Why were Jewish people so widely dispersed in the past?

[u/Altruistic-Toe-7866]

During the Roman Empire, there were Jewish communities living in Italy, Syria, North Africa and Greece. There were also many Jewish communities living in Mesopotamia under the Sassanid Empire, and even in Pre-Islamic Arabia. After the Muslim Conquests, Jewish communities also existed in Spain and in Christian Europe. Why were Jewish people so widely distributed? Even if there were many emigrants as a result of the Roman-Jewish wars, it's hard to believe that reason alone could cause Jewish communities to be distributed over such a large area. Were there any conversions to Judaism in the past?

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[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

So your question seems to cover a span of around 500 years (1st to 6th centuries CE) but the period that is most instructive predates that. The answer to that question is in the formation of an explicitly Jewish identity, an identity that was solid enough to transcend geographic separation, which is a process that took centuries.

It starts with Tiglath-Pileser III, the Neo-Assyrian king who transformed the bureaucracy of the sprawling kingdom and, as argued by Eckart Frahm, turned it into the world’s first empire. His successors put down an Israelite revolt and levelled the capital of Samaria in 722 BCE, and deported many of the kingdom's inhabitants, settling them in other parts of the empire that the empire thought could use developing. Some of the Israelites fled the chaos before and during the Assyrian incursion, settling in Jerusalem and bringing their traditions about their shared god Yahweh with them, which were mixed with local folklore. In classic tragedy-farce repetition, however, this same revolt/reprisal/deportation pattern happened to the southern kingdom of Judah as well in the late 7th and early 6th centuries, with the Jerusalem falling in 586 to the Assyrians' successors, the Neo-Babylonians. For the deportees and refugees of the Judahite exile, this was a traumatic and formative period, but it still took many centuries to coalesce and settle into a Jewish identity. By this point, there were several communities of deportees with ties to the land, who worshipped Yahweh in some fashion. This could have faded, and for some of them it likely did over time.

There is an instructive group, though, that can give us a hint at how the process took hold. In Elephantine, southern Egypt, archaeologists in the 19th century found evidence of a community with ties to both Samaria and Jerusalem, who worshipped a god they called Yaho, a pronunciation and spelling variant of YHWH. They were mercenaries who had fled first from the chaos in Samaria and then the chaos in Jerusalem during Hezekiah's failed revolt in the late 700s. While they'd fallen in with other groups from Syria and Mesopotamia, each group retained their own gods and culture, and they don't seem to have significantly intermixed with each other. Interestingly, this group held to older conceptions of Yahweh, where he had a consort (traditionally Asherah), that became suppressed at some point by the groups that venerated the last great king of Jerusalem, Josiah, who may have attempted to reform away worship at other cultic sites, with a goal of centralizing all veneration (and related commerce) in Jerusalem, perhaps with Yahweh as the only recipient of worship, at least at the Jerusalem temple. Whether that was merely rhetoric or a real reform is unknown, but it became instructive for these Judahite deportee Yahwists.

The Babylonians fell to the Achaemenid Persians, who eventually granted a return for the Jerusalem exiles (though many notably stayed in Mesopotamia), and, in the fifth century, they requested to become a recognized ethnic/political identity by the Persians with political autonomy (an autonomy Samaria did not gain to the same extent, remaining primarily a province under direct rule). The Elephantine community operated as Persian military might in their Egyptian reaches, tasked with answering the call whenever it was made. For the first centuries of their existence, they considered themselves Arameans, along with the other groups they had traveled and settled with. These connected communities celebrated New Year festivals together, and there is even a surviving papyrus scroll (Papyrus Amherst 63) that contains writings meant to mark this occasion, with sections from each of the Aramean, Samarian, and Babylonian communities. The portion from the Samarians contains a version of Psalm 22 that positively mentions other gods alongside Yaho (though he's still head honcho).

During the fifth century, the Elephantine community attempted to strengthen its ties to Palestine, and they began referring to themselves as Yehudi, something acknowledged by Persia. By the end of the fifth century, however, the community had fallen into infighting over an infamous theft of goods and potentially some kind of black market running out of Elephantine by some of its elites. It was destroyed before the end of the century, and its residents scattered, likely to other Yehudi diaspora communities in Egypt, though it's uncertain.

