Jewish diaspora: Encyclopedia II - Jewish diaspora - Pre-Roman Diaspora

Jewish diaspora - Pre-Roman Diaspora

After the overthrow in 588 BC of the kingdom of Judah by the Chaldeans (see Babylonian captivity), and the deportation of a considerable portion of its inhabitants to the valley of the Euphrates, the Jews had two principal rallying-points: Babylonia and Land of Israel.

Although a majority of the Jewish people, especially the wealthy families, were to be found in Babylonia, the existence it led there, under the successive rules of the Achaemenids, the Seleucids, the Parthians, and the Neo-Persians, or Sassanians, was obscure and devoid of political influence. The poorest but most fervent element among the exiles returned to Land of Israel during the reigns of the first Achæmenidæ. There, with the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem as its center, it organized itself into a community, animated by a remarkable religious ardor and a tenacious attachment to the Torah, which thenceforth constituted the focus of its identity. No sooner had this little nucleus increased in numbers with the accession of recruits from various quarters, than 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 an easy prey to the ambition of the Romans, the successors of the Seleucids. In 63 BC Pompey invaded Jerusalem, and Gabinius subjected the Jewish people to tribute.

Jewish diaspora - Early diaspora populations

As early as the middle of the 2nd century BC, the Jewish author of the third book of the Oracula Sibyllina, addressing the "chosen people," says: "Every land is full of thee and every sea." The most diverse witnesses, such as Strabo, Philo, Seneca, the author of the Acts of the Apostles, and Josephus, all bear testimony to the fact that the Jewish people were disseminated over the known world.

King Agrippa I, in a letter to Caligula, enumerates among the provinces of the Jewish diaspora almost all the Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient; and this enumeration is far from being complete, as Italy and Cyrene are not included. The epigraphic discoveries from year to year augment the number of known Jewish communities. There is only scant information of a precise character concerning the numerical significance of these diverse Jewish conglomerations; and this must be used with caution. After the Land of Israel and Babylonia, it was in Syria, according to Josephus, that the Jewish population was the densest; particularly in Antioch, and then in Damascus, in which latter place, at the time of the great insurrection, 10,000 (according to another version 18,000) Jews were massacred. Philo gives the number of Jewish inhabitants in Egypt as 1,000,000; one-eighth of the population. Alexandria was by far the most important Jewish communities, the Jews in Philo's time were inhabiting two of the five quarters of the city. To judge by the accounts of wholesale massacres in 115, the number of Jewish residents in Cyrenaica, at Cyprus, and in Mesopotamia must also have been large. In Rome, at the commencement of the reign of Caesar Augustus, there were over 8,000 Jews: this is the number that escorted the envoys who came to demand the deposition of Archelaus. Finally, if the sums confiscated by the propraetor Flaccus in the year 62 represented actually the tax of a didrachma per head for a single year, the inference may be safely drawn that in Asia Minor the Jewish population numbered 45,000 males, or a total of at least 180,000 persons.

If the least credit could be put to these accounts, it seems inevitable that the numerous Jewish communities in areas such as Alexandria could not all be made up of emigrants. Most likely, a large fraction of them were convertites to the Jewish religion. It is well-known that the Jewish community assumed a missionary policy in the time before the destruction of the Temple. One famous convertite was Herod the Great, who belonged to an Arab tribe.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Pre-Roman Diaspora", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki