Jewish diaspora

• 1. Introduction

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  The Jewish diaspora carries three names in Hebrew, each telling a different story. Gōlā, təfūṣā, gālūṯ: exile, dispersion, scattering. The word a speaker chooses reveals how they feel about the condition itself. These are not synonyms. They are arguments about Jewish existence that have been running for more than two and a half thousand years.

  The story begins in 722 BCE, when the Assyrians under Sargon II conquered the Kingdom of Israel and deported its people to Mesopotamia. It continues through the Babylonian conquest of Judah in 586 BCE, through Roman sieges and provincial reorganizations, through medieval expulsions and Ottoman tolerances, through genetic studies that trace maternal and paternal lineages across continents. By the Second Temple period alone, Jonathan Adelman estimated that around 60 percent of Jews already lived outside the homeland.

  How did a people become so thoroughly distributed across the ancient world? What drove them out, and what pulled them in? And what did it mean, to those who left and to those who stayed, to live so far from the place their religion told them was the center of everything?

• 2. Words for Exile

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  The English word diaspora entered usage as late as 1876. It had no traditional equivalent in Hebrew. That gap matters.

  Steven Bowman traces the Greek concept back to the practice of a city exporting its surplus population, while the emigrants maintained cultural ties with their place of origin. In biblical terms, it could mean becoming a guiding light among gentile nations, or enduring the pain of separation from home. The two senses ran in opposite directions.

  Galut tells a harsher story. It implies living as a denigrated minority, stripped of the rights that diaspora, at its more optimistic reading, assumed. Where diaspora can carry a positive nuance, galut is more teleological, conveying what Daniel Boyarin calls an existential situation of uprootedness. Bowman frames galut as a religious-nationalist term, implying exile from the homeland as a consequence of collective sins, an exile awaiting divine redemption.

  The Greek term διασπορά itself first appears in the translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, where it occurs fourteen times. In those passages it never translated any term drawn from the Hebrew root glt, which lies behind galah and golah. Stéphane Dufoix, surveying the textual evidence, concludes that galuth and diaspora are drawn from two completely different lexicons. Galuth refers to precise and datable episodes of foreign occupation. Diaspora, in the Septuagint, describes a chastisement yet to come, conditional on the people's failure to observe divine law.

  In the 1930s, the Jewish-American Zionist academic Simon Rawidowicz introduced the modern Hebrew concept of Tefutzot, meaning scattered, arguing to some degree for acceptance of Jewish presence outside the Land of Israel as a modern reality and an inevitability. The tension between his pragmatism and the galut tradition would shape Zionist debates for generations.

• 3. Before the Romans

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  In 722 BCE, Sargon II's forces deported large numbers of Israelites to Mesopotamia, and those taken from the northern Kingdom of Israel dispersed as what tradition calls the Ten Lost Tribes. Those taken from the Kingdom of Judah carried a different fate: after the Babylonian conquest under Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BCE, they were eventually repatriated following the Persian conquest of Babylonia under Cyrus the Great.

  The biblical book of Ezra records two decrees attributed to Cyrus permitting exiled Jews to return and ordering the Temple rebuilt. One is in Hebrew, the other in Aramaic. Scholars have questioned their authenticity. The Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient clay tablet carrying a declaration in Cyrus's name about restoring temples and repatriating exiled peoples, has often been cited as corroboration, but other scholars note it refers specifically to Babylon and Mesopotamia, with no mention of Judah or Jerusalem. Lester L. Grabbe concluded that the alleged decree regarding Judah cannot be considered authentic, though a general policy of allowing deportees to return did exist. Archaeology suggests the return was a trickle unfolding over decades, not a single event.

  The first Jewish diaspora in Egypt arose in the last century of pharaonic rule. According to Josephus, when Ptolemy I took Judea, he led 120,000 Jewish captives to Egypt. Many other Jews emigrated voluntarily, attracted by Ptolemy's liberal policies and the fertility of Egypt's soil. Ptolemy settled Jews there as mercenaries; his successor Philadelphus later emancipated the captives and settled them in cleruchs, specialized military colonies.

  Jews began settling in Cyrenaica, modern-day eastern Libya, around the third century BCE, also under Ptolemy I, who sent them to secure the region. By the early first century BCE, the geographer Strabo identified Jews as one of the four main groups in the city of Cyrene. When Pompey invaded Jerusalem in 63 BCE, the Jewish people lost their political sovereignty and became subject to Roman tribute, and diaspora populations expanded further in the campaign's wake.