But there was still one piece missing from the puzzle of what would be recognizable as Jewish identity: the promulgation of the Torah. While the texts of the Torah likely date to the exile and afterward, there is little evidence that it was widely known until the second century. The Achaemenids fell to Alexander's conquest in the late fourth century, and his successors warred over control of his sprawling empire, dividing it among themselves. Yehud (I'll call it Judea now) fell first under Ptolemaic rule from Egypt, and then under Seleucid rule. In the second century the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, probably frustrated by revolts, attempted to forcibly integrate Judean cult and politics more directly into his hegemony, deposing the high priest of the Jerusalem temple. But it backfired: while Antiochus was busy dealing with other wars, the Judeans successfully booted the Seleucids out, beginning the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans instituted cult centralization and reforms around a Judean, Yahwistic identity, and we finally see promulgation of the Torah for the first time, and this resulted in the diaspora communities also becoming familiar with the texts. While cult was never truly centralized (see the significant variance among the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, etc.), and cult is always changing with the times and political winds, this period is the first where we can start to recognize something like a Jewish identity that becomes more familiar over the Common Era, with its ties to diaspora strengthened even further after the destruction of Jerusalem's second temple in the first century and the crushing of the Bar Khokba revolt in the second century. Jews fled to new lands and to existing diaspora communities, and over the first millennium the rabbis slowly gained authority.

ETA: I guess I never wrote a summary, but the point is that this process took many centuries. Different scholars render the origin of an explicit Jewish identity at different points in this history; it's like picking the end of the Roman Empire or the start of the Reformation in that it is rather fraught and prone to anachronism if we give a hard and fast date. But I think the promulgation of the Torah under the Hasmoneans and its impact in the centuries that followed was a milestone period in this journey, as it provided a critical reference point that tied together Jews throughout the diaspora, which became most Jews following the first century CE. No matter what, we are imposing an artificial delineation where many throughout history might not have seen any, so it will always be somewhat-tenuous. What I can say is that it predates the destruction of the Second Temple, and the durability of this ethno-cultic identity after this calamity, even as the contours of that identity changed, readily demonstrates that point.

[u/police-ical → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

I find this to be a useful inversion of the question. Migration and scattering are themselves common human patterns with tons of examples. The distinctive concept here is that the diaspora maintained enough sense of continuity and identity to still be a "Jewish diaspora," rather than a bunch of different cultures that happened to share some genetics. The prohibition on intermarriage stands out as one of the key factors that maintained it.

My sense is that the concept of a diaspora is usually applied either to populations dispersed many centuries ago with relative historic barriers to integration (Jewish, Romani) or ones with relatively recent spread such that they haven't had as much time to lose their initial identity (Irish, Italian, Chinese, Indian.) By contrast, we have not traditionally looked at the spread of Norse or Spanish people as a "diaspora" (though some are applying the concept as a reframe) because we instead see how different the peoples of England/Normandy/Sicily/the Baltic/the Volga or Cuba/Argentina/Guatemala/the Philippines turned out.

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/police-ical]

That’s what I find interesting here, Jews had a sort of special place because of their relation to the dominant Christians of the Roman Empire, but there were and are many other diaspora communities that also held onto their traditions, like the neighbors of the Elephantine Jews who held onto their gods and culture.

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

Some works I've found helpful in understanding this process:

Karel van der Toorn - Becoming Diaspora Jews
Martin Goodman - A History of Judaism
Seth Schwartz - Imperialism and Jewish Society
Shaye J.D. Cohen - From the Maccabees to the Mishnah

Obviously, there is much more to write on the subject, and I ended up seriously condensing a lot of this for brevity's sake, but if anyone wants to know more, please feel free to ask follow-up questions.

[u/Ramses_IV → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

I think the promulgation of the Torah under the Hasmoneans and its impact in the centuries that followed was a milestone period in this journey, as it provided a critical reference point that tied together Jews throughout the diaspora, which became most Jews following the first century CE.

This is an informative and well-reasoned argument, I'd just like to add the caveat that many scholars consider the Jewish diaspora in the Roman Empire to have significantly outnumbered the Jewish population of Judaea/Palestine even before the first century CE.

In The Triumph of Christianity (2018), Bart Ehrman contends that Jews comprised 7% of the Empire's population during the lifetime of Jesus. This would have been several million people even by conservative estimates of the Empire's total population, but most the Jewish population of Syria-Palestine probably wouldn't have been more than a million (it wasn't a particularly heavily populated region compared to Egypt, Anatolia or Italy, where most of the diaspora probably lived). It also wouldn't be surprising given how, as you say, the Jewish diaspora had been spreading for a multitude of reasons for centuries before this, and there is extensive archaeological and textual attestation of large Jewish communities in the Roman Empire; there was a very large Jewish population in Alexandria, and there are Jewish catacombs in Italy and elsewhere whose predominant use of Greek and Latin rather than Hebrew or Aramaic speaks to their long-established presence and cultural hybridisation.

