Jewish diaspora

The Jewish diaspora (or simply the Diaspora) is the English term used to describe the Galut גלות (Yiddish: 'Golus'), or 'exile', of the Jews from the region of the Kingdom of Judah and Roman Iudaea and later emigration from wider Eretz Israel.

The modern Hebrew term of Tefutzot תפוצות, "scattered", was introduced in the 1930s by the German-American Zionist academic Simon Rawidowicz, who to some degree argued for the acceptance of the Jewish presence outside of the Land of Israel as a modern reality and an inevitability.

The diaspora is commonly accepted to have begun with the 6th century BC conquest of the ancient Kingdom of Judah, destruction of the First Temple (c.586 BC), and expulsion of the population, which is recorded in the Bible. The second major event in the exile is popularly thought to be the destruction of the Second Temple and aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt during the Roman occupation of Judea in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, although experts dismiss this.

The complete destruction of Jerusalem, and the settlement of several Greek and Roman colonies in Judea indicated the express intention of the Roman government to prevent the political regeneration of the Jewish nation. Nevertheless, forty years later the Jews put forth efforts to recover their former freedom. With Israel exhausted, they strove to establish commonwealths on the ruins of Hellenism in Cyrene, Cyprus, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. These efforts, resolute but unwise, were suppressed by Trajan (115-117), and under Hadrian the same fate befell the attempt of the Jews of Israel to regain their independence (133-135). From this time on, in spite of unimportant movements under Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, and Severus, the Jews of Palestine, reduced in numbers, destitute, and crushed, lost their preponderance in the Jewish world. Jerusalem had become, under the name "Ælia Capitolina", a Roman colony and entirely pagan city. Jews were forbidden entrance on pain of death, except for the day of Tisha B'Av, see also Anti-Judaism in the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, 43 Jewish communities in Israel remained in the 6th century: 12 on the coast, in the Negev, and east of the Jordan, and 31 villages in Galilee and in the Jordan valley. Yavne on the coastal plain, associated with Yochanan ben Zakai, was an important center of Rabbinic Judaism.

Dispersion of the Jews in the Roman Empire

Following the 1st century Great Revolt and the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, the destruction of Judea exerted a decisive influence upon the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world, as the centre of worship shifted from the Temple to Rabbinic authority.

Some Jews were sold as slaves or transported as captives after the fall of Judea, others joined the existing diaspora, while still others remained in Judea and began work on the Jerusalem Talmud. For those Jews in the diaspora, they were generally accepted into the Roman Empire, but with the rise of Christianity, restrictions grew. Forced expulsions and persecution resulted in substantial shifts in the international centers of Jewish life to which far-flung communities often looked; although not always unified due to the Jewish people's dispersion itself.

While more Jews lived outside Judea than in, Roman punishing of all Jews empire-wide for the Judean revolt, by collecting from them the annual temple tax, tended to treat all Jews as a distinct ethno-national group, other communities of which, in Egypt, Libya and Crete revolted in sympathy with their Judean brethren from the 2nd century on. The Christian empire continued the punishment, by which time the church fathers had evolved a discourse that, not only were the Jews a distinct, reprehensible ethno-national group, they were a group largely exiled or dispossessed of temple, city and land, for their rejection of Christ, a state it was deemed in which they were to remain in perpetuo.

This notion evolved even though substantial numbers of Jews lived in the land, now under increasingly harsh imperial Roman Christian law, further alienating and marginalizing Jews, and favouring the settlement of largely gentile Christians, of culturally pagan Greco-Roman or Aramaic provenance. It was in this period that Judea became normatively known as Syria Palestina, a name reflecting both the large scale killing of the suppression of the 2nd Jewish revolt, and a Roman policy, pagan, then Christian, to further alienate Jews from the land, ensuring that no Jewish temple, Jerusalem or state ever rose again. During this time the Talmudic thesis of a Jewish people in exile evolved, even as imperial Christian degrees laid further burdens of taxation, discrimination and social exclusion on Jews in the land and without.

Over the centuries, rather than a few individual events, Jews were eroded into a minority in their historical patria, while the rabbis "Judaized" Judaism, by prescribing only the Hebrew Bible as authoritative, and Hellenistic-Jewish literature, culture and discourse declined sharply from the 2nd century, not only from imperial Roman suppressions, but also Christian appropriation of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, as its authorized version. Through internal and external pressures, the two communities, Greco-Roman and Jewish, diverged, the former becoming universally Christian, and, in time, self-defined as "Roman", when the emperor granted citizenship to all, and "Greek" became in patristic discourse synonymous with "pagan".

It would enter Arabic, Islamic discourse as "Rumi", the Quranic term for "Roman" or "belonging to the Roman Empire". In the meanwhile, the meme of a Jewish people in exile entered normative mediaeval Jewish, Christian and, in time, Islamic thought and discourse, when Muhammed would address the Jews of Makkah and Madinah as though they themselves had been expelled from the land, twice, by the servants of Allah, as a punishment for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets.

Experts dismiss the popular notion that the Jews were expelled or exiled from Palestine in the 1st century AD, in particular that this would have been a sudden event. The myth of exile from Palestine receives only minimal treatment in serious Jewish historical scholarship.

Post-Roman period Jewish populations

During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe and Sephardic Jews of Iberia, North Africa and the Middle East. These groups have parallel histories sharing many series of persecutions and forced expulsions.

By 1764 there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population was estimated at 1.2 million.

The "Negation of the Diaspora" by Zionism

According to Eliezer Schweid, the rejection of life in the Diaspora is a central assumption in all currents of Zionism. Underlying this attitude was the feeling that the Diaspora restricted the full growth of Jewish national life. For instance the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote: :And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ... :How burned, how blasted must our portion be, :If seed like this is withered in its soil. ... According to Schweid, Bialik meant that the “seed” was the potential of the Jewish people. Preserved in the Diaspora, this seed could only give rise to deformed results; however, once conditions changed the seed could still provide a plentiful harvest.

In this matter Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism. One was the liberal or utilitarian school of Herzl and Nordau. Especially after the Dreyfus Affair, they held that anti-Semitism would never disappear and saw Zionism as a rational solution for Jewish individuals.

The other was the organic nationalist school. It was prevalent among the Zionists in Palestine and saw the movement as a project to rescue the Jewish nation rather than as a project to rescue Jewish individuals. For them Zionism was the "Rebirth of the Nation".

Contrary to the Israel-centric Zionist view, acceptance of the Jewish communities outside of Israel was postulated by those, like Simon Rawidowicz (also a Zionist), who viewed the Jews as a culture evolved into a new 'worldly' entity that had no reason to seek a return, either physical, emotional or spiritual to its ancient Land, and could remain a one people even in dispersion.

It was argued that the dynamics of the diaspora which were affected by persecution, numerous subsequent exiles, as well as political and economic conditions created a new Jewish awareness of the World, and a new awareness of the Jews by the World.

A critical postcolonial account of the diaspora is given by a scholar who argues that "a journey to the moment of transubstantiation, wherever it occurred, would dim the claim for uniqueness [of the Jewish tragedy]--a claim that has been abused and exploited..."

The Diaspora in Contemporary Jewish life

As of 2010 the largest numbers of Jews live in Israel (5,703,700), United States (5,300,000), Russia (900,000), France (700,000), Canada (375,000), the United Kingdom (295,000), and Germany (120,000).. These numbers reflect the "core" Jewish population, defined as being "not inclusive of non-Jewish members of Jewish households, persons of Jewish ancestry who profess another monotheistic religion, other non-Jews of Jewish ancestry, and other non-Jews who may be interested in Jewish matters."

The Jewish Autonomous Oblast continues to be an Autonomous Oblast of Russia. The Chief Rabbi of Birobidzhan, Mordechai Scheiner, says there are 4,000 Jews in the capital city. Governor Nikolay Mikhaylovich Volkov has stated that he intends to, "support every valuable initiative maintained by our local Jewish organizations." The Birobidzhan Synagogue opened in 2004 on the 70th anniversary of the region's founding in 1934. An estimated 75,000 Jews live in the vast Siberia region.

Metropolitan areas with the largest Jewish populations are listed below, though one source at jewishtemples.org states that "It is difficult to come up with exact population figures on a country by country basis, let alone city by city around the world. Figures for Russia and other CIS countries are but educated guesses." The source cited here, the 2010 World Jewish Population Survey, also notes that "Unlike our estimates of Jewish populations in individual countries, the data reported here on urban Jewish populations do not fully adjust for possible double counting due to multiple residences. The differences in the United States may be quite significant, in the range of tens of thousands, involving both major and minor metropolitan areas."

# Gush Dan (Tel Aviv and surroundings) - Israel - 3,300,000. # New York - U.S. - 2,007,850. # Jerusalem - 705,000. # Los Angeles - U.S. - 700,000. # Haifa - Israel - 680,000. # Miami - U.S. - 500,000. # Be'er Sheva - Israel - 370,000. # San Francisco - U.S. - 345,000. # Paris - France - 285,000. # Chicago - U.S. - 270,500. # Philadelphia - U.S. - 265,000. # Boston - U.S. - 230,000. # Washington, DC - U.S. - 215,000 # London - United Kingdom - 200,000. # Moscow - Russia - 195,000. # Toronto - Canada - 190,000. # Buenos Aires - Argentina - 180,000. # Atlanta - U.S. - 125,000. # Baltimore - U.S. - 91,500. # San Diego - U.S. - 90,000. # Denver - U.S. - 83,900. # Phoenix - U.S. - 82,900. # Cleveland - U.S. - 81,500. # Montreal - Canada - 80,000.

See also

The Great Revolt

Bar Kokhba revolt

Babylonian captivity

Timeline of Jewish history

History of ancient Israel and Judah

Jewish history

Jewish population

Jews by country

Historical Jewish population comparisons

Zionism

Return to Zion

History of Israel

Yerida

Jewish refugees

Jews and Judaism in Europe

Antisemitism and History of antisemitism

Christianity and antisemitism

Timeline of Jewish Polish history

Islam and antisemitism

History of the Jews under Muslim rule

Jewish exodus from Arab lands

Arabs and antisemitism

Days of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust

Jewish American Heritage Month

White House Hanukkah Party

Palestinian diaspora

References

Footnotes

Immigration to Israel from North America hits 22-Year High ()

External links

Jewish Diaspora at the JewishEncyclopedia.com

Livius.org: The Jewish diaspora in Rome

How ALL ISRAEL will be saved, about Paul's apostleship to the diaspora (including the Gentiles)

The Diaspora and Israel - Rich Cohen

Category:Jewish history Category:Expulsions of Jews Category:Jewish diaspora