Dealing with the Diaspora

NOTE: This Review was written and scheduled to go out today before last week’s news. I thought long and hard about whether to still release it and decided (at the urging of Israeli friends) to still send out the post.

With her recent book, Letters from Home: The Creation Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity (Eisenbrauns, 2024), Dr. Malka Simkovich seeks to correct significant scholarly misconceptions about diasporic Jewish identity from ancient times to today. In her words,

Only a few generations ago, it was commonplace for scholars to dismiss diasporic Jewish life as marginal to the “authentic” Jewish experiences that took place in the land of Israel. Underlying this scholarship was the presumption that Jews living outside the land of Israel were collectively guilty of sin and were suffering consequent estrangement from their god. Yet from a demographic perspective, life outside of Israel was a massive success. After the deportations to Babylonia in 597-586 BCE, most Judahites and their descendants lived outside the land of Israel, where they established robust communities. Even after Persian authorities vanquished Babylon and granted Judahites permission to return to their homeland around 583 BCE, most of them decided to remain outside their homeland. Over time, they scattered throughout the Persian world. Some settled locally in communities along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and others moved west to regions lying along the Mediterranean Levant. Despite literary and material evidence suggesting that the descendants of these Judahites embraced their ancestral identities regardless of where they lived, scholars of early Judaism working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries focused primarily on literature produced in the land of Israel to answer the question of how the “Judean-ism” of the early Second Temple era transitions into the “Judaism” of the late Second Temple era, which the early rabbis inherited.

Over the past century, the discovery and publication of additional Jewish texts from the Second Temple Era has prompted scholars to reassess prevailing assumptions about early Jewish self-understanding in the diaspora. The varied outlooks expressed in this literature testify to the countless ways that Jews outside the land of Israel creatively assimilated cultural ideas that circulated in their host communities. These Jews also retained ancestral practices such as circumcision, dietary laws, and the Sabbath. References to synagogues in Egyptian Jewish literature indicate that Jews in the Hellenistic world fathered regularly to read their scriptures, a practice that bound them in common memory and contributed to their sense of connection to Jews who lived elsewhere. The recollection of a shared past served to close the geographic gaps among Jews who were spread throughout the world.

The present consensus that most Jews in the Second Temple period held a positive attitude toward life outside the land of Israel marks a welcome turn from the anti-diaspora bias that once pervaded scholarship. And yet, academics who study the Jewish diaspora overcorrect this earlier scholarship, which privileged the study of Jewish life in the land of Israel. Analyzing material evidence from outside the land of Israel, these academics presume that the “diaspora” was a self-evident reality rather than a discursive category. Judean literature produced within the land of Israel that engages with the category of diaspora, meanwhile, is often ignored.

Simkovich hopes to provide needed nuance by examining “how Jewish writers working in the Second Temple period constructed their self-understandings in relation to Jews who lived outside their communities.” The picture she paints is a familiar one:

Judean Jews shaped their identities in ways that defined themselves against Jews who lived elsewhere. They developed the idea that the diaspora was a space on one side of an invisible boundary line, a space where Judeans were not meant to be, a space that they defined in relation to their homeland. Jews living in Egypt, however, shaped their identities in ways that bonded them to Judean Jews. Rather than enforcing an invisible boundary, these Jews expressed devotion to both their host government and their ancestral homeland.

As such, “the diaspora was drawn by those who lived outside of it and ignored by those who lived within it.” This led to a reality in which “Judean Jewish texts purport to quote biblical heroes and religious leaders who bemoan that Jewish suffering outside Judea is a divinely wrought consequence of sin” while “texts produced in Egypt, on the other hand, purport to quote Judean Jewish leaders who embrace life outside the homeland as legitimate and long-lasting.”

Given all of the above, Simkovich notes that “the successful establishment of Jewish communities outside the land of Israel was the single biggest theological problem for Jews in the Hellenistic era.” Indeed, she writes that “by the end of the second century BCE, outsiders to these communities might have wondered whether these Jews were more pious than Jews who lived in Judea, where bitter infighting was taking place over whether to abandon the Jews’ ancestral practices in favor of a more Hellenized way of life.” Diasporic communities, on the other hand,

wrote texts that present the family of world Jewry as united in values and bound by a common history. They also emphasized the idea that the universal God is equally accessible anywhere and cares for all humankind. They even established their own holidays, which commemorated events that took place outside Judea and signified God’s protection. The absence of the Greek word diaspora in literature produced by these Jews suggests that they did not think with the category of diaspora or with the concept that Jews outside Judea occupy a theologically meaningful space that signifies divine rejection.

Furthermore, “while there is substantive evidence that many Jews left the land of Israel for Egypt during the Second Temple era, we have less evidence that Jews migrated from Egypt to the land of Israel at this time.” It’s no wonder, then, that “Judean leaders were concerned about talented Jews investing resources into building Jewish communities in Egypt.”

Despite these clear tensions, though, Simkovich emphasizes the continued feelings of connection between the Judean and diasporic groups:

Still, it is clear that Jews in both regions felt deeply connected to one another, even if they perceived their relationship differently. They expressed support for one another’s political and social well-being and practiced their ancestral laws in similar ways. The factor that singularly differentiated them was their attitude toward the concept of diaspora. Most Jews hoped for a time when all people would live in harmonious coexistence, when foreign nations would embrace the Jewish people and recognize their God, and when Jews would embrace one another in common worship. For Judean Jews, the image of this common worship was shaped by scriptural depictions of Jews returning from exile to worship alongside one another at the Jerusalem Temple. For Jews in Egypt, it rested on the critical role that Jews outside the land of Israel would play in bringing the knowledge of the one true God to the foreign nations.

Outside of a short conversation about how this discourse evolved in the early rabbinic period, Simkovich does not bring the conversation into modern times. However, as readers have no doubt noticed, it is impossible not to read her words without thinking about our contemporary situation.

Nearly every point highlighted above has a parallel in today’s discourse, particularly in conversations playing out between Israeli and American Jews. We may have more denominations, and thus more ways of practically expressing one’s Jewish identity, today, but the divide between “homeland” identity and “feeling at home in any land” persists.

Perhaps the biggest difference between today’s situation and the ancient landscape Simkovich paints is the proliferation of Jews who live outside of Israel but themselves have a “diasporic” view of Jewish reality. Many Zionist Jews living in the US and Canada, for example, fully embrace Israel as our homeland and the center of the Jewish story. Thus, tensions are not between two separated communities but between individuals within the same locale - and those tensions become quite heated when each side believes that embracing the other perspective could literally spell destruction for our entire people.

This review is not the place to examine that contemporary conversation in depth. Interested readers can find that tension addressed in much of my writings interacting with the work of Professor Shaul Magid and others. For now, let us perhaps find some solace in understanding that these tensions are literally as old as our exile itself and are unlikely to dissipate until the messianic era (which should arrive speedily in our days).