Debating Diaspora Dynamics

Most Jews in L.A., Miami and Tel Aviv likely haven’t heard of the Egyptian island the ancients called Yeb. Also referred to as Elephantine, it now constitutes part of modern-day Egypt’s city of Aswan. Yet as a new book shows, the dynamic between Jews who inhabited the island over two millennia ago and their coreligionists in Judea bears more than a passing resemblance to today’s Israel-Diaspora relationship.

As one can’t help but notice in reading the brilliant scholar Malka Simkovich’s “Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity,” the political and religious entanglements, communal aspirations, and spiritual longings possessed by individuals who resided in the Holy Land and those who didn’t — and the interplay between the two populations — seems to have hardly changed in thousands of years. 

Consider her description of the questions faced by those Jews who fled to Egypt after facing persecution elsewhere and who, through hard work and opportunity, found themselves financially more successful and even physically safer than their cousins in the Holy Land. Just swap out Pharaoh’s fiefdom for Pico-Robertson. 

“These [Egyptian] Jews were enthusiastically involved in building successful Jewish communities outside Judea. But they were also loyal to their homeland and to the Jerusalem Temple … outsiders to these communities might have wondered whether these Jews were more pious than Jews who lived in Judea, where bitter in-fighting was taking place.” 

Like so many of today’s Diaspora Jews, those of the last 400 years before the start of the Common Era felt in foreign lands not like exiles but as individuals who had found opportunity in their environment, even if it was spiritually less-than-ideal.

Like so many of today’s Diaspora Jews, those of the last 400 years before the start of the Common Era felt in foreign lands not like exiles but as individuals who had found opportunity in their environment, even if it was spiritually less-than-ideal. 

As Simkovich’s study argues, Yeb’s religiously committed Jews asked themselves questions that you might find debated in today’s Jerusalem Post and Jewish Journal:

“Did the presence of Jews outside the land of Israel mean that Jews were still living in a state of exile and that a restoration awaited them in the distant future, even though Jews in Judea had already established political independence? How was the astonishing success of Jews outside the land of Israel meant to be understood? Was God going to put an end to Jewish life outside the land, as the prophets long ago promised? And if God was planning to allow these communities [in the Diaspora] to thrive, what did Jewish life outside the land of Israel mean?” 

Unsurprisingly, as “Letters from Home” demonstrates, there was disagreement over the answers. After all, the Bible itself, in books like the Scroll of Esther, seemed to portray Jews outside of Israel as politically savvy and socially successful, albeit subject to the whims of their non-Jewish overlords. 

As Simkovich notes, some Judeans insisted their faraway friends and family members were, by dint of declining to return home, spiritually deficient sinners. Insertions to the Scroll of Esther were composed by a few such Judeans during the Second Temple period. These additions to the canonical text aimed at a means of offering religious rebuke to those who sought, in the governments of gentiles, the means of salvation. Jerusalem’s cobblestones were not to be neglected for the gilded streets of Shushan. 

Other texts from that period, like the Third Book of Maccabees, insisted, as Simkovich writes, “that all Jews, wherever they live, share a common destiny” and are “fundamentally connected to one another.” “Ben Sira,” a non-biblical book produced during the Second Temple period and known to the rabbis of the Talmud, also did not perceive Jewish life outside of Israel to be “a problem that requires a resolution.” 

Breaking with Deuteronomy’s depressing prophetic description of sin followed by oppression and expulsion from our national homeland, the authors of these ancient texts, like so many Jews today, declined to see their lives as “fulfillments of biblical predictions concerning the Israelites’ displacement.” Like Jewish-Americans who would decry accusations of “dual loyalty,” these ancient ancestors did not perceive fealty to their homeland and host country as in tension. Nor did they perceive two halves of the global Jewish population, but rather a cohesive whole, albeit one spread out geographically.

Like Jewish-Americans who would decry accusations of “dual loyalty,” these ancient ancestors did not perceive fealty to their homeland and host country as in tension.

The dynamic of the Diaspora will, undoubtedly, continue to be debated until the Messiah comes. Until then, participants in this crucial conversation can gain much historical insight into its complexities from Simkovich’s learned and engaging “Letters from Home.”

Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”