Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people in whole or in part. The term was coined in 1944 by Raphael Lemkin. It is defined in Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide
(CPPCG) of 1948 as "any of the following acts committed with intent to
destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious
group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical
destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent
births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the
group to another group."
The preamble to the CPPCG states that "genocide is a crime under international law, contrary to the spirit and aims of the United Nations
and condemned by the civilized world", and it also states that "at all
periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity." Genocide is widely considered to be the epitome of human evil, and has been referred to as the "crime of crimes". The Political Instability Task Force estimated that 43 genocides occurred between 1956 and 2016, resulting in 50 million deaths. The UNHCR estimated that a further 50 million had been displaced by such episodes of violence.
The debate continues over what legally constitutes genocide. One definition is any conflict that the International Criminal Court
has so designated. Mohammed Hassan Kakar argues that the definition
should include political groups or any group so defined by the
perpetrator. He prefers the definition from Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, which
defines genocide as "a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state
or other authority intends to destroy a group so defined by the
perpetrator."
In literature, some scholars have popularly emphasized the role that the Soviet Union played in excluding political groups from the international definition of genocide, which is contained in the Genocide Convention of 1948, and in particular they have written that Joseph Stalin may have feared greater international scrutiny of the political killings that occurred in the country, such as the Great Purge; however, this claim is not supported by evidence. The Soviet view was
shared and supported by many diverse countries, and they were also in
line with Raphael Lemkin's original conception, and it was originally promoted by the World Jewish Congress.
Historical genocides
The Holocaust heavily influences the popular understanding of genocide, as mass killing of innocent people based on their ethnic identity.
Raphael Lemkin applied the concept of genocide to a wide variety of events throughout human history. He and other scholars date the first genocides to prehistoric times. Ancient sources like the Hebrew Bible have been cited by some scholars as acts of genocide although this is criticised by biblical scholars who argue that such a description is anachronistic. Genocide in the ancient world often consisted of the massacre of men
and the enslavement or forced assimilation of women and children—often limited to a particular town or city rather than applied to a larger group. Potential medieval examples are found in Europe, even though experts caution against applying a modern term like genocide to such events. Overall, premodern examples that can be considered genocide were relatively uncommon. Beginning in the early modern period, racial ideologies emerged as a more important factor.
According to Frank Chalk, Helen Fein,
and Kurt Jonassohn, if a dominant group of people had little in common
with a marginalized group of people, it was easy for the dominant group
to define the marginalized group as a subhuman group; the marginalized group might be labeled a threat that must be eliminated.
The expansion of various European colonial powers, such as the British and Spanish Empires, and the subsequent establishment of colonies on indigenous territory frequently involved acts of genocidal violence against indigenous groups in the Americas (including Brazil, Paraguay, Canada, and the United States), Australia, Africa, and Asia. According to Lemkin, colonisation was in itself intimately connected with genocide. He saw genocide as a two-phase process: in the first, the indigenous
population's way of life was destroyed; and in the second, the newcomers
impose their way of life on the indigenous group.
According to David Maybury-Lewis,
imperial and colonial forms of genocide are enacted in two main ways,
either through the deliberate clearing of territories of their original
inhabitants to make them exploitable for purposes of resource extraction
or colonial settlements, or through enlisting indigenous peoples as forced laborers in colonialist or imperialist projects of resource extraction. The designation of specific events as genocidal is often controversial.
During the 17th century Beaver Wars,
the Iroquois destroyed several large tribal confederacies—including the
Mohicans, Huron, Neutral, Erie, Susquehannock, and northern
Algonquins—with extreme brutality. The exterminatory nature of the mode
of warfare practised by the Iroquois caused some historians to label
these events as acts of genocide.
A group of 34 non-governmental organizations and 31 individuals, calling themselves African Citizens, referred to the Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide report prepared by a panel headed by former Botswana president Quett Masire for the Organisation of African Unity, which later became the African Union. African Citizens highlighted the sentences, commenting: "Indisputably,
the most important truth that emerges from our investigation is that the
Rwandan genocide could have been prevented by those in the
international community who had the position and means to do so. ... The
world failed Rwanda. ... [The United Nations] simply did not care
enough about Rwanda to intervene appropriately." Chidi Odinkalu, former head of the National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria, was among those involved with African Citizens.
On 20 November 2021, Genocide Watch predicted genocide in Ethiopia, in the context of the war in Tigray and also the violence across the Oromia, and the Benishangul-Gumuz (Metekel) regions that worsened since 2018. On 21 November, Odinkalu called for genocide prevention, stating: "We
need to focus on an urgent programme of Genocide Prevention advocacy on
Ethiopia NOW. It may be too late in 2 weeks, guys." On 26 November, African Citizens and Alton, Clark, and Lapsley also called for the predicted genocide to be prevented.
The Rohingya genocide is an ongoing genocide of the MuslimRohingya people consisting of arson, rape, ethnic cleansing, and infanticide by the Burmese military.
The genocide has so far consisted of two phases so: the first was a
military crackdown that occurred from October 2016 to January 2017, and
the second has been occurring since August 2017.
The Chinese government has engaged in a series of human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang. Legislatures in several countries, including Canada, the United Kingdom, and France, have passed non-binding motions describing China's actions as genocide.
The United States officially denounced China's treatment of Uyghurs as a
genocide.
International prosecution
Ad hoc tribunals
Gravestones at the Potočari genocide memorial near Srebrenica
Exhumed mass grave of Srebrenica massacre victims in 2007
In July 1995, Serbian forces killed more than 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), mainly men and boys, both in and around the town of Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. The killing was perpetrated by units of the Army of Republika Srpskawhich were under the command of General Ratko Mladić. The Secretary-General of the United Nations described the mass murder as the worst crime on European soil since the Second World War. A paramilitary unit from Serbia known as the Scorpions, officially a part of the Serbian Interior Ministry until 1991, participated in the massacre, along with several hundred Russian and Greek volunteers.
In 2001, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia delivered its first conviction for the crime of genocide, against General Krstić
for his role in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre (on appeal he was found
not guilty of genocide but was instead found guilty of aiding and
abetting genocide).
In February 2007, the International Court of Justice returned a judgment in the Bosnian Genocide Case.
It upheld the findings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia that genocide had been committed in and around
Srebrenica but did not find that genocide had been committed on the
wider territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war. The court also ruled that Serbia
was not responsible for the genocide nor was it responsible for "aiding
and abetting it", although it ruled that Serbia could have done more to
prevent the genocide and that Serbia failed to punish the perpetrators. Before this ruling, the term Bosnian Genocide had been used by some academics and human rights officials.
In 2010, Vujadin Popović, Lieutenant Colonel and the Chief of Security of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb Army, and Ljubiša Beara, Colonel
and Chief of Security of the same army, were convicted of genocide,
extermination, murder and persecution by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia for their role in the Srebrenica
massacre and were each sentenced to life in prison. In 2016 and 2017, Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić were sentenced for genocide.
German courts handed down convictions for genocide during the Bosnian War. Novislav Djajic
was indicted for his participation in the genocide, but the Higher
Regional Court failed to find that there was sufficient certainty for a
criminal conviction for genocide. Nevertheless, Djajic was found guilty
of 14 counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. At Djajic's appeal on 23 May 1997, the Bavarian Appeals Chamber found that acts of genocide were committed in June 1992, confined within the administrative district of Foca. The Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of Düsseldorf, in September 1997, handed down a genocide conviction against Nikola Jorgic, a Bosnian Serb from the Doboj region who was the leader of a paramilitary group located in the Doboj region. He was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment for his involvement in genocidal actions that took place in regions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, other than Srebrenica. On 29 November 1999, the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht) of
Düsseldorf "condemned Maksim Sokolovic to 9 years in prison for aiding
and abetting the crime of genocide and for grave breaches of the Geneva
Conventions."
Rwanda
The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) is a court under the auspices of the United Nations for the prosecution of offences committed during the Rwandan genocide
during April and May 1994, commencing on 6 April. The ICTR was created
on 8 November 1994 by the UN Security Council to resolve claims in
Rwanda, or by Rwandan citizens in nearby states, between 1 January and
31 December 1994. For approximately 100 days from the assassination of
President Juvénal Habyarimana on 6 April through mid-July, at least 800,000 people were killed according to a Human Rights Watch estimate.
