IV.

Jewish Life in the Diaspora

The Jewish diaspora began with the Babylonian conquest in the 6th century bc. Many Jews understood their presence outside the land of Israel as exile. God had imposed exile as a punishment for their sins, they believed, and they would be unable to return to their land until God redeemed them from exile by sending a Messiah. In time some Jews interpreted exile as independent of geography. In their view exile meant exile from God, and exile could occur even in the land of Israel, especially when non-Jews dominated Israel. Other Jews did not understand their lives in the diaspora as an exile; they chose to live outside the land of Israel.

For some 2,500 years Jews have continued to live outside the land of Israel. In the early centuries of the diaspora, they established substantial communities in Asia Minor, North Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula. Later they spread to the rest of the globe. Each Jewish community interacted with the local culture, and Jewish life and culture became remarkably diverse as a result. In particular European Jews and the Jews of the Mediterranean basin, including Spain, developed different ways of observing the Jewish religion and different identities as Jews. The European Jews (outside of Spain) are called Ashkenazim (from the Hebrew word for “Germany”) and the Jews of Spain and the rest of the Mediterranean basin are called Sephardim (from the Hebrew word for “Spain”).

A.

The Early Centuries of the Diaspora

Historians know very little about the early centuries of Jewish life in the diaspora. During the Babylonian captivity part of the Jewish community successfully maintained a distinct identity and culture, but the circumstances of this community remain a mystery. Nor is there much information about Jewish life in the Persian Empire; what we do know is that some Jews longed to return to their land, but others remained in Persia (and later Iran) into the 20th century. The picture becomes somewhat clearer during the period of Greek and Roman rule, when substantial Jewish communities developed in Alexandria, Egypt; Cyrene, Libya; Antioch (in present-day Turkey); Rome (in present-day Italy); and cities throughout Asia Minor. Jews in most of these communities spoke the dominant language, Greek, and they based their religion on a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures known as the Septuagint. Each of these Jewish communities seems to have developed its own distinct form of the Jewish religion, which differed from the religion of the leading rabbis in Palestine. Palestine was the name the Romans had officially given the province of Judea in the 2nd century ce.

Some Jews were quite comfortable living under the domination of the Hellenistic and Roman empires. Others deeply resented their domination by pagans (followers of polytheistic religions) or the lack of respect they received from the dominant culture. In Palestine and the diaspora the Jews revolted unsuccessfully against Roman rule. Simon Bar Kokhba, for example, led revolts in Jerusalem in the 2nd century that received support from Jews throughout the region. Before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce, many Jews throughout the diaspora had sent money to support the Temple, which seems to have served as a source of solidarity for Jews as a nation. After Temple was destroyed, the Jewish communities of the diaspora no longer had this unifying mission, and they had little in common other than the maintenance of a distinct Jewish identity.

B.

The Babylonian Community

The Jewish diaspora community that flourished best was in Babylonia. The Parthians, who ruled Babylonia and the rest of Mesopotamia until 224 ce, granted Jews considerable autonomy, and Jewish economic and religious life responded favorably. The Jews in Babylonia experienced a brief period of persecution in the 3rd century, after a Persian dynasty known as the Sassanids defeated the Parthians. Babylonian Jewry soon regained basic freedoms, however, and this community continued to grow and flourish for another 1,000 years. The learning of rabbis prospered in Babylonian religious academies and found expression in commentaries on oral law and in interpretations of the Torah. The commentaries on oral law in Babylonia produced the Babylonian Talmud—the Hebrew and Aramaic text that served as the basis of Judaism. The rabbinic Judaism that had developed in Babylonia was a further development of a form of Judaism that became dominant in Palestine in the 2nd century, due in large part to Roman recognition of rabbis as the religious and political leaders of the Jews.

C.

The Spread of Christianity

The social and political situtation of the Jews changed markedly in the 4th century, after Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. His conversion ushered in a process through which Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and Jews were considered subversive for their refusal to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. Many leaders of church and empire believed that Jews should not be allowed to remain in the Roman Empire if they continued to practice their religion, as Jews were seen as potential contaminants of the true faith, which they rejected. However, this position was rejected in favor of a view presented by Christian theologian Saint Augustine. Like other Christians, Augustine believed that the Jews fully deserved to be degraded and humiliated. But instead of arguing for their destruction or forcible conversion, he felt that they should live in a state of poverty and humiliation. In this way Jews might be punished for their refusal to acknowledge the new revelation in Christ and might serve as witnesses to the superiority of Christianity. Although harsh, Augustine’s position often served to save Jews in Christendom from annihilation.

Constantine established a new capital in Byzantium (now İstanbul, Turkey), in the eastern part of the Roman Empire. He renamed the city Constantinople. After Rome fell to invaders in 476, the Roman Empire in the west collapsed, but the Roman Empire in the east, which came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, remained strong. Attitudes toward Jews in the Byzantine Empire differed from attitudes in the Western Roman Empire and the states that succeeded it. The Byzantine Empire had far more Jews under its rule than did states in the Western Roman Empire, and it dealt more harshly with them. Jews under Byzantine rule often had difficulty making a living and, among other obstacles, they were barred from building new synagogues (places of assembly for prayer) or holding public office.

D.

Under Islamic Rule

Islam, another monotheistic religion, arose in Arabia in the 7th century, and Islamic forces conquered much of the Byzantine Empire in the 7th and 8th centuries. For the most part Jews welcomed the change in rule. Although Jews also experienced religious and economic obstacles under Islam, conditions for them improved. The Islamic conquests extended from Babylonia to Egypt and included Palestine. For the first time in centuries the two major centers of Jewish life, Babylonia and Palestine, were under the same rulers. But the balance had shifted, and Babylonia had become the more significant cultural and intellectual center. From the 8th to the 12th century extraordinary cultural achievements took place in the Islamic world, and Jews, especially in Babylonia, participated in and benefited from those achievements.

Academies in Babylonia, headed by rabbis called geonim (plural of Hebrew gaon, meaning “eminence”), were instrumental in establishing the Babylonian Talmud as the authoritative text of the Jewish religion. They also established Babylonian customs as the norm throughout the Jewish world. The geonim fostered the principle that study was the highest religious ideal. The most significant of the geonim was Saadia ben Joseph, a remarkable 10th-century intellectual who translated the Hebrew Bible into Arabic, the language of Islamic lands. Through this translation and a commentary on the Bible in Arabic, Saadia founded Jewish literature in Arabic and became the first of many Jewish philosophers in the Islamic world. Only the philosopher Moses Maimonides of Egypt surpassed Saadia in importance. Benefiting from Saadia’s pioneering spirit, Maimonides elevated the world of Jewish learning to unimagined heights in the 12th century. The Jews of the Islamic world also transmitted philosophical works of the ancient and Islamic worlds to European Christians. They translated many of the philosophical classics from Arabic to Hebrew, and other Jews helped translate them from Hebrew to Latin, which was the written language of educated Europeans at that time.

E.

Under Christian Rule

From the 8th century to the late Middle Ages, culture remained largely stagnant and undistinguished in Christian Europe while flourishing in the Islamic world. Beginning in the 8th century the kings of the Franks and the Holy Roman Emperors encouraged Jews to settle in Provence (now part of southern France) and the Rhineland (now part of Germany). Communities in Aix, Marseille, and elsewhere in Provence and in Mainz, Speyer, and other cities of the Rhineland became early centers of European Jewish life and retained their importance for centuries.

The encouragement of Jewish settlement resulted from an assumption that Jews had useful economic skills, especially as traders. As Jews neither owned land nor worked the land as peasants for feudal masters, they depended directly on European rulers for protection. That dependence meant that rulers could safely entrust the Jews with economic privileges without any threat to their own power. The economic privileges heightened resentment that the European masses already felt toward Jews, a resentment rooted in religious difference. The arrangement did not lead to any sustained persecution of Jews for several centuries, however.

The situation of European Jews changed in 1096, the year of the first Crusade, a military expedition to take control of the Holy Land (Palestine) from Muslim rulers. As the Crusader armies gathered, they directed their religious hostility at Jewish communities of the Rhineland, massacring the people and destroying the settlements. Local authorities lacked the forces to stop the rampaging Crusaders. In some communities, the Jews preferred to commit collective suicide rather than fall into the hands of the mobs. The Crusades inaugurated a new era in the life of the Jews of Europe.