• 4. The Roman Catastrophe

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  Roman rule in Judea began with Pompey's capture of Jerusalem in 63 BCE, and thousands of Jewish prisoners of war were brought to Rome and sold into slavery. After being freed, many settled permanently on the right bank of the Tiber as traders. By the reign of Caesar Augustus, over 7,000 Jews lived in Rome, though some ancient sources place the figure at 8,000. Many sources say Jews constituted a full tenth of the ancient city's population.

  The First Jewish-Roman War began in 66 CE as an uprising for independence and was crushed in 73 CE. The siege destroyed the Temple, the center of national and religious life for Jews throughout the world. According to Josephus, about 97,000 Jewish captives from Judea were sold into slavery during the revolt. Josephus also wrote that 30,000 Jews were deported from Judea to Carthage by the Romans.

  Sixty years later, in 130 CE, the emperor Hadrian visited the ruins and decided to rebuild the city as Aelia Capitolina, a Roman colonia with foreign cults. Whether this was intended as a deliberate insult to Jewish identity or as an assertion of Roman imperial administration remains debated. Menachem Mor argues the pagan reframing of Jerusalem may have been designed to challenge the growing influence of Christianity, for which Jerusalem was also a crucial symbol. Whatever the intent, Jewish opposition was fierce. The Bar Kokhba revolt of 132-136 CE, led by Simon bar Kokhba and assisted, according to Dio Cassius, by some other peoples perhaps including Arabs recently subjected by Trajan, endured for four years before being crushed. Jews were forbidden entrance to Jerusalem on pain of death, except for the annual observance of Tisha B'Av.

  David Aberbach has argued that much of the European Jewish diaspora originated with the wars that occurred between 66 and 135 CE. Martin Goodman states that only after the destruction of Jerusalem are Jews found in northern Europe and along the western Mediterranean coast. Yet Erich S. Gruen contends that this framing misses the point: before any of these catastrophes, between three and five million Jews already dwelled outside Palestine across the roughly four centuries stretching from Alexander to Titus.

• 5. Babylonia and the Shift East

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  During the Crisis of the Third Century, civil wars in the Roman Empire caused severe economic disruption. Taxes imposed to finance these wars fell heavily on the Jewish population of Palestine. Many Jews emigrated to Babylon under the more tolerant Sassanid Empire, lured by economic prosperity and the freedom to lead a full Jewish life.

  Between the third and seventh centuries, estimates indicate the Babylonian Jewish community numbered approximately one million, which may have been the largest single Jewish diaspora population of the time, possibly outnumbering those in the Land of Israel. Both Palestine and Babylon became great centers of Jewish scholarship, but tensions between the two communities grew acute. Many Palestinian sages refused to consider Babylonian scholars their equals and would not ordain Babylonian students, fearing they would return to Babylon as rabbis. By the end of the third century, the Jewish academies of Palestine were reliant on donations from Babylon.

  After the Bar Kokhba revolt, the center of religious authority had already shifted from Yavne, as rabbis regrouped in Usha in the western Galilee, where the Mishnah was composed. The destruction of the Second Temple came to represent, for the generations that followed, a fundamental insight about a people who had become dispossessed and persecuted for much of their history. Israel Yuval contends the Babylonian captivity created a promise of return in Jewish consciousness that enhanced the perception of exile after 70 CE, even when dispersion arose from non-exilic factors such as trade, debt, or military employment.

  Hasia R. Diner writes that the destruction of the Second Temple, followed by the dissolution of Jewish sovereignty over the territory renamed Syria Palaestina in 132 CE, launched what she calls the second dispersion of the diaspora, the first being the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. She describes this as the beginning of the world's longest diaspora.

• 6. Ashkenazim and Sephardim

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  By the Middle Ages, increasing migration and resettlement had divided diaspora Jews into distinct regional groups. Two primary groupings emerged: Ashkenazi Jews, who coalesced in the Holy Roman Empire and Eastern Europe, and Sephardic Jews, who coalesced in the Iberian Peninsula and the Arab world.

  Ashkenazi Jews are generally understood to have originated with communities that immigrated to what is now Germany and northeastern France during the Middle Ages. Evidence suggests groups of Jews immigrated to Germania during the Roman era, probably merchants who followed the legions. They later migrated from Germany into Eastern Europe as a result of persecution. A 2006 study by Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa demonstrated that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews, both men and women, carry Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Nicholas Wade's 2010 autosomal study, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews share roughly 30 percent European ancestry, with the remainder being Middle Eastern.

