About Jewishness

The Jewish diaspora is the English term used to describe the Galut, or 'exile' that encompassed several forced expulsions of Israelites from what is now the states of Israel, Jordan and parts of Lebanon.
The diaspora is commonly accepted to have begun with the 8th-6th century BCE conquests of the ancient Jewish kingdoms of Israel and Judah, destruction of the First Temple, and expulsion of the Jewish population, and is also associated with the destruction of the Second Temple and aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt during the Roman occupation of Judea in the 1st and 2nd century CE. In those countries North of the Sahara a Jewish presence dates back to the Babylonian captivity in the 6th century BCE and, outside of Arabia, predates the Arab presence by a thousand years.
A number of Middle Eastern Jewish communities were established then as a result of tolerant policies and remained notable centers of Torah life and Judaism for centuries to come. The defeat of the Great Jewish Revolt in the year 70 CE and of Bar Kokhba's revolt against the Roman Empire in 135 CE notably contributed to the diaspora as many Jews were scattered after losing control over Judea or were sold into slavery throughout the empire.

Pre-Roman Diaspora
In 722 BCE the Assyrians under Shalmaneser V conquered the (Northern) Kingdom of Israel, and many Israelites were deported to Khorasan. For over 2,700 years since, Persian Jews have lived in the territories of today's Iran.
In 601 BC, in the fourth year of his reign, Nebuchadnezzar II, king of Babylon, unsuccessfully attempted to invade Egypt and was repulsed with heavy losses. This failure lead to numerous rebellions among the states of the Levant which owed allegiance to Babylon, including Judah, where the king, Jehoiakim, stopped paying tribute to Nebuchadnezzar and took a pro-Egyptian position.
Nebuchadnezzar soon dealt with these rebellions. According to the Babylonian Chronicles, he lay siege to Jerusalem, which eventually fell on March 16, 597 BC. Nebuchadnezzar pillaged both the city and the Temple and deported to Babylon the new king Jeconiah who was either eight or eighteen at the time (Jehoiakim having died in the meantime) and his court and other prominent citizens and craftsmen, along with a sizable portion of the Jewish population of Judah, numbering about 10,000. Among them were Ezekiel. The author of the book of Daniel, while actually most likely writing/compiling in the middle of the second century BCE, reports that his experiences (if they are to be understood and interpreted as historical narrative) also occur while in Babylonian exile in this period. A biblical text written in approximately the same time period of the exile reports that "None remained except the poorest people of the land" and that also taken to Babylon were the treasures and furnishings of the Temple, including golden vessels dedicated by King Solomon. This is the start of the Jewish Diaspora (or exile).

After the overthrow of the kingdom of Judah in 588 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.
Although most of the Jewish people, especially the wealthy families, were to be found in Babylonia, the existence they led there, under the successive rules 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 Judaea 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 its 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 for political enfranchisement.
After numerous vicissitudes, and especially owing to internal dissensions in the Seleucid dynasty on the one hand and to the interested support of the Romans on the other, the cause of Jewish independence finally triumphed. 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 in the royal family and the growing disaffection of the pious, the soul of the nation, toward rulers who no longer evinced any appreciation of the real aspirations of their subjects made the Jewish nation easy prey for the ambition of the Romans, the successors of the Seleucids. In 63 BCE Pompey invaded Jerusalem, and Gabinius subjected the Jewish people to tribute.

Early diaspora populations
As early as the middle of the 2nd century BCE the Jewish author of the third book of the Oracula Sibyllina addressed the "chosen people," saying: "Every land is full of thee and every sea." The most diverse witnesses, such as Strabo, Philo, Seneca, Luke (the author of the Acts of the Apostles), Cicero, and Josephus, all mention Jewish populations in the cities of the Mediterranean. King Agrippa I, in a letter to Caligula, enumerated among the provinces of the Jewish diaspora almost all the Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient. The epigraphic discoveries from year to year augment the number of known Jewish communities but must be viewed with caution due to the lack of precise evidence of their numbers. According to Josephus, the next most dense Jewish population after the Land of Israel and Babylonia was in Syria, particularly in Antioch, and Damascus, where 10,000 to 18,000 Jews were massacred during the great insurrection. Philo gives the number of Jewish inhabitants in Egypt as one million, one-eighth of the population. Alexandria was by far the most important of the Egyptian Jewish communities.
To judge by the accounts of wholesale massacres in 115, the number of Jewish residents in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia was also large. At the commencement of the reign of Caesar Augustus, there were over 7,000 Jews in Rome (this is the number that escorted the envoys who came to demand the deposition of Archelaus). Finally, if the sums confiscated by the governor Lucius Valerius Flaccus in the year 62/61 BCE represented the tax of a didrachma per head for a single year, it would imply that the Jewish population of Asia Minor numbered 45,000 adult males, for a total of at least 180,000 persons.

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. Jewish communities were thereby largely expelled from Judea and sent to various Roman provinces in the Middle East, Europe and North Africa.

Post-Roman period Jewish populations
During the Middle Ages, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to three primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazim of Northern and Eastern Europe, the Sephardim of Iberia, and the Mizrahim of the Middle East. These groups have parallel histories sharing many series of persecutions and forced expulsions, which finally culminated in events in the 20th century that led to the State of Israel.
By 1764 there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population was estimated at 1.2 million.

You will find the rest of the history of the Jewish Diaspora in the section History and Migration, under Jewish Migration. (See navigation bar on top of the page.)

