Jewish diaspora

The Jewish diaspora, alternatively the dispersion or the exile, consists of Jews who reside outside of the Land of Israel. Historically, it refers to the expansive scattering of the Israelites out of their homeland in the Southern Levant and their subsequent settlement in other parts of the world, which gave rise to the various Jewish communities.
In the Hebrew Bible, the term denotes the fate of the Twelve Tribes of Israel over the course of two major exilic events in ancient Israel and Judah: the Assyrian captivity, which occurred after the Kingdom of Israel was conquered by the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 8th century BCE; and the Babylonian captivity, which occurred after the Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Neo-Babylonian Empire in the 6th century BCE. While those who were taken from Israel dispersed as the Ten Lost Tribes, those who were taken from Judah—consisting of the Tribe of Judah and the Tribe of Benjamin—became known by the identity "Jew" and were repatriated following the Persian conquest of Babylonia.
A Jewish diaspora population existed for many centuries before the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In the preceding Second Temple period, it existed as a consequence of various factors, including the creation of political and war refugees, enslavement, deportation, overpopulation, indebtedness, military employment, and opportunities in business, commerce, and agriculture. Prior to the mid-1st century CE, in addition to Judea, Syria, and Babylonia, large Jewish communities existed in the Roman provinces of Egypt, Crete and Cyrenaica, and in Rome itself. In 6 CE, most of the Southern Levant was organized as the Roman province of Judaea, where a large uprising led to the First Jewish–Roman War, which destroyed the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem. The Jewish defeat to the Roman army and the accompanying elimination of the symbolic centre of Jewish identity marked the end of Second Temple Judaism, motivating many Jews to formulate a new self-definition and adjust their existence to the prospect of an indefinite period of displacement. Nevertheless, intermittent warfare between Jewish nationalists and the Roman Empire continued for several decades. In 129/130 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of Aelia Capitolina over the ruins of Jerusalem, sparking the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE. Led by Simon bar Kokhba, this uprising endured for four years, but was ultimately unsuccessful and became the last of the Jewish–Roman wars; Jews were massacred or displaced across the province, banned from Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and forbidden to practice Judaism, leading to a significant rise in the Jewish diaspora.
By the Middle Ages, owing to increasing migration and resettlement, diaspora Jews divided into distinct regional groups that are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi Jews, who coalesced in the Holy Roman Empire and Eastern Europe; and the Sephardic Jews, who coalesced in the Iberian Peninsula and the Arab world. These groups have parallel histories, sharing many cultural similarities and experiences of persecution and expulsions and exoduses, such as the expulsion from England in 1290, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the expulsion from the Muslim world after 1948. Although the two branches comprise many unique ethno-cultural practices and have links to their local host populations, their common religious practices and shared ancestry, as well as their continuous communication and population transfers, have been responsible for cementing a unified sense of peoplehood between them since the late Roman period.

Origins and uses of the terms

Diaspora has been a common phenomenon for many peoples since antiquity, but what is particular about the Jewish instance is the pronounced negative, religious, indeed metaphysical connotations traditionally attached to dispersion and exile, two conditions which were conflated. The English term diaspora, which entered usage as late as 1876, and the Hebrew word galut though covering a similar semantic range, bear some distinct differences in connotation. The former has no traditional equivalent in Hebrew usage.
Steven Bowman argues that diaspora in antiquity connoted emigration from an ancestral mother city, with the emigrant community maintaining its cultural ties with the place of origin. Just as the Greek city exported its surplus population, so did Jerusalem, while remaining the cultural and religious centre or metropolis for the outlying communities. It could have two senses in Biblical terms, the idea of becoming a 'guiding light unto the nations' by dwelling in the midst of gentiles, or of enduring the pain of exile from one's homeland. The conditions of diaspora in the former case were premised on the free exercise of citizenship or resident alien status. Galut implies by comparison living as a denigrated minority, stripped of such rights, in the host society. Sometimes diaspora and galut are defined as 'voluntary' as opposed to 'involuntary' exile. Diaspora, it has been argued, has a political edge, referring to geopolitical dispersion, which may be involuntary, but which can assume, under different conditions, a positive nuance. Galut is more teleological, and connotes a sense of uprootedness. Daniel Boyarin defines diaspora as a state where people have a dual cultural allegiance, productive of a double consciousness, and in this sense a cultural condition not premised on any particular history, as opposed to galut, which is more descriptive of an existential situation, that properly of exile, conveying a particular psychological outlook.
The Greek word διασπορά first appears as a neologism in the translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, where it occurs 14 times, starting with a passage reading: ἔση διασπορὰ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς, translating 'ləza'ăwāh', whose root suggests 'trouble, terror'. In these contexts it never translated any term in the original Tanakh drawn from the Hebrew root glt, which lies behind galah, and golah, nor even galuth. ''Golah appears 42 times, and galuth in 15 passages, and first occurs in the 2 Kings 17:23's reference to the deportation of the Judean elite to Babylonia. Stéphane Dufoix, in surveying the textual evidence, draws the following conclusion:

galuth and diaspora are drawn from two completely different lexicons. The first refers to episodes, precise and datable, in the history of the people of Israel, when the latter was subjected to a foreign occupation, such as that of Babylon, in which most of the occurrences are found. The second, perhaps with a single exception that remains debatable, is never used to speak of the past and does not concern Babylon; the instrument of dispersion is never the historical sovereign of another country. Diaspora is the word for chastisement, but the dispersion in question has not occurred yet: it is potential, conditional on the Jews not respecting the law of God... It follows that diaspora belongs, not to the domain of history, but of theology.'

