REL 464 - The Inter-Testamental Era
Course Notes
The Jewish Diaspora
The wide-spread dispersion of Jews away from Israel/Judah and into the rest of the world was started by the Assyrians, who deported the northern Israelites and settled them in scattered communities throughout the Assyrian Empire.
It was continued by the Babylonians, who deported Jewish leaders and nobility to Babylon - this included Ezra, and Daniel and his companions.
At the time of the Assyrian and Babylonian attacks, some Jews fled to Egypt, eg. Jeremiah 42:13-44:30, and settled there. One such settlement was at Elephantine, where many papyrus documents have been found - these relate mainly to the Hellenic Period.
When Cyrus allowed the Jews to return from their Exile in Babylonia/Persia to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, not all the Jews did so. In fact, it was probably a minority of the Jewish population of Babylon/Persia who returned to Jerusalem.
During the seventy years of the Exile new generations of Jews had grown up who had no first-hand knowledge of Jerusalem and the land of Israel - which was by then referred to as Judah. They were more comfortable living as Jewish inhabitants of Persia, so remained there. The Jewish community of Babylon developed their own variation of Jewish culture, their own teachers, and their own literature.
When Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70, the Roman Empire did not include Babylon/Persia, and the Jewish communities of the East were spared the general dispersion of Jews which happened to those who lived in the Roman Empire.
To this day, there are several varieties and traditions of Jewish culture - some of which developed in the West, and some which have their roots in the East.
In the West, there were communities in what became Spain and Portugal, who spoke a language which was a mixture of Hebrew and Spanish or Portuguese, called Ladino. The Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, and any remaining Jews were eventually either forced to convert to Christianity (and were known as "conversos", or were killed by the Inquisition, or fled - often to America. The Jews from Spain-Portugal are known as Sephardic Jews or the Sephardim, and still speak Ladino.
The Jewish settlers in the Rhineland (Germany) spoke and wrote a mixed dialect of German and Hebrew, which became Yiddish - these were called Ashkenazi Jews, or the Ashkenazim.
Further East, communities of Jews settled in what became Poland and Russia.
The Jews were subject to murder and persecution by their nominally Christian neighbors. They were forced to live in closed communities called Ghettos, and were blamed for any misfortunes which occurred, such as drought, floods, famine, illness, or the death of someone.
The "Pogroms" were murderous attacks by non-jews upon their Jewish neighbors, particularly in Poland and Russia, in which Jews were killed, their villages burned, and any survivors forced to flee.
Because of centuries of persecution, many Jews emigrated to America.
During World War II Hitler attempted to "solve the Jewish Problem" by trying to exterminate all Jews left in Germany and the invaded territories.
At the end of WWII there was added impetus to the call for re-establishing a homeland for Jews, and the modern State of Israel was established by the United Nations.
Survivors from Germany, Poland, Russia, and some of the Jews from America had already begun to move to Palestine, as the land was then called, even before the start of WWII, and formed the nucleus from which Israel has re-emerged as a nation.
Copyright © 1999 Shirley J. Rollinson, all Rights Reserved