  Some 300,000 Jews resided in Spain before the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century. When the Reyes Católicos reconquered Spain from the Arabs, they ordered Jews to convert to Catholicism, leave, or face execution without trial. Between 40,000 and 100,000 who chose not to convert were expelled in 1492 under the Alhambra decree. Sephardic Jews subsequently migrated to North Africa, Christian Europe including the Netherlands, Britain, France, and Poland, and throughout the Ottoman Empire. In the Ottoman Empire, Sephardim mostly settled in major cities including Istanbul, Selânik, and Bursa. Selânik, today known as Thessaloniki, had a large and flourishing Sephardic community.

  The two branches share parallel histories of persecution and expulsion: the expulsion from England in 1290, from Spain in 1492, and from Arab countries after 1948. Despite distinct ethno-cultural practices, their shared religion, common ancestry, and continuous communication sustained a unified sense of Jewish peoplehood between Sephardim and Ashkenazim from the late Roman period onward. By 1764, about 750,000 Jews lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, with the worldwide Jewish population estimated at 1.2 million.

• 7. Communities at the Margins

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  Beyond the two dominant groupings, the Jewish diaspora produced communities whose isolation yielded practices unlike anything found in Europe or the Middle East.

  The Cochin Jews, also called Malabar Jews, are the oldest group of Jews in India, with claimed roots to the time of King Solomon. They settled in the Kingdom of Cochin in South India, now part of Kerala. As early as the 12th century, the Jewish traveler Benjamin of Tudela wrote of the Black Jews of the Malabar Coast, describing several thousand Israelites in Kollam, all of them black in complexion, whom he called good and benevolent and versed in the law of Moses and the prophets. These communities developed Judeo-Malayalam, a dialect of the Malayalam language, and built synagogues in Kerala beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries.

  The Yemenite Jews, known as Temanim, developed their practices in geographic and social isolation from the rest of the Jewish world across many centuries, resulting in a liturgy significantly distinct from other Oriental Jewish groups. They themselves comprise three distinctly different groups, though the distinction is one of religious law and liturgy rather than ethnicity. The community was significantly reinforced during the reign of Dhu Nuwas in the 6th century CE and during the Muslim conquests in the 7th century CE, which drove Arab Jewish tribes out of central Arabia.

  A genetic study of the population of the Iberian Peninsula released in December 2008 found evidence of high levels of religious conversion, whether voluntary or enforced, driven by historical episodes of religious intolerance. Researchers estimated that up to 19.8 percent of the modern population of Iberia and at least 10 percent of the modern population of Ibero-America has Sephardic Jewish ancestry within the last few centuries. Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity, known as Anusim, often continued practicing Judaism in secret. Among the best known were the Jews of Spain and Portugal, though they existed throughout Europe.

• 8. Zionism and the Debate About Exile

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  Eliezer Schweid argued that 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. The poet Hayim Nahman Bialik expressed this in verse, writing of his unhappy people and asking how burned and blasted their portion must be if seed like this is withered in its soil. Schweid interpreted the seed as the potential of the Jewish people, preserved but deformed in diaspora conditions.

  Zionist thinkers were not unified on what to do about this. Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau represented a liberal or utilitarian school. Especially after the Dreyfus Affair, they held that antisemitism would never disappear and that Zionism offered a rational solution. Ahad Ha-am took a contrary position, arguing that a Jewish state's function would be to sustain Jewish nationhood in the diaspora rather than end it. In Zionist debates, a distinction was made between galut and golus. The latter denoted social and political exile, while galut was a psycho-spiritual framework not wholly dependent on physical conditions, since one could, in theory, remain in galut even while living in Eretz Israel.

  In 1983, the Central Conference of American Rabbis codified a decree on patrilineal descent, holding that matrilineal descent is not necessary for a person to be considered Jewish. This stands in marked contrast to Orthodox Judaism, whose adherents represent around 30 percent of the Jews in Israel. Orthodox Judaism considers the Jewish people a closed ethnoreligious community with strict conversion procedures. The gap between these positions reflects the same ancient tension between diaspora as an open, evolving condition and galut as a bounded, historically specific, and theologically charged predicament. The modern Samaritans, who numbered 745 people at the time of the source's writing and live in two communities in Israel and the West Bank, offer one endpoint of that long divergence: a group that traces itself to the ancient Israelites but does not regard itself as Jewish at all.