Diaspora

Jewish Diaspora

The dispersal of Jewish populations throughout history has often been cited as a classic example of diaspora. Its origins in recorded history begin with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and the Babylonian conquest of the kingdom of Judah in the 6th century b.c.e. by Nebuchadnezzar and his military forces. For decades, Jewish communities existed outside Judah, in the Babylonian Empire and Egypt; though there was a return to the capital of Jerusalem under the leadership of Persian ruler Cyrus the Great, who allowed the reconstruction of the Temple, “Babylon” became a metaphor for exile within Jewish religious and secular texts, and the exilic experience has been recorded in the Hebrew Bible. Despite the opportunity to return, many Jews remained in the settlements that had been established outside Judah; with the ability to retain their language and culture, these populations thrived in what is today Iraq. Centuries later, the Temple was destroyed for a second time in the 1st century c.e., when Jerusalem was under the Roman Empire. In the following century, Roman soldiers crushed Jewish independence movements and the name of the state was changed from Judea (what had formerly been Judah as well as Samaria) to Syria-Palestine.

In subsequent centuries, the rise of Jewish communities throughout the Asian, African, and European continents under various powers (first empires and later nations) meant populations that acclimated to the cultures that surrounded them; they therefore developed different ethnic identifications, such as Sephardi, Ashkenazi, and Mizrahi. Nevertheless, there remained identification with a Jewish homeland, the capital of which was Jerusalem.

Jewish migration to the Americas began at the conclusion of the 17th century. Fleeing the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition that began in the 15th century, many were forced to convert to Catholicism (conversos) or migrate to other European nations such as Britain, France, and the Netherlands. Some moved to Spanish and French holdings in the Western Hemisphere; there remain small communities throughout the region, including in Curação, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Jamaica, among other islands.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, there was large-scale migration to the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. As a result of pogroms in the Russian Empire, more than two million fled to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the same time period, Argentina encouraged Jewish immigration as a means to increase the general population and cultivate large swaths of land, resulting in the creation of the largest Jewish community in Latin America. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of survivors migrated to North America. Today there are more than five and a half million men, women, and children who claim Jewish heritage throughout the Americas.

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