created attracted Jews in search of trade to venture out into far-flung areas of Greek settlement, where they came into closer contact with Hellenistic ideology. It was during this period that Jews began to disperse throughout the Mediterranean basin in substantial numbers. As the philosopher Philo Judaeus noted in the first century c.e., the area of Jewish settlement within the Hellenistic world spread from Libya to Ethiopia. Important and influential diaspora communities formed at Alexandria (Egypt), Cyrene (Libya), Antioch (Syria), Pergamon (Turkey/Asia Minor) and other large Hellenistic port cities. In these places, Jews were exposed to Hellenistic teachings in philosophy and science. Some important Jewish individuals, such as Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, flourished in this bicultural environment, but the impact of Hellenistic thought on rabbinic Judaism was slight overall. This was because of a revival of Jewish nationalism and violent resistance to Greek influence within Judea, under the leadership of Judah Maccabbee, as well as the emergence of Babylon, which remained outside the sphere of Hellenistic culture, as the main center for Jewish theological development and scholasticism.

The migration of Jews out of Judea continued under the Romans, but under different conditions and therefore with different motivations. The economic and social environment of the Hellenistic empire had drawn Jews out of Judea of their own volition without substantially disrupting Jewish theocratic traditions. Roman rule, however, aimed at conquest and subjugation of the Jewish state apparatus. This created a fundamental tension between Judea's inhabitants and Roman administrators that frequently erupted into violence. Jewish migration into the Roman Empire therefore, while still voluntary, was driven in large part by the desire to escape violence and oppression in Judea. Growing conflict led to two revolts by the people of Judea and the employment of ever more brutal tactics by the Romans. Roman military occupation of Judea in 63 c.e. and ongoing violence (including the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.e.) through the crushing of the Bar Kochba Revolt, made Judea less desirable as a place for Jews to live and encouraged further dispersion of Judea's Jews throughout the Roman world. Judea's role as the center for Jewish life declined rapidly after 138 c.e. By the seventh century c.e., the vast majority of Jews resided in communities outside of biblical Judah and Israel, and by 1600 only one percent of the Jewish people could be found in the traditional Jewish homelands of the Hebrew scriptures.

Interpretations of the Jewish Diaspora

Rome's imperial aims involved the destruction of Jewish political independence. Once that had been achieved and Judea no longer represented a threat to Rome's territorial advances, Jews were as readily absorbed into the empire as other conquered peoples. In 212 c.e., an edict extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants, including Jews. Judaism was officially recognized, and Jews were free to pursue an autonomous communal life without interference from the Roman state. Although they were banned from Jerusalem, they could move and settle freely throughout the rest of the empire. This situation began to change with the spread of Christianity, as the church fathers found it imperative that they distinguish the new faith from its predecessor. In 313, the emperor Constantine issued an edict granting freedom of worship to all religious sects. For the first time, the Christian religion was no longer suppressed and it quickly came to predominate within the empire. This had negative consequences for Jews, as the Christian Church began to call for the official separation of Jews from Christians.

Initially, the Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean had helped to advance the diffusion of Judaism into regions where it had previously been unknown. By the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century c.e, Jewish communities were well-established in sites throughout the Roman world, from Asia Minor to Spain. Rome itself had at least thirteen synagogues. A wider Jewish presence led to better knowledge of Judaism, and upon occasion to conversion of local populations. About 700 c.e., for example, Bulan, leader of the nomadic Khazar people of Central Asia, decided to convert his nation to Judaism, creating an autonomous Jewish state that lasted for some five hundred years. However, after 500, Judaism faced growing threats from the spread of Christianity and (after 632) Islam, both of which found the continuing evolution of Jewish thought threatening to their respective theological postures as successors to Judaism.