As of mid-2011, the ICTR had convicted 57 people and acquitted 8. Another ten persons were still on trial while one (Bernard Munyagishari) is awaiting trial; nine remain at large. The first trial, of Jean-Paul Akayesu, ended in 1998 with his conviction for genocide and crimes against humanity. Jean Kambanda,
the interim prime minister during the genocide, pleaded guilty. This
was the world's first conviction for genocide, as defined by the 1948
Convention.
The Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, Ta Mok,
and others, perpetrated the mass killing of ideologically suspect
groups, ethnic minorities such as ethnic Vietnamese, Chinese or
Sino-Khmers, Chams, and Thais, former civil servants, former government
soldiers, Buddhist monks, secular intellectuals and professionals, and
former city dwellers. Khmer Rouge cadres who were defeated in factional
struggles were also liquidated in purges. Man-made famine and slave
labor resulted in many hundreds of thousands of deaths. Craig Etcheson suggested that the death toll was between 2 and
2.5 million, with a most likely figure of 2.2 million. After spending
five years excavating 20,000 grave sites, he concluded that "these mass
graves contain the remains of 1,386,734 victims of execution." One researcher, Steven Rosefielde,
representing a minority opinion, argued that the Khmer Rouge were not
racist by claiming that they did not intend to exterminate ethnic
minorities, and he also stated that the Khmer Rouge did not intend to
exterminate the Cambodian people as a whole; in his view, the Khmer
Rouge's brutality was the product of an extreme version of communist
ideology.
On 6 June 2003, the Cambodian government and the United Nations reached an agreement to set up the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which would focus exclusively on crimes committed by the most senior Khmer Rouge officials during the period of Khmer Rouge rule of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. The judges were sworn in during early July 2006. The investigating judges were presented with the names of five possible suspects by the prosecution on 18 July 2007:
Khieu Samphan at a public hearing before the pre-trial Cambodia Tribunal on 3 July 2009
Kang Kek Iew
was formally charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity and
detained by the Tribunal on 31 July 2007. He was indicted on charges of
war crimes and crimes against humanity on 12 August 2008. His appeal was rejected on 3 February 2012, and he continued serving a sentence of life imprisonment.
Nuon Chea,
a former prime minister, was indicted on charges of genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and several other crimes under
Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody
of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial began on 27 June 2011.On 16 November 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison for genocide.
Khieu Samphan,
a former head of state, was indicted on charges of genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and several other crimes under
Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody
of the ECCC on 19 September 2007. His trial also began on 27 June 2011. On 16 November 2018, he was sentenced to life in prison for genocide.
Ieng Sary,
a former foreign minister, was indicted on charges of genocide, war
crimes, crimes against humanity, and several other crimes under
Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. He was transferred into the custody
of the ECCC on 12 November 2007. His trial began on 27 June 2011. He died in March 2013.
Ieng Thirith,
wife of Ieng Sary and a former minister for social affairs, was
indicted on charges of genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity,
and several other crimes under Cambodian law on 15 September 2010. She
was transferred into the custody of the ECCC on 12 November 2007.
Proceedings against her have been suspended pending a health evaluation.
Some of the international jurists and the Cambodian government
disagreed over whether any other people should be tried by the Tribunal.
The racial conflict in Darfur, Sudan, which started in 2003, was declared a genocide by United States Secretary of StateColin Powell on 9 September 2004 in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Since that time however, no other permanent member of the UN Security Council has followed suit. In January 2005, an International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, authorized by UN Security Council Resolution 1564 of 2004, issued a report stating that "the Government of the Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide." Nevertheless, the Commission cautioned that "The conclusion that no
genocidal policy has been pursued and implemented in Darfur by the
Government authorities, directly or through the militias under their
control, should not be taken in any way as detracting from the gravity
of the crimes perpetrated in that region. International offences such as
the crimes against humanity and war crimes that have been committed in
Darfur may be no less serious and heinous than genocide."
In March 2005, the Security Council formally referred the
situation in Darfur to the ICC, taking into account the Commission
report but without mentioning any specific crimes. Two permanent members of the Security Council, the United States and China, abstained from the vote on the referral resolution. As of his fourth report to the Security Council, the Prosecutor found
"reasonable grounds to believe that the individuals identified [in the UN Security Council Resolution 1593] have committed crimes against humanity and war crimes", but did not find sufficient evidence to prosecute for genocide.