The Diaspora in Contemporary Jewish life

Contrary to the Israel-centric Zionist view, acceptance of the Jewish communities outside of Israel was postulated by those, like Simon Rawidowicz (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.
As of 2006 the largest numbers of Jews live in Israel (5,309,000), United States (5,275,000), France (652,000), Canada (372,000), and the United Kingdom (297,000).
The waves of immigration to the United States and elsewhere at the turn of the nineteenth century, the founding of Zionism and later events, including pogroms in Russia, the massacre of European Jewry during the Holocaust, and the founding of the state of Israel, with the subsequent Jewish exodus from Arab lands, all resulted in substantial shifts in the population centers of world Jewry by the end of the twentieth century.

In this Rosh Hashana greeting card from the early 1900s, Russian Jews, packs in hand, gaze at the American relatives beckoning them to the United States. Over two million Jews would flee the pogroms of the Russian Empire to the safety of the US from 1881–1924.
Currently, the largest Jewish community in the world is located in the United States, with 5.3 million or 6.4 million Jews by various estimates. Elsewhere in the Americas, there are also large Jewish populations in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil, and smaller populations in Mexico, Uruguay, Venezuela, Chile, and several other countries.
Western Europe's largest Jewish community can be found in France, home to 490,000 Jews, the majority of whom are immigrants or refugees from North African Arab countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia (or their descendants). There are 295,000 Jews in the United Kingdom. In Eastern Europe, there are anywhere from 350,000 to one million Jews living in the former Soviet Union, but exact figures are difficult to establish. The fastest-growing Jewish community in the world, outside Israel, is the one in Germany, especially in Berlin, its capital. Tens of thousands of Jews from the former Eastern Bloc have settled in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The Arab countries of North Africa and the Middle East were home to around 900,000 Jews in 1945. Fueled by anti-Zionism after the founding of Israel, systematic persecution caused almost all of these Jews to flee to Israel, North America, and Europe in the 1950s. Today, around 8,000 Jews remain in all Arab nations combined.
Iran is home to around 10,800 Jews, down from a population of 100,000 Jews before the 1979 revolution. After the revolution some of the Iranian Jews emigrated to Israel or Europe but most of them emigrated (with their non-Jewish Iranian compatriots) to the United States (especially Los Angeles, where the principal community is called "Tehrangeles").
Outside Europe, the Americas, the Middle East, and the rest of Asia, there are significant Jewish populations in Australia and South Africa.

Assimilation
Since at least the time of the Ancient Greeks, a proportion of Jews have assimilated into the wider non-Jewish society around them, by either choice or force, ceasing to practice Judaism and losing their Jewish identity. Assimilation took place in all areas, and during all time periods, with some Jewish communities, for example the Kaifeng Jews of China, disappearing entirely. The advent of the Jewish Enlightenment of the 1700s and the subsequent emancipation of the Jewish populations of Europe and America in the 1800s, accelerated the situation, encouraging Jews to increasingly participate in, and become part of, secular society. The result has been a growing trend of assimilation, as Jews marry non-Jewish spouses and stop participating in the Jewish community. Rates of interreligious marriage vary widely: In the United States, they are just under 50%, in the United Kingdom, around 53%, in France, around 30%, and in Australia and Mexico, as low as 10%. In the United States, only about a third of children from intermarriages affiliate themselves with Jewish religious practice. The result is that most countries in the Diaspora have steady or slightly declining religiously Jewish populations as Jews continue to assimilate into the countries in which they live.

Between 1882 and 1988, most of Israel's Jewish immigrants came from Russia, Poland and other Eastern European countries, following pogroms and outbreaks of anti-semitism and discrimination in those countries. Many of them were advocates of Zionism, lots of them were poor and uneducated, most of them would rather have emigrated to the United States (or other Western democracies), if it weren't for measures like the immigration quotas of the United States and Great Britain, which kept Jews out. Many of these immigrants to Israel would emigrate to the West at a later stage.
Those Eastern European Jews who had the opportunity to emigrate to the West, often clashed with the native Jews in those countries, who had assimilated for decades, sometimes centuries.
The Eastern European Jewish immigrants brought with them the identity of a deprived national minority, sustained by great forces of religious, cultural, and communal cohesion.

Allan Brownfield writes, "The corruption of Judaism, as a religion of universal values, through its politicization by Zionism and by the replacement of dedication to Israel for dedication to God and the moral law, is what has alienated so many young Americans who, searching for spiritual meaning in life, have found little in the organized Jewish community."

Orit Weksler writes, "What does Israel have to offer Jews who come to find shelter? Right now it's offering grief, fear and shame. If we're doomed to be a nation that lives by the sword, as is commonly proclaimed on the streets of Tel Aviv these days, then I opt out.And I did. When my son was born five years ago in Tel Aviv, the nurse complimented his good health by saying: "He'll make a good soldier." That gave me the chills. The babies he shared the nursery with will, in 13 years, be fighting the third, or fourth or fifth Lebanon war. I will do anything in my power so that my son does not become one of them.This is one of the reasons I don't live in Israel. In many ways I feel I'm in exile. I'm glued to the Internet and I cry for every civilian -- Lebanese and Israeli, who is killed, wounded or traumatized by this war. I also cry for the soldiers and their families. I believe they are making a huge mistake and I don't know how to make them stop."

I can't blame the Jews who don't want to live in Israel. (To be continued...)