There is a widespread belief that the Jewish diaspora began during the Roman rule, when they destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 CE and defeated Bar Kokhba and his men in 135 CE. This is incorrect. The Jewish diaspora began in 733 BCE with the exile of the ten tribes of the Kingdom of Israel to the Assyrians and continued with the exile to Babylon of part of the population of the Kingdom of Judah in 597 BCE. In 539 BCE, Cyrus the Great, king of Persia, conquered Babylon and issued a decree allowing the return of the exiles from Judah to the land of Israel, but many chose to remain in Babylon.

The Persian Empire was replaced by the Greek Empire under Alexander the Great, and upon his death in 323, it was divided in two, led by two generals: Ptolemy and Seleucus. The former governed the southern part, which included Egypt and the Land of Israel, and during his reign, many Jews went to Egypt as mercenaries, while others sought their fortune. By the second century BCE, according to Flavius ​​Josephus, nearly a million Jews lived in Egypt, and their presence extended as far as Cyrenaica, in present-day Libya. Soon, the Land of Israel fell into the hands of the Seleucids, who also ruled Syria, causing a migration of Jews to that territory. With the Maccabean Revolt, the Jews achieved a degree of autonomy, but in 63 BCE, the Romans invaded Jerusalem, and the Jewish people lost their independence and sovereignty. The Roman response to the Jewish rebellion included many being taken as slaves to Rome, where a significant Jewish community already existed.

As early as the middle of the second century BCE, the Jewish author of the Third Sibylline Oracle, a collection of prophecies, speaking of the Jews said, «Every land and every sea is full of you.» Strabo, a Greek geographer, Philo, Seneca, Luke, Cicero, and Flavius ​​Josephus all mention the existence of Jewish populations in the Mediterranean basin, in addition to communities in Mesopotamia. King Agrippa I, in a letter to Caligula, listed the provinces where the Jewish diaspora was located, and these included both Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries in the East. Only Italy and Cyrene in Libya were missing.

Daniel J. Elazar tells us: “The way in which Jews, as a community in the Diaspora, created their own way of life, with a calendar with each day clearly specified, which established a distinct rhythm of Jewish life and separated them from their neighbors, deserves further study. In parallel, it is possible to study how Jews were excluded from Christian and Muslim societies, through a combination of anti-Jewish attitudes and measures, on the one hand, and the mutually acceptable principle that Jews were a nation in exile and therefore deserving of corporate autonomy, on the other.”

The displacement of the great centers of Jewish life, from the Land of Israel to Babylon, then to Spain and North Africa, then to Europe, especially Poland and neighboring countries, and then to the United States and other countries in the Americas, until reaching the present-day State of Israel, gives us the image of a people on the move. These constant migrations were, on the one hand, disruptive, but on the other, they offered Jews the opportunity to renew their lives and adapt to new conditions. The Diaspora is a process of constant renewal for Judaism.

By Marcos Gojman.

Bibliography: Daniel J. Elazar, “The Jewish People as the Classic Diaspora: A Political Analysis,” and other sources.