Jewish Diaspora - Dispersion of The Jews in The Roman Empire

Dispersion of The Jews in The Roman Empire

See also: History of the Jews in the Roman Empire

Following the 1st century Great Revolt and the 2nd century Bar Kokhba revolt, the destruction of Judea exerted a decisive influence upon the dispersion of the Jewish people throughout the world, as the centre of worship shifted from the Temple to Rabbinic authority.

Many Jews entered the Diaspora as slaves, after the destruction of the Temple. Evidence for Jews in the Diaspora is scanty, until the fourth century. Presumably, many of these slave populations served as the basis of later communities.

While more Jews lived outside Judea than in, the Romans did not distinguish between Jews inside and outside of Judea. They collected an annual temple tax, thereby treating all Jews as a distinct ethno-national group. Communities in Egypt, Libya and Crete revolted in 115–117 CE, which likely decimated the Jewish Diaspora population. The Christian empire continued the punishment, by which time the church fathers and imperial law argued that, not only were the Jews a distinct, reprehensible ethno-national group, they were a group largely exiled or dispossessed of temple, city and land, for their rejection of Christ, a state it was deemed in which they were to remain in perpetuo.

This notion evolved even though substantial numbers of Jews lived in the land, now under increasingly harsh imperial Roman Christian law, further alienating and marginalizing Jews, and favouring the settlement of largely gentile Christians, of culturally pagan Greco-Roman or Aramaic provenance. It was in this period that Judea became normatively known as Syria Palestina, a name reflecting both the large scale killing of the suppression of the 2nd Jewish revolt, and a Roman policy, pagan, then Christian, to further alienate Jews from the land, ensuring that no Jewish temple, Jerusalem or state ever rose again. During this time the Talmudic thesis of a Jewish people in exile evolved, even as Imperial Christian degrees laid further burdens of taxation, discrimination and social exclusion on Jews in the land and without.

Over the centuries, rather than a few individual events, Jews were eroded into a minority in their historical patria, while the rabbis "Judaized" Judaism, by prescribing only the Hebrew Bible as authoritative, and Hellenistic-Jewish literature, culture and discourse declined sharply from the 2nd century, not only from Imperial Roman suppressions, but also Christian appropriation of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the Septuagint, as its authorized version. Through internal and external pressures, the two communities, Greco-Roman and Jewish, diverged, the former becoming universally Christian, and, in time, self-defined as "Roman", when the emperor granted citizenship to all, and "Greek" became in patristic discourse synonymous with "pagan".

It would enter Arabic, Islamic discourse as "Rumi", the Quranic term for "Roman" or "belonging to the Roman Empire". In the meanwhile, the meme of a Jewish people in exile entered normative mediaeval Jewish, Christian and, in time, Islamic thought and discourse, when Muhammed would address the Jews of Makkah and Madinah as though they themselves had been expelled from the land, twice, by the servants of Allah, as a punishment for their rejection of Jesus and the prophets.

Experts have rejected the popular belief that there was a sudden expulsion of Jews from Palestine in 70 AD that led to the creation of the Diaspora and agree that modern Jewish ancestry owes as much to converts from the first millennium to the beginning of the Middle Ages as it does to the Jews of antiquity. While the myth of exile from Palestine is dismissed by serious Jewish historical scholarship, the destruction of the second temple was responsible for a seismic change in communal Jewish self-perception and of their place in the world. For the generations that followed the event came to represent a fundamental insight about the Jews who were to become an exiled and persecuted people for much of their history.