The Diaspora

Why this Chapter exists

The diaspora is a network, not a list of expulsions.

The Jewish diaspora can be told as a string of disasters. The Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BCE and deported much of its population to Babylonia. The Romans burned the Second Temple, the rebuilt central sanctuary of Jewish worship in Jerusalem, in 70 CE. Spain expelled its Jews in 1492. Waves of mob violence swept the Russian Empire in the late 1800s. Each of these happened, but a list of the times Jews were forced to move says little about what the diaspora was for most of its history.

For century after century, the diaspora worked as a system. Communities from Spain to Iraq to Yemen stayed in touch and answered to the same law. They prayed nearly the same prayers, exchanged letters, scholars, and books, traded along the same routes, and faced toward one place. The forced expulsions belong to the Chapters that tell each region's story. Here, the subject is what held the communities together.

A note on the word

Where the word "diaspora" comes from.

"Diaspora" comes from a Greek word, diaspora, meaning "a scattering," the way a farmer scatters seed. Greek-speaking Jews used it more than two thousand years ago when they translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, in a translation called the Septuagint, made in Alexandria, Egypt. The word has been attached to the Jewish experience ever since.

Today scholars use "diaspora" for many scattered peoples: the Armenian, Greek, Irish, Chinese, Indian, and African diasporas, among others. The Jewish case is one of the historical examples scholars most often use for comparison, partly because it lasted so long and partly because of how tightly it remained connected.

One more note about words. In Hebrew, two different terms get translated as "diaspora," and their meanings differ. Galut means "exile," being driven out, against your will, after a defeat. Tefutzot means "dispersion," simply the fact of Jews living in many places, with no sense of punishment attached.

It started before 70 CE

The diaspora was already old when the Temple fell.

The event often treated as the beginning of the scattering, the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, came when the diaspora was already centuries old and thriving. By the time the Temple fell, Alexandria in Egypt held one of the largest Jewish communities in the world.

After the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem in 586 BCE, many of the deported settled in Babylonia. When Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, their communities spread across the Persian Empire. Babylonia (roughly today's Iraq) stayed a center of Jewish life for more than a thousand years afterward. Alexander the Great's conquests in the 330s and 320s BCE spread Greek culture across the eastern Mediterranean. In the Greek kingdoms that followed, Jewish communities grew in Greek-speaking cities: Alexandria, Antioch (in ancient Syria, today's Turkey), Cyrene (in today's Libya), and far beyond.

Alexandria's Jewish community was big enough, and Greek-speaking enough, that it needed the Bible in Greek, which is why the Septuagint translation was made there. One of its members, the philosopher Philo (born around 20 BCE), wrote a large body of work blending Jewish thought with Greek philosophy. By the first century CE, Philo could name Jewish communities in Rome, Egypt, Syria, Asia Minor, Greece, Cyprus, and Crete, and out past the edge of the Roman world in Babylon. The destruction of 70 CE made the dispersion deeper and more permanent. It did not start it.

Living among Greeks and Romans

A people with its own day, its own table, and its own God.

Picture the Jewish neighborhood of Rome in the time of the emperor Augustus. It lay across the Tiber River, and most of the people in it had come to Italy as captives of war. Their owners freed them, and many became Roman citizens. Philo of Alexandria, writing about those years, says they were freed “without ever having been compelled to alter any of their hereditary or national observances.”

They had synagogues, and they gathered in them “most especially on the sacred sabbath days,” Philo wrote, to study their law together. They collected money from their first fruits and sent it to Jerusalem for the Temple. Philo, pleading with a later emperor for the same treatment, wrote that Augustus knew all of this and left it alone. He never forbade, in Philo’s words, “their assembling for the interpretation of the law.”

The same pattern held from Alexandria to Asia Minor. Jews lived in Greek and Roman cities, some as citizens and others as residents. Whether they counted as citizens was itself disputed, most sharply in Alexandria. They spoke Greek, traded in the markets, and stood apart in a few clear ways. They rested on the seventh day. They kept their own food laws, circumcised their sons, and married among themselves. They had no statue of their God and would not bow to anyone else’s. Roman authorities generally protected those customs in law. Still, the emperors Tiberius and Claudius each expelled Jews from the city of Rome. The Jews of the island of Delos complained to a Roman magistrate that a city decree forbade their customs. He wrote to that city, defending their right “to live according to their own customs, or to bring in contributions for common suppers and holy festivals.”

Their neighbors noticed. Some admired the Jews, some joined them, and some resented them, and in a crisis the resentment could turn into accusation and violence. What those neighbors made of the Jews, from the Alexandria pogrom of 38 CE to the emperor Gaius (Caligula), who demanded to be worshiped, is told in the Adversus Judaeos (Latin for “Against the Jews”) Chapter.

In 115–117 CE, Jews in Cyrene, Egypt, and Cyprus rose against their Greek and Roman neighbors, and the revolt left Cyrene in ruins. The church historian Eusebius, writing two centuries later, records that the rebels first defeated the Greeks, who fled to Alexandria and there imprisoned and killed the city’s Jews, and that the rebels from Cyrene went on to plunder the Egyptian countryside. The emperor sent the commander Marcius Turbo, who, Eusebius writes, “slew many thousands of Jews.” In Alexandria the great synagogue went up in flames, and the community, for centuries one of the largest in the world, was all but wiped out.

What held it together

Six threads kept the diaspora one people.

If communities were spread across thousands of miles, under different rulers, speaking different everyday languages, what stopped them from drifting into unrelated groups who forgot one another? Six connections did most of the work. The sections below follow four of them closely: letters, law, prayer, and language. The Cairo Geniza shows the other two, travel and trade, in its everyday papers.

• A network of letters. Communities wrote to each other constantly, sending legal questions, religious rulings, news, money, and scholarly arguments back and forth across the map.
• One shared law. Wherever they lived, communities followed the same body of Jewish law (called halakhah), with local variation but a common core and a built-in way to settle differences.
• Nearly the same prayers. Communities shared the same core prayers, so a visitor from far away could recognize the service.
• The Jewish languages. Beyond Hebrew, the shared language of prayer and study, many regions grew their own everyday Jewish language: Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic, and more, tying a community both to its neighbors and to the wider Jewish world.
• Texts and people on the move. Scholars, rabbis, merchants, and refugees traveled the network, carrying books and ideas that kept distant communities in step with each other.
• Trade routes. Jewish merchants ran long-distance trading networks that linked the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, moving goods and, with them, contact.

The network of letters

A civilization run by mail.

One defining feature of the Jewish diaspora was a letter-writing network that connected far-apart communities for more than a thousand years. The exact channels changed over the centuries, but the basic pattern held the whole time: a community with a question would write to a recognized center of learning, and the answer would come back and be put into practice.

The clearest early example runs from 589 to 1038 CE, the period of the Geonim. A community anywhere in the Islamic world (Muslim-ruled Spain, Yemen, Persia, Egypt) could send a legal or religious question to the great Jewish academies of Babylonia, in the towns of Sura and Pumbedita. The heads of these academies, called Geonim (singular Gaon), would write back a ruling. These letters and answers (known as responsa, Latin for "answers") meant that academies in Iraq served as a kind of supreme court for communities thousands of miles away. The caliphs, the rulers of the Islamic empire, recognized the academies’ leaders. No army enforced a ruling once it left Babylonia. Communities asked, and followed, because they accepted the academies’ authority.

From the 1000s on, the pattern spread to many centers at once: Spain, southern France, the Rhineland (in today's Germany), Italy, and across the Mediterranean. Communities exchanged questions through a web of overlapping correspondence, and the rulings piled up into a vast written record (the responsa literature) that survives today and is now searchable in digital collections like the Bar-Ilan Responsa Project in Israel.

One law across the world

The same legal system, from Baghdad to Kraków.

Across almost the entire diaspora, communities followed one shared legal tradition, halakhah (Jewish law). The great exception was the Karaites, a medieval Jewish movement that accepted only the written Hebrew Bible and rejected the Talmud. They formed a substantial community inside the same medieval network. The shared law held together for a few practical reasons:

• One core text everyone used. From the early Middle Ages on, the Babylonian Talmud, a huge record of legal debate compiled in the Jewish academies of Babylonia and largely completed around 500 CE, was the foundation almost everywhere. Local customs differed, but the bedrock held.
• Master summaries that traveled. Every so often a scholar would organize the whole sprawling system into a single reference. Maimonides (1138–1204), a scholar and physician born in Córdoba who settled in Egypt, did it in his Mishneh Torah, completed around 1180. Jacob ben Asher did it in the 1300s in his four-part code, the Arba’ah Turim. Joseph Karo's Shulchan Aruch, printed in 1565, became the standard handbook still used today. Moses Isserles of Kraków added notes to it for Ashkenazi practice. Each one circulated widely.
• A way to handle new questions. When a situation came up that the old texts didn't cover, it was settled through those letters (the responsa), which kept the system flexible without breaking its unity.
• Local self-government underneath. Each community ran its own affairs through a religious court (a beit din), a council, and the authority of the local rabbi. Poland’s "Council of Four Lands" (about 1580–1764, told in the Poland and Lithuania Chapter), Lithuania’s own council, the Jewish town-councils of Spain, and the organized communities of the Ottoman Empire all governed themselves. Each stayed inside the same shared legal world.

The result was a legal system that worked across enormous distances yet still allowed for local difference. Menahem Elon traces how this legal system worked in Jewish Law: History, Sources, Principles.

Living under others' rules

The diaspora also lived under laws made by others.

The sections above on letters and law describe the rules Jews made for themselves. Every Jewish community also lived under the laws of whoever ruled it. Those outside laws set what Jews could do, own, and build, and they changed from one ruler to the next. Pre-Christian Rome generally protected Jewish practice by law, as the section on Greek and Roman cities shows. After Rome crushed the Jewish revolt and destroyed the Temple in 70 CE, the emperor Vespasian redirected the yearly Temple tax. Jews across the empire now paid it to the temple of Jupiter on the Capitol in Rome. Christianity became the empire’s official religion in the late 300s CE. In the 400s, Roman law barred Jews from public office and forbade new synagogues. When Islam arose in Arabia in the early 600s, most Jews of the Middle East lived under one of two empires. Christian Rome ruled the Land of Israel, Egypt, and North Africa. Persia ruled Babylonia (today’s Iraq), where the Babylonian Talmud had taken shape over the previous century.

Under classical Islamic rule: the dhimma. Starting with the Arab conquests of the 600s and running for centuries, Islamic law set a defined second-class status for Jews and Christians, and in Persia for Zoroastrians. The status was called the dhimma, and each person under it was a dhimmi ("protected person"). It meant a special tax (the jizya), limits on building or repairing synagogues and churches, special clothing markers in some periods, weaker standing in court, and a bar from certain government jobs. Some of these rules echoed the Roman ban on new synagogues. The Pact of Umar, a list of conditions for Christians under Muslim rule whose date is uncertain, promises to build no new churches or monasteries. Converting to Islam ended the restrictions. Violence broke out at times, as in the 1066 massacre of the Jews of Granada. The Almohads, a strict Muslim dynasty ruling Spain and North Africa in the 1100s, broke with the practice of earlier Muslim rulers and gave Jews the choice to convert, flee, or die. The Dhimma Chapter tells that system’s full history.

Under medieval Christian rule: law shaped by doctrine. Christian Europe based its treatment of Jews on Church teaching, covered in the Adversus Judaeos Chapter. Following Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the Church held that Jews should not be killed or forcibly converted, but should be kept in a subordinate status. Many Christians also blamed Jews for the death of Jesus. That teaching shaped the law. Kings and emperors treated Jews as their personal property. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 ruled that “Jews and Saracens” (Muslims) in every Christian province must be marked off by their dress. The rule was enforced unevenly, and in many places it became the Jewish badge. From 1516, beginning in Venice, cities confined Jews to the walled ghetto, told in its own Chapter. Rulers expelled Jews again and again: England in 1290, France in 1306 and 1394, Spain in 1492, Portugal in 1497 (where most were forcibly converted instead), and many German towns. Outside the law, the blood libel accusation spread, though Pope Innocent IV in 1247 and Pope Gregory X in 1272 rejected it. As under the dhimma, conversion offered an exit.

The historian Mark R. Cohen compares these two worlds in Under Crescent and Cross. He rejects both the idea of an interfaith utopia under Islam and the idea that Jews there were persecuted as they were in Christian Europe. He concludes that relations under medieval Islam were less confrontational and violent than in the Christian West.

Under the racial idea of the late 1800s: no exit through conversion. In 1879 the word “antisemitism” became the name of a political movement in Germany. The movement claimed that Jews were a separate and harmful race, defined by blood rather than belief. The Racial Turn explains how it spread. Recasting Jewishness as blood closed the exit the older systems had usually left open. If being Jewish is inherited and permanent, conversion cannot change it. Spain’s purity-of-blood statutes, beginning at Toledo in 1449, had already held converts’ ancestry against them. What 1879 added was a claimed science, and soon a mass politics. The Nazis would later build on this idea.

Jewish law, prayer, and scholarship, and the philosophy and science covered in Unit 5, were built inside these outside rules.

The same prayers everywhere

Walk into a synagogue far from home and you'd know the service.

A Jew from Poland, Yemen, Italy, or Iran could enter a synagogue elsewhere in the diaspora and recognize the structure of the service. The backbone of the service was the same across nearly every tradition: the Shema (the central declaration of faith), the Amidah (the standing prayer), the public reading of the Torah, and the shape of the Sabbath and holiday services. Local differences lay in the exact wording in spots, the melodies, the religious poems each region added, and local customs.

The first complete Jewish prayer order, the Seder Rav Amram, came out of this network in the 800s CE. Its story is told in the Object Spotlight below.

Later additions traveled the same network. The hymn Lekha Dodi, sung to welcome the Sabbath, was written by the poet Solomon ha-Levi Alkabetz around the middle of the 1500s. It was one of the last poems accepted into the regular service, in both the Sephardic and the Ashkenazi rites.

The Jewish languages

One sacred language, many everyday ones.

The diaspora developed a distinctive language pattern: Hebrew (with Aramaic alongside it) as the shared language of prayer and study everywhere, plus a homegrown everyday language in each region. These everyday languages usually blended the local tongue with a layer of Hebrew and Aramaic, so a community could belong to its host society and to the wider Jewish world at the same time. The major ones:

• Yiddish: the everyday language of Jews in Central and Eastern Europe (the Ashkenazi communities). Built mostly from medieval German with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic mixed in. In the years just before the Holocaust, perhaps ten or eleven million people spoke it, making it the most widely spoken Jewish language. It had a huge newspaper press, a famous theater, school systems, and a large literature (writers like Sholem Aleichem and, later, Nobel winner Isaac Bashevis Singer).
• Ladino (Judeo-Spanish): the language of the Sephardic Jews descended from those expelled from Spain in 1492. Built from medieval Spanish with Hebrew and, in the Ottoman lands, Turkish and Greek. It flourished in cities like Salonika (in today's Greece) and Istanbul. The Holocaust destroyed most of its Balkan communities, and far fewer speak it today.
• Judeo-Arabic: the language of Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, with many regional dialects (Iraqi, Egyptian, Moroccan, Yemenite). Maimonides wrote several of his major works in it.
• Judeo-Persian: spoken by Jewish communities in Iran and Central Asia, with its own literary tradition.
• Judeo-Italian: spoken by the old Jewish communities of Italy.
• Judeo-Greek (Yevanic): spoken by the Romaniote Jews of Greece, one of Europe's oldest Jewish communities.
• Smaller ones: including Judeo-Tat in the Caucasus mountains and Krymchak and Karaim in Crimea.

The Cairo Geniza

A storeroom in Cairo full of everyday evidence.

For a long time, much of this was reconstructed from formal books: law codes, prayer books, the famous responsa. Then one discovery brought the everyday life of the medieval diaspora into view.

In an old synagogue in Cairo, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, there was a geniza: a storeroom where worn-out documents were placed instead of thrown away, because Jewish practice forbids destroying any paper that might carry God's name. For roughly a thousand years, the community had been dropping papers into that room and not clearing it out. When scholars finally examined it at the end of the 1800s, the hoard proved to hold, across all the collections it was dispersed into, around 400,000 fragments.

The hoard held far more than sacred books. It held the ordinary paper trail of real lives: business contracts, marriage agreements, shopping lists, schoolchildren's writing practice, letters between merchants whose trade reached India, complaints, debts, gossip. The historian S. D. Goitein spent decades reading it and produced a six-volume work, A Mediterranean Society. It reconstructs the medieval Jewish world of the Mediterranean in extraordinary detail: what people ate, how they married, how they did business across the sea. The Geniza is the closest we have to a window into how the diaspora network felt from the inside, day to day. The discovery of the storeroom itself (the Cambridge scholar Solomon Schechter, the Ben Ezra Synagogue, the carrying-off of the fragments) is the Object Spotlight of the Continuous Presence Chapter. Here, one specific fragment from it tells the diaspora's story.

Object Spotlight

A prayer book carried across the world, in pieces.

The leaf is brown with age, torn along every edge, and punched through with small holes where the page gave way. It holds two columns of handwritten Hebrew. It looks like a scrap, and it was treated like one: it was placed in a storeroom for worn-out paper and left there for centuries.

This is a page from a siddur (a Jewish prayer book), identified with the Seder Rav Amram tradition. Amram was the first known to arrange the prayers for the whole annual cycle in one systematic order. The word seder means "order."

The Seder Rav Amram was composed in the 800s CE in Babylonia (today's Iraq) by Amram ben Sheshna, the head of the Jewish academy at Sura. The original is long lost. What survives are later copies, with many additions, and this fragment belongs to that tradition. It was recovered from the Cairo Geniza and is now held in the Taylor-Schechter collection at Cambridge University Library in England. An English library holds a copy, found in Egypt, of a book written in Iraq.

The book was not written for Babylonia. It seems to have begun as a responsum, a written answer, sent to the Jewish community of Barcelona in Spain. From there it spread across Spain and to other countries, and versions of it shaped Jewish prayer across much of the Jewish world.

The page itself is ordinary, hard-used paper. The holes, the wear, and the cramped, practical hand show a page that was used, not kept for display. That is what makes the Geniza fragments so valuable to historians: they are the used objects of real lives. At the bottom is a small marking, "T-S AS 67." It is not part of the prayer. It marks the series in Cambridge’s collection where the fragment is shelved, the modern world's label on a centuries-old page.

Once the leaf was worn out, it went into the Geniza with the rest. At the end of the 1800s, scholars carried the storeroom's contents to libraries in Cambridge, Oxford, New York, and elsewhere. The basic order Amram set down in the 800s still stands behind the prayer books in synagogues today, more than eleven hundred years later.

The thread back to the Land

However far they scattered, one place stayed at the center.

For all its spread, the diaspora never let go of a single point of reference: the Land of Israel, and Jerusalem in particular. It was built into daily life. Jews prayed facing Jerusalem, no matter where they stood on earth. The yearly cycle of holidays followed the seasons and harvests of the Land. Three times a day, the Amidah asked for the return to Jerusalem. The Passover meal ends with the line "Next year in Jerusalem." A Jewish presence remained in the Land continuously, and pilgrims and scholars kept traveling there. The Land of Israel and Continuous Presence Chapters tell that story.

What changed in the modern age

The last two centuries rebuilt the map.

The diaspora was never frozen, but the 1800s and 1900s reshaped it more sharply than any stretch before. A few changes stand out:

• Mass migration. Between roughly 1880 and 1924, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe for the United States, a story told in the American Jewry Chapter. The center of gravity of Jewish life began shifting westward across the Atlantic.
• New institutions. Much of the framework of modern Jewish life took shape in this period: major organizations, charitable federations, newspapers, schools, and the academic study of Jewish history itself.
• The Holocaust. The Nazi regime murdered six million European Jews, above all between 1941 and 1945, as told across Unit 4. The Yiddish-speaking world of Poland and Lithuania, which had been the diaspora’s largest cultural center, was almost entirely destroyed. Afterward, the weight of Jewish life shifted toward Israel and the United States, where most survivors leaving the displaced-persons camps made new homes.
• The founding of Israel in 1948. For the whole length of the diaspora, the Land had been both the center of prayer and one community among many. The creation of the State of Israel changed that relationship: a Jewish state and a worldwide diaspora, distinct but deeply connected.
• Departures from the Middle East and North Africa. Between about 1945 and 1972, some 850,000 Jews left or were forced out of the Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Some of those communities were more than two thousand years old. After Iran’s 1979 revolution, some 60,000 to 70,000 more left Iran over the following decades. The Departure from MENA Chapter tells that history.
• Departures from the Soviet Union. Between 1968 and 2000, about 1.6 million Jews and their family members left the Soviet Union and the states that replaced it, most of them after 1989. About one million went to Israel. The Soviet Jewry Chapter tells that history.

The diaspora continues. In 2024 about 15.8 million Jews lived worldwide. The largest communities were in Israel and the United States, followed by France, Canada, Britain, and Argentina. The basic pattern persists: separate communities across the world, tied together by shared institutions and memory.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• Ancient & Classical World History: Jewish communities in the Persian, Greek, and Roman worlds, and Roman law on Jewish practice.
• World History & Belief Systems: one of the longest-running examples of how a faith community holds together across huge distances.
• Medieval & Early-Modern World History: the medieval Mediterranean diaspora (the Cairo Geniza and the responsa) and the Sephardic world rebuilding after 1492 across the Ottoman, Italian, and Atlantic regions.
• Geography & Migration: the diaspora as a working network across Asia, Africa, and Europe, and later the Americas.
• Comparative Diasporas: the Jewish case beside the Armenian, Greek, Irish, Chinese, Indian, and African diasporas.
• Languages & Linguistics: Yiddish, Ladino, and Judeo-Arabic, the diaspora’s regional Jewish languages.
• Historical Thinking & Source Analysis: reading and combining the Geniza documents and the responsa.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Global History & Geography: 9.2 (Belief Systems).
• Common Core ELA-Literacy: RH.6–8.7, RH.9–10.9, and RH.11–12.7 / RH.11–12.9 (integrating and comparing multiple sources): the Geniza documents and the responsa.
• C3 Framework: D2.His.1 (Jewish life shaped by its time, place, and rulers), D2.His.4 (the perspectives of Philo and a Roman magistrate), and D2.His.10 (the limits of fragmentary Geniza evidence).

Further Teaching Resources

• Bar-Ilan University, the Responsa Project, the searchable archive of the letters-and-answers tradition that connected the diaspora for centuries (a paid subscription service, and an advanced resource for teachers).