Judaism

The Diaspora

The enforced dispersion of the Jews after the botched insurrection against the Romans and the burning of Jerusalem and the Holy Temple in 70 CE, entailed many enormous changes for the expelled survivors. One major ramification was the imposed transformation of the character of the Jewish community in exile with regard to members' affiliation and the basis of attachment to the collective. Due to the termination of Jewish independence or self-rule, Jews were compelled to follow the directives of the local authorities within each location they settled. Instead of natural and, later, voluntary communities in which Jews cultivated their religious and cultural unique identity from birth and then continued and perpetuated their association by free choice, in the Diaspora, the belonging to the community became enforced and compulsory. The rulers of ancient Mesopotamia, Catholic Spain, or Medieval Ukraine, as examples of large concentrations of exiled Jewry, had a similar political preference: to designate and isolate “their” Jews in separate and segregated social enclaves amenable to rigorous control and manipulation. This situation meant that the Jew as an individual citizen did not exist and his or her sole reality was expressed as a component of the community. The personal identity was submerged and taken over by the collective identity. Furthermore, since out of expediency, the hosting authorities usually empowered the Jewish governance to levy taxes on their people, these local community elites accumulated a tremendous amount of power and command over their constituencies, rendering the Jewish community all-inclusive and self-sustaining in every possible walk of life. Hence, while the globalization of Christianity and Islam meant dispatching individual believers to personally expand the horizons of their religion and encounter new worlds and faiths to be subdued, the globalization of Judaism was a humbling experience with introverted and reclusive consequences that made the Jewish communities ever more pestilent and alien in the eyes of their host nations.

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