![]() ![]() God will also restore Israel-when it repents. Israel did not freely abandon its land but was removed from it by God Israel’s own agency was limited to its free choice to commit the sins for which it was punished. Dispersion is a stage in Israel’s theological narrative. It is a term whose connotations are overwhelmingly theological. 1 It thus overlaps with exile ( golah galut), though it is not quite coextensive with it. In the Hebrew Bible, tefutzah or nefutzah (the Greek translation is diaspora) refers to the scattering of the Israelites among the nations, most often as divine punishment for Israel’s sins. Even in Asia Minor, normally understood as the best-case scenario for Jews under Roman rule, the evidence indicates that Jewish life in the Roman imperial period was more fragile, constrained, fraught, and impermanent than is often supposed.ĭiaspora, Actors’ or Observers’ Category?įor at least some ancient Jews, “diaspora,” which has since the 1990s become a central term in cultural anthropology and postcolonial studies, was a native category. In Egypt, this led at once to the ultimately lethal-for the Jews, anyhow-three-way competition between Jews, Greeks, and Egyptians. Intentionally or not, in the cities of the east (and the big villages of Egypt) the Romans fomented discord between different elements of the population. The main lesson is that the onset of Roman rule created crises around the integration of the Jews into their host societies. ![]() But we can follow the evidence where it exists. It is not known to what extent diaspora Jews were emigrants from Palestine and their descendants nor do we know how numerous they were. Yet “diaspora” retains analytic utility for historians, if taken to refer to the geographically and temporally varied modes of Jewish life outside Palestine. But its import was primarily theological: God punished the Jews for their sins by dispersing them from their native land of Israel. For some ancient Jews, “diaspora” (together with its cognates) was an actor’s and not an observer’s term.
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