In April 2007, the ICC issued arrest warrants against the former Minister of State for the Interior, Ahmad Harun, and a Janjaweed militia leader, Ali Kushayb, for crimes against humanity and war crimes. On 14 July 2008, the ICC filed ten charges of war crimes against Sudan's president Omar al-Bashir, three counts of genocide, five of crimes against humanity,
and two of murder. Prosecutors claimed that al-Bashir "masterminded and
implemented a plan to destroy in substantial part" three tribal groups
in Darfur because of their ethnicity. On 4 March 2009, the ICC issued a warrant for al-Bashir's arrest for
crimes against humanity and war crimes but not for genocide. This is the
first warrant issued by the ICC against a sitting head of state.
On 29 December 2023, South Africa filed an application instituting proceedings with the International Court of Justice against Israel,
alleging that it had violated its obligations under the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the "Genocide
Convention") during its 2023 offensive in the Gaza Strip. South Africa's standing is based on the erga omnes partes
nature of the Genocide Convention, which allows and obligates States
Parties to the convention to take measures to prevent and punish the
crime of genocide. South Africa requested indication of provisional
measures by the court, including that Israel end its military
operations, to "protect against further, severe and irreparable harm to
the rights of the Palestinian people under the Genocide Convention",
triggering an urgent preliminary hearing. Public hearings on the
provisional measures question were held on 11 January (oral arguments by
South Africa) and 12 January (oral arguments by Israel), respectively.
Scene from Lachish reliefs: Judahites from Lachish in Assyrian captivity, playing the lyre (cf. Psalm 137 from a later period: 'they that carried us away captive required of us a song'.)
The Jewish diaspora (Hebrew: גוֹלָהgōlā), alternatively the dispersion (תְּפוּצָהtəfūṣā) or the exile (גָּלוּתgālūṯ; Yiddish: גלותgōləs), consists of Jews who reside outside of the Land of Israel. Historically, it refers to the expansive scattering of the Israelites out of their homeland in the Southern Levant and their subsequent settlement in other parts of the world, which gave rise to the various Jewish communities.
A Jewish diaspora population existed for many centuries before the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. In the preceding Second Temple period,
it existed as a consequence of various factors, including the creation
of political and war refugees, enslavement, deportation, overpopulation,
indebtedness, military employment, and opportunities in business,
commerce, and agriculture. Prior to the mid-1st century CE, in addition to Judea, Syria, and Babylonia, large Jewish communities existed in the Roman provinces of Egypt, Crete and Cyrenaica, and in Rome itself. In 6 CE, most of the Southern Levant was organized as the Roman province of Judaea, where a large uprising led to the First Jewish–Roman War, which destroyed the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem. The Jewish defeat to the Roman army and the accompanying elimination of the symbolic centre of Jewish identity (the Temple in Jerusalem) marked the end of Second Temple Judaism,
motivating many Jews to formulate a new self-definition and adjust
their existence to the prospect of an indefinite period of displacement. Nevertheless, intermittent warfare between Jewish nationalists and the Roman Empire continued for several decades. In 129/130 CE, the Roman emperor Hadrian ordered the construction of Aelia Capitolina over the ruins of Jerusalem, sparking the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 CE. Led by Simon bar Kokhba, this uprising endured for four years, but was ultimately unsuccessful and became the last of the Jewish–Roman wars;
Jews were massacred or displaced across the province, banned from
Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, and forbidden to practice Judaism, leading to a significant rise in the Jewish diaspora.
Diaspora has been a common phenomenon for many peoples since
antiquity, but what is particular about the Jewish instance is the
pronounced negative, religious, indeed metaphysical connotations
traditionally attached to dispersion and exile (galut), two conditions which were conflated. The English term diaspora, which entered usage as late as 1876, and the Hebrew word galut
though covering a similar semantic range, bear some distinct
differences in connotation. The former has no traditional equivalent in
Hebrew usage.
Steven Bowman
argues that diaspora in antiquity connoted emigration from an ancestral
mother city, with the emigrant community maintaining its cultural ties
with the place of origin. Just as the Greek city exported its surplus
population, so did Jerusalem, while remaining the cultural and religious
centre or metropolis (ir-va-em be-yisrael) for the outlying communities. It could have two senses in Biblical terms, the idea of becoming a 'guiding light unto the nations'
by dwelling in the midst of gentiles, or of enduring the pain of exile
from one's homeland. The conditions of diaspora in the former case were
premised on the free exercise of citizenship or resident alien status.
Galut implies by comparison living as a denigrated minority, stripped of
such rights, in the host society. Sometimes diaspora and galut are defined as 'voluntary' as opposed to 'involuntary' exile. Diaspora, it has been argued, has a political edge, referring to
geopolitical dispersion, which may be involuntary, but which can assume,
under different conditions, a positive nuance. Galut is more teleological, and connotes a sense of uprootedness. Daniel Boyarin defines diaspora as a state where people have a dual cultural allegiance, productive of a double consciousness,
and in this sense a cultural condition not premised on any particular
history, as opposed to galut, which is more descriptive of an
existential situation, that properly of exile, conveying a particular
psychological outlook.
The Greek word διασπορά (dispersion) first appears as a neologism in the translation of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint, where it occurs 14 times, starting with a passage reading: ἔση διασπορὰ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς ('thou shalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth', Deuteronomy 28:25),
translating 'ləza'ăwāh', whose root suggests 'trouble, terror'. In
these contexts it never translated any term in the original Tanakh drawn from the Hebrew rootglt (גלה), which lies behind galah, and golah, nor even galuth.Golah appears 42 times, and galuth in 15 passages, and first occurs in the 2 Kings 17:23's reference to the deportation of the Judean elite to Babylonia. Stéphane Dufoix, in surveying the textual evidence, draws the following conclusion:
galuth and diaspora are drawn from two
completely different lexicons. The first refers to episodes, precise and
datable, in the history of the people of Israel, when the latter was
subjected to a foreign occupation, such as that of Babylon, in which
most of the occurrences are found. The second, perhaps with a single
exception that remains debatable, is never used to speak of the past and
does not concern Babylon; the instrument of dispersion is never the
historical sovereign of another country. Diaspora is the word for
chastisement, but the dispersion in question has not occurred yet: it
is potential, conditional on the Jews not respecting the law of God. . .
It follows that diaspora belongs, not to the domain of history, but of theology.'
In Talmudic and post-Talmudic Rabbinic literature, this phenomenon was referred to as galut (exile), a term with strongly negative connotations, often contrasted with geula (redemption). Eugene Borowitz describes Galut as "fundamentally a theological category The modern Hebrew concept of Tefutzot תפוצות, "scattered", was introduced in the 1930s by the Jewish-AmericanZionist academic Simon Rawidowicz, who to some degree argued for the acceptance of the Jewish presence outside the Land of Israel as a modern reality and an inevitability. The Greek term for diaspora (διασπορά) also appears three times in the New Testament,
where it refers to the scattering of Israel, i.e., the Ten Northern
Tribes of Israel as opposed to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, although
James (1:1) refers to the scattering of all twelve tribes.
In modern times, the contrasting meanings of diaspora/galut have
given rise to controversy among Jews. Bowman states this in the
following terms,
(Diaspora) follows the Greek usage and is considered a
positive phenomenon that continues the prophetic call of Israel to be a
'light unto the nations' and establish homes and families among the
gentiles. The prophet Jeremiah issues this call to the preexilic
emigrants in Egypt. . . Galut is a religious–nationalist term, which
implies exile from the homeland as a result of collective sins, an exile
that will be redeemed at YHWH's pleasure. Jewish messianism is closely connected with the concept of galut.'
In Zionist debates a distinction was made between galut and golus/gola.
The latter denoted social and political exile, whereas the former,
while consequential on the latter, was a psycho-spiritual framework that
was not wholly dependent on the conditions of life in diasporic exile,
since one could technically remain in galut even in Eretz Israel. Whereas Theodor Herzl and his follows thought that the establishment of a Jewish state would put an end to the diasporic exile, Ahad Ha-am thought to the contrary that such a state's function would be to 'sustain Jewish nationhood' in the diaspora.
Deportees returned to the Samaria after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was in turn conquered by Cyrus the Great. The biblical book of Ezra
includes two texts said to be decrees allowing the deported Jews to
return to their homeland after decades and ordering the Temple rebuilt.
The differences in content and tone of the two decrees, one in Hebrew
and one in Aramaic, have caused some scholars to question their
authenticity. The Cyrus Cylinder,
an ancient tablet on which is written a declaration in the name of
Cyrus referring to restoration of temples and repatriation of exiled
peoples, has often been taken as corroboration of the authenticity of
the biblical decrees attributed to Cyrus, but other scholars point out that the cylinder's text is specific to
Babylon and Mesopotamia and makes no mention of Judah or Jerusalem. Lester L. Grabbe asserted that the "alleged decree of Cyrus" regarding Judah, "cannot be considered authentic", but that there was a
"general policy of allowing deportees to return and to re-establish
cult sites". He also stated that archaeology suggests that the return
was a "trickle" taking place over decades, rather than a single event.
There is no sudden expansion of the population base of 30,000 and no
credible indication of any special interest in Yehud.
Although most of the Jewish people during this period, especially
the wealthy families, were to be found in Babylonia, the existence they
led there, under the successive rulers of the Achaemenids, the Seleucids, the Parthians, and the Sassanians,
was obscure and devoid of political influence. The poorest but most
fervent of the exiles returned to Judah / the Land of Israel during the
reign of the Achaemenids (c. 550–330 BCE). There, with the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem
as their center, they organized themselves into a community, animated
by a remarkable religious ardor and a tenacious attachment to the Torah
as the focus of their identity. As this little nucleus increased in
numbers with the accession of recruits from various quarters, it awoke
to a consciousness of itself, and strove once again for national
independence and political enfranchisement and sovereignty.
The first Jewish diaspora in Egypt arose in the last century of pharaonic rule, apparently with the settlement there, either under Ashurbanipal or during the reign of Psammeticus of a colony of Jewish mercenaries, a military class that successively served the Persian, the Ptolemaic
and Roman governments down to the early decades of the second century
CE, when the revolt against Trajan destroyed them. Their presence was
buttressed by numerous Jewish administrators who joined them in Egypt's
military and urban centres. According to Josephus, when Ptolemy I
took Judea, he led 120,000 Jewish captives to Egypt, and many other
Jews, attracted by Ptolemy's liberal and tolerant policies and Egypt's
fertile soil, emigrated from Judea to Egypt of their own free will. Ptolemy settled the Jews in Egypt to employ them as mercenaries. Philadelphus subsequently emancipated the Jews taken to Egypt as captives and settled them in cleruchs, or specialized colonies, as Jewish military units. Jews began settling in Cyrenaica
(modern-day eastern Libya) around the third century BCE, during the
rule of Ptolemy I of Egypt, who sent them to secure the region for his
kingdom. By the early first century BCE, the geographer Strabo identified Jews as one of the four main groups residing in the city of Cyrene.
While communities in Alexandria and Rome dated back to before the Maccabean Revolt, the population in the Jewish diaspora expanded after the Pompey's campaign in 62 BCE. Under the Hasmonean princes, who were at first high priests and then kings, the Jewish state displayed even a certain luster and annexed several territories. Soon, however, discord within the
royal family and the growing disaffection of the pious towards rulers
who no longer evinced any appreciation of the real aspirations of their
subjects made the Jewish nation easy prey for the ambitions of the now
increasingly autocratic and imperial Romans, the successors of the
Seleucids. In 63 BCE Pompey invaded Jerusalem, the Jewish people lost their political sovereignty and independence, and Gabinius subjected the Jewish people to tribute.
As early as the third century BCE Jewish communities sprang up in the
Aegean islands, Greece, Asia Minor, Cyrenaica, Italy and Egypt.
In Palestine, under the favourable auspices of the long period of
peace—almost a whole century—which followed the advent of the Ptolemies,
the new ways were to flourish. By means of all kinds of contacts, and
particularly thanks to the development of commerce, Hellenism
infiltrated on all sides in varying degrees. The ports of the
Mediterranean coast were indispensable to commerce and, from the very
beginning of the Hellenistic period, underwent great development. In the
Western diaspora Greek quickly became dominant in Jewish life and
little sign remains of profound contact with Hebrew or Aramaic, the
latter probably being the more prevalent. Jews migrated to new Greek
settlements that arose in the Eastern Mediterranean and former subject
areas of the Persian Empire on the heels of Alexander the Great's conquests, spurred on by the opportunities they expected to find. The proportion of Jews in the diaspora in relation to the size of the
nation as a whole increased steadily throughout the Hellenistic era and
reached astonishing dimensions in the early Roman period, particularly
in Alexandria. It was not least for this reason that the Jewish people
became a major political factor, especially since the Jews in the
diaspora, notwithstanding strong cultural, social and religious
tensions, remained firmly united with their homeland. According to Anna Collar, "although much of the origin of the western
Diaspora can be linked with enforced resettlement, it must also be
assumed that some Jews added to the Diaspora communities of their own
free will." Smallwood writes that, 'It is reasonable to conjecture that many, such
as the settlement in Puteoli attested in 4 BCE went back to the late
(pre-Roman Empire) Roman Republic or early Empire and originated in
voluntary emigration and the lure of trade and commerce." Many Jews migrated to Rome from Alexandria due to flourishing trade relations between the cities. Dating the numerous settlements is difficult. Some settlements may have
resulted from Jewish emigration following the defeat of Jewish revolts.
Others, such as the Jewish community in Rome, were far older, dating
back to at least the mid second century BCE, although it expanded
greatly following Pompey's campaign in 62 BCE. In 6 CE the Romans annexed Judaea. Only the Jews in Babylonia remained outside of Roman rule. Unlike the Greek speaking Hellenized Jews in the west, the Jewish
communities in Babylonian and Judea continued the use of Aramaic as a
primary language.
King Agrippa I, in a letter to Caligula,
enumerated among the provinces of the Jewish diaspora almost all the
Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient. This enumeration
was far from complete as Italy and Cyrene were not included. The epigraphic
discoveries from year to year augment the number of known Jewish
communities but must be viewed with caution due to the lack of precise
evidence of their numbers. According to the ancient Jewish historian
Josephus, the next most dense Jewish population after the Land of Israel
and Babylonia was in Syria, particularly in Antioch, and Damascus,
where 10,000 to 18,000 Jews were massacred during the great
insurrection. The ancient Jewish philosopher Philo gives the number of
Jewish inhabitants in Egypt as one million, one-eighth of the population. Alexandria
was by far the most important of the Egyptian Jewish communities. The
Jews in the Egyptian diaspora were on a par with their Ptolemaic
counterparts and close ties existed for them with Jerusalem. As in other
Hellenistic diasporas, the Egyptian diaspora was one of choice not of
imposition.
To judge by the later accounts of wholesale massacres in 115 CE, the number of Jewish residents in Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia must also have been large. At the commencement of the reign of Caesar Augustus,
there were over 7,000 Jews in Rome (though this is only the number that
is said to have escorted the envoys who came to demand the deposition
of Archelaus;
compare: Bringmann: Klaus: Geschichte der Juden im Altertum, Stuttgart
2005, S. 202. Bringmann talks about 8,000 Jews who lived in the city of
Rome.). Many sources say that the Jews constituted a full one-tenth
(10%) of the population of the ancient city of Rome itself. Finally, if
the sums confiscated by the governor
Lucius Valerius Flaccus in the year 62/61 BCE represented the tax of a
didrachma per head for a single year, it would imply that the Jewish
population of Asia Minor numbered 45,000 adult males, for a total of at least 180,000 persons.
The 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus gave a figure of 6,944,000 Jews in the Roman world. Salo Wittmayer Baron considered the figure convincing. The figure of seven million within and one million outside the Roman
world in the mid-first century became widely accepted, including by Louis Feldman.
However, contemporary scholars now accept that Bar Hebraeus based his
figure on a census of total Roman citizens and thus, included non-Jews.
The figure of 6,944,000 being recorded in Eusebius' Chronicon. Louis Feldman, previously an active supporter of the figure, now states that he and Baron were mistaken. Philo
gives a figure of one million Jews living in Egypt. John R. Bartlett
rejects Baron's figures entirely, arguing that we have no clue as to the
size of the Jewish demographic in the ancient world. The Romans did not distinguish between Jews inside and outside of the Land of Israel/Judaea. They collected an annual temple tax from Jews both in and outside of Israel.
The suppression of the diaspora uprisings of 116–117 CE resulted in the near-total destruction of Jewish communities in Cyrenaica and Egypt. By the third century, Jewish communities began to re-establish
themselves in Egypt and Cyrenaica, primarily through immigration from
the Land of Israel.
Roman rule in Judea began in 63 BCE with the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey.
After the city fell to Pompey's forces, thousands of Jewