THE MYTHS AND REALITIES OF “DIASPORA” AND “EXILE”

To understand the myths and the realities behind the idea of a Jewish Nation forming a global Diaspora of “exiles,” two particular events from history must be noted:

A) The siege and fall of Jerusalem to Titus after Jewish guerillas began a series of campaigns against Roman forts. Their massacres of unarmed Roman soldiers and emissaries resulted in a million innocent Jews, who happened to live in Jerusalem, being put to the sword or sold into slavery. This revolt, waged by a minority of hotheads among the people, also resulted in the destruction of the Second Temple of Yahweh in 70 CE.

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B) The Bar-Kokba Revolt of 132-135 CE resulting in a final deportation of Jewish residents of Jerusalem to the slave markets of the East and the gladiatorial arenas of the West. This revolt, ironically, instead of bringing about the Final Messianic Liberation, brought about the issuing of a Roman imperial edict forbidding any further residency of Jews within the city of Jerusalem.

The modern, global Diaspora of Jews has often been mythicized and romanticized as a “Nation of people exiled from their Homeland.” The common Jewish people who were sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem to Severus in 135 CE are often portrayed as representing, in a single group, all the Jews ever historically deported throughout the Middle East by the kings of Assyria and Babylonia. In this way, the image of the destroyed Temple from 70 CE; the image of the common Jews of Jerusalem being sold into slavery after the fall of Jerusalem in 135 CE; and the image of the resulting imperial edict that prohibited Jews, not from residing within Palestine, but only within the city of Jerusalem; have all mythically transformed themselves within the collective consciousness into a single event which is used to explain the genesis and existence of the modern Jewish Diaspora. As our brief tour of 1,061 years of Jewish history has demonstrated, this notion of a global Diaspora formed by “a people exiled from their homeland” is a myth, and is historically without any foundation. As we have seen, whole generations of Jews – long before the rise of Roman power – grew up in lands under Babylonian, Persian, and Greek rule. They often worked within the royal administrations of these empires and naturally preferred to stay where they were. They had comfortable and honored positions in the countries of their birth and upbringing, and had no deep-seated need to move to Judah, a faraway place and society they had never known. The Jews of Babylonia who migrated to Egypt in the late 6th century BCE, just after Cyrus the Persian was crowned King of Babylon in 539, came to number just over one million. At one point, the Hellenized Jewish population of Ptolemaic Alexandria in Egypt, second largest city in the world, made up 40% of the total population. In VI, p. 8 of the “Encyclopedia Judaica,” it is explained that during the Second Temple period – a 600 year period between 539 BCE (the end of the “Babylonian exile”) and 70 CE (the destruction of the Second Temple by Titus) –

“The vast majority of Jews, by choice, did not, and never had, lived in Eretz Israel. They were not exiles in any sense of the word. Centuries before the fall of Jerusalem [in 135 CE] their ancestors had emigrated from Israel voluntarily and had colonized the major centers of population around the Mediterranean and beyond. These Jewish communities were highly successful and prosperous.”

Twenty-two years before the destruction of the Second Temple, and eighty-seven years before the Roman edict forbidding Jews further residence in the city of Jerusalem, primary sources show us that most Jews were not living in Palestine at all, and that they did not, as a “Nation,” get exiled from their “homeland” as a single group in 135 CE. In his “History of the Jews,” professor Paul Johnson writes:

“At the time of the Claudian census in A.D. 48 some 6,944,000 Jews were within the confines of the Roman Empire, plus what Josephus calls the ‘myriads and myriads’ in Babylonia and elsewhere beyond it. One calculation is that during the Herodian period there were about eight million Jews in the world, of whom 2,350,000 to 2,500,000 lived in Palestine, the Jews thus constituting about 10 percent of the Roman Empire. This expanding nation and teeming Diaspora were the sources of Jerusalem’s wealth and influence.”(27)

“The Diaspora, through which Paul and others traveled, was vast. The Roman geographer, Strabo, said that the Jews were a power throughout the inhabited world. There were a million of them in Egypt alone. In Alexandria, perhaps the world’s greatest city after Rome itself, they formed a majority in two out of five quarters.”(28)

History shows us that, in the rising and clashing of Middle Eastern empires, the Jews, along with many other Semitic and non-Semitic peoples, periodically suffered from imperial programs of deportation and the experience of being sold into slavery as spoils of conquest and conflict. History also shows that in the periods of peace, i.e. when a minority of militants weren’t foolishly trying to challenge the empire-of-the-moment, Jews lived throughout these empires as relatively non-persecuted, often privileged, and respected people. As we will see later, all this history will be distorted and manipulated by the secular ideologues of Zionism, who will create the myths of a single Jewish Nation and a Jewish Diaspora of Exiles in order to promote the creation of their Jewish State, and to promote the mass emigration of world Jewry to Palestine in order to make Theodor Herzl’s “National Project” a reality. This pillar of Zionist ideology, based upon a tragic-romanticist distortion of real history, is called the “aliya” to Israel or the “Ingathering of the Exiles.”