In Talmudic and post-Talmudic Rabbinic literature, this phenomenon was referred to as galut, a term with strongly negative connotations, often contrasted with geula. Eugene Borowitz describes Galut as "fundamentally a theological category The modern Hebrew concept of Tefutzot תפוצות, "scattered", was introduced in the 1930s by the Jewish-American Zionist academic Simon Rawidowicz, who to some degree argued for the acceptance of the Jewish presence outside the Land of Israel as a modern reality and an inevitability. The Greek term for diaspora also appears three times in the New Testament, where it refers to the scattering of Israel, i.e., the Ten Northern Tribes of Israel as opposed to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, although James refers to the scattering of all twelve tribes.
In modern times, the contrasting meanings of diaspora/galut have given rise to controversy among Jews. Bowman states this in the following terms,
follows the Greek usage and is considered a positive phenomenon that continues the prophetic call of Israel to be a 'light unto the nations' and establish homes and families among the gentiles. The prophet Jeremiah issues this call to the preexilic emigrants in Egypt... Galut is a religious–nationalist term, which implies exile from the homeland as a result of collective sins, an exile that will be redeemed at YHWH's pleasure. Jewish messianism is closely connected with the concept of galut.'

In Zionist debates a distinction was made between galut and golus/gola. The latter denoted social and political exile, whereas the former, while consequential on the latter, was a psycho-spiritual framework that was not wholly dependent on the conditions of life in diasporic exile, since one could technically remain in galut'' even in Eretz Israel. Whereas Theodor Herzl and his follows thought that the establishment of a Jewish state would put an end to the diasporic exile, Ahad Ha-am thought to the contrary that such a state's function would be to 'sustain Jewish nationhood' in the diaspora.

Pre-Roman diaspora

In 722 BCE, the Assyrians, under Sargon II, successor to Shalmaneser V, conquered the Kingdom of Israel, and many Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia. The Jewish proper diaspora began with the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE.
After the overthrow of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon and the deportation of a considerable portion of its inhabitants to Mesopotamia, the Jews had two principal cultural centers: Babylonia and the land of Israel.
Deportees returned to the Samaria after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was in turn conquered by Cyrus the Great. The biblical book of Ezra includes two texts said to be decrees allowing the deported Jews to return to their homeland after decades and ordering the Temple rebuilt. The differences in content and tone of the two decrees, one in Hebrew and one in Aramaic, have caused some scholars to question their authenticity. The Cyrus Cylinder, an ancient tablet on which is written a declaration in the name of Cyrus referring to restoration of temples and repatriation of exiled peoples, has often been taken as corroboration of the authenticity of the biblical decrees attributed to Cyrus, but other scholars point out that the cylinder's text is specific to Babylon and Mesopotamia and makes no mention of Judah or Jerusalem. Lester L. Grabbe asserted that the "alleged decree of Cyrus" regarding Judah, "cannot be considered authentic", but that there was a "general policy of allowing deportees to return and to re-establish cult sites". He also stated that archaeology suggests that the return was a "trickle" taking place over decades, rather than a single event. There is no sudden expansion of the population base of 30,000 and no credible indication of any special interest in Yehud.
Although most of the Jewish people during this period, especially the wealthy families, were to be found in Babylonia, the existence they led there, under the successive rulers of the Achaemenids, the Seleucids, the Parthians, and the Sassanians, was obscure and devoid of political influence. The poorest but most fervent of the exiles returned to Judah / the Land of Israel during the reign of the Achaemenids. There, with the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem as their center, they organized themselves into a community, animated by a remarkable religious ardor and a tenacious attachment to the Torah as the focus of their identity. As this little nucleus increased in numbers with the accession of recruits from various quarters, it awoke to a consciousness of itself, and strove once again for national independence and political enfranchisement and sovereignty.
The first Jewish diaspora in Egypt arose in the last century of pharaonic rule, apparently with the settlement there, either under Ashurbanipal or during the reign of Psammeticus of a colony of Jewish mercenaries, a military class that successively served the Persian, the Ptolemaic and Roman governments down to the early decades of the second century CE, when the revolt against Trajan destroyed them. Their presence was buttressed by numerous Jewish administrators who joined them in Egypt's military and urban centres. According to Josephus, when Ptolemy I took Judea, he led 120,000 Jewish captives to Egypt, and many other Jews, attracted by Ptolemy's liberal and tolerant policies and Egypt's fertile soil, emigrated from Judea to Egypt of their own free will. Ptolemy settled the Jews in Egypt to employ them as mercenaries. Philadelphus subsequently emancipated the Jews taken to Egypt as captives and settled them in cleruchs, or specialized colonies, as Jewish military units. Jews began settling in Cyrenaica around the third century BCE, during the rule of Ptolemy I of Egypt, who sent them to secure the region for his kingdom. By the early first century BCE, the geographer Strabo identified Jews as one of the four main groups residing in the city of Cyrene.
While communities in Alexandria and Rome dated back to before the Maccabean Revolt, the population in the Jewish diaspora expanded after the Pompey's campaign in 62 BCE. Under the Hasmonean princes, who were at first high priests and then kings, the Jewish state displayed even a certain luster and annexed several territories. Soon, however, discord within the royal family and the growing disaffection of the pious towards rulers who no longer evinced any appreciation of the real aspirations of their subjects made the Jewish nation easy prey for the ambitions of the now increasingly autocratic and imperial Romans, the successors of the Seleucids. In 63 BCE Pompey invaded Jerusalem, the Jewish people lost their political sovereignty and independence, and Gabinius subjected the Jewish people to tribute.