Jewish leaders of medieval Europe such as Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (otherwise Nachmanides) saw the Roman conquest of Israel as the beginning of a permanent Jewish diaspora within the Christian world. This understanding of the Jewish diaspora was grounded in personal experience with the Holy Roman Church and its dictates. By 1215, the Roman Catholic Church's Fourth Lateran Council advocated the wearing of special insignia by Jews living in Christian lands, to identify them for an uneducated Christian populace as people to be avoided and as a "badge of shame" to highlight the inferiority of their religious beliefs. Moreover, Jews living in diaspora in Europe faced successive waves of expulsion, forced conversion, and segregation into ghettos as Christians attempted different tactics to control and constrain the development of a Jewish communal presence in their midst. From the Jewish perspective, the sense of diaspora as exile was also acutely heightened (particularly during the Crusades) by the inability of Jews to return to the Holy Land to rebuild the Temple and gather in Jewish exiles—that is, to reestablish a Jewish state as an independent political and theological entity. Exile became the dominant understanding of the diaspora in subsequent generations of both Jews and Christians. Jewish and Christian thinkers put a different spin on the notion of "exile" however. For Jews, the exile, although painful, was part of God's plan for the Jews as a test of their faith and commitment to the Torah. Christians saw the diaspora as God's just punishment of the Jews for their role in the death of Christ. While Islamic rulers treated Jews less harshly than did their Christian counterparts. Muslims similarly distinguished themselves from Jews and Judaism and there were scattered instances of persecution, including forced conversions, in Muslim lands.

By the late eighteenth century many Jews had come to believe that their exile from the Jewish state was permanent. For some, accepting that the diaspora was inescapable meant developing the means for resolving persistent questions about the place of Jews in the various societies within which they resided. Influenced by the developing Enlightenment, Jewish intellectuals in Europe believed that the contemporary mission of the Jewish people was to adapt to their surroundings and find ways to participate in the nation state on equal terms with other citizens. The most important of these advocates was Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Following Mendelssohn's call for civil integration of the Jews, later generations of Reformers suggested a series of modifications to Jewish ritual practice that were intended to harmonize Judaism with modern life and make it possible for Jews to present their community as well disposed for social and political participation. The Reformers had great success and influence in Germany and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other places, the idea of Jewish integration and acculturation was not as readily embraced. The outbreak of violence after the death of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 pushed the Jews of Russia and Poland in the opposite direction, toward Jewish nationalism, and awakened interest in reestablishing a Jewish state at the site of the original Jewish homeland. After the anti-Semitic debacle of the Dreyfus Affair in France, a broad range of European and American Jewish intellectuals were forced to the conclusion that the kind of complete civil integration imagined by the Reformers would never be possible. Accordingly, the first Zionist Congress was held at Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, to organize the push for the Jewish return to Palestine. Zionism, in effect, called for an end to the demeaning conditions in which diaspora Jews were generally forced to live through the creation of a new, modern Jewish state in Palestine.

Diaspora in the Twenty-First Century

In the early 2000s, the diaspora is commonly understood to comprise all Jews living outside modern Israel, regardless of their nation of birth. The establishment of the state of Israel following the United Nations partition plan created the opportunity to end the Jewish diaspora. The new nation attempted an in-gathering of Jewish exiles from around the world, in part by establishing the Law of Return (1950), which permitted any Jew to immigrate to Israel, and the Citizenship Law (1952), which permitted Jews to claim Israeli citizenship upon touching Israeli soil. In the first year of its independence, Israel took in and absorbed 203,000 Jews from forty-two different countries, comprising not only the survivors of European Jewry (largely Ashkenazim), but also large numbers of "Oriental" Jews from Arab lands who had become the victims of escalating violence and persecution as international pressure mounted to sanction the creation of a Jewish state in the British mandate. Some Jewish refugees arrived via special convoys organized by the Jewish Agency to move large numbers of Jewish refugees living in exigent circumstances, including Jews from Yemen (Operation Magic Carpet, 1949), Iraq (Operation Ezra and Operation Nehemiah, 1950), and later from Ethiopia (Operations Solomon, 1974, and Moses, 1984–1985). Due to extensive immigration from Europe and Arab lands where anti-Semitism surged, the Jewish population of Israel increased from 657,000 in 1948 to 1,810,000 by 1958.

There remain, in the early twenty-first century, multiple interpretations of the diaspora and its significance to Jewish history and to the modern state of Israel. Many Jews, for a variety of complex reasons, continue to reside outside the Jewish state, not only in the affluent nations of Europe and North America, but in countries around the world.

See also Exile ; Ghetto ; Identity, Multiple: Jewish Multiple Identity ; Judaism .

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Holly Snyder