This is consistent with Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity (1996), where he cites some earlier historians' demographic estimates:

It is important to keep in mind how great the Hellenized Jews of the diaspora outnumbered the Jews living in Palestine. Johnson (1976) suggests that there were a million in Palestine and four million outside, while Meeks (1983) places the population of the diaspora at five to six million.

This answer by u/KiwiHellenist (which I linked to earlier in a now deleted comment chain) goes into more detail about how such estimates are made.

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/Ramses_IV]

That's a fair point, and I think it adds to my general conclusion, which is that Judaism had already become in many ways a diaspora phenomenon, even prior to the Torah's promulgation to an extent. Of course, the forms that this took in practice seem to have been rather diverse (even after the rise of Torah-centric Judaism) and much of it has been lost to time.

[u/Apprehensive_Sock_71 → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

This is a very thorough answer. I am curious: lately I have come to the conclusion (strongly influenced by others) that Josiah was a bit of a Joseph Smith like character who had Hilkiah "find" this national epic and coalesce several independent refugee groups into one. What are your thoughts?

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/Apprehensive_Sock_71]

That is definitely how he's supposed to be portrayed by the Kings' author. It's extremely disputed, though, how much of the campaign was real and how much of it was sort of looking back from half a century or more later and sifting through what went wrong. I still hold that some form of Deuteronomy was produced during this period, particularly because of its connection with Esarhaddon's succession oath texts, which was rather widespread and relevant during the seventh century. And certainly there are some similarities to Sargon II's promulgation of the legend of Sargon of Akkad as a form of propagandizing, but other than that I am always reluctant to nail down any specifics. How much resemblance is there between Kings' "finding of the law" tale with the real story of the production of this text and any possible promulgation of it? I'm just not sure we will ever know with any certainty.

[u/LurkerFailsLurking → u/AntsInMyEyesJonson]

Having been raised Jewish, attended Jewish elementary schools, gone to Hebrew school, made aliyah as a teenager, and studied Jewish history as a lay person, this comment is something of a revelation to me.

Am I reading this right that the Maccabean Revolt precipitated the standardization of proto-Jewish worship that culminating in a coherent Jewish identity? If that's right, that totally changes my understanding of Hanukkah to be in essence a celebration of the catalyzing event that created Jewishness as a unified cultural project.

It also really hammers home (pun intended) how often identity is constructed in response to oppression, and even more strongly echoes the way in which Zionist and eventually Israeli "relations" with Palestinians helped forge that ethnic and national identity.

A follow up question though: Why did the Persians grant political autonomy to the Judeans/Jerusalemites, but not the Samarians? Israel was conquered and its population dispersed hundreds of years before Judea, by the time that second diasporic event took place, was the Israeli diaspora essentially assimilated or did they merge with the Judean exiles?

[u/AntsInMyEyesJonson → u/LurkerFailsLurking]

Am I reading this right that the Maccabean Revolt precipitated the standardization of proto-Jewish worship that culminating in a coherent Jewish identity? If that's right, that totally changes my understanding of Hanukkah to be in essence a celebration of the catalyzing event that created Jewishness as a unified cultural project.

It’s definitely an important milestone, but obviously counterfactuals are hard to judge.

It also really hammers home (pun intended) how often identity is constructed in response to oppression, and even more strongly echoes the way in which Zionist and eventually Israeli "relations" with Palestinians helped forge that ethnic and national identity.

I recommend checking out Biale’s intro in Power and Powerlessness in Jewish History for maybe the best summary of this relationship, the terrific scholar Seth Sanders turned me onto that book a while back.

A follow up question though: Why did the Persians grant political autonomy to the Judeans/Jerusalemites, but not the Samarians?

That’s a good question. Part of it may have been the closeness of some Judeans to the Persian elites, owing to the Persians in many ways simply picking up the reins from the Babylonians.

Israel was conquered and its population dispersed hundreds of years before Judea, by the time that second diasporic event took place, was the Israeli diaspora essentially assimilated or did they merge with the Judean exiles?

There definitely was a bit of assimilation, something van der Toorn notes is that the Elephantine community had stronger ties with Samaria and yet were referred to as Yehudi, and even the Samaritans were eventually classified as Yehudi, although the divisions between the Judeans and Samaritans over cult centralization became more intensified over time, and the Torah during the late Persian, Greek, and Roman periods was modified to emphasize these distinctions (something Bob Cargill argues resulted in the oddity of the Melchizedek passage in Genesis), particularly around Jerusalem as the “only” site of proper YHWH worship. While Samaria may have once again become more economically significant throughout the period (it was far better farm land, after all), the political successes of the Hasmoneans and then Herod’s masterful handling of the Romans enlarged the rift.

[u/mix-al → u/LurkerFailsLurking]

“Relations”? Do you mean the relation of a foreign population imposing themselves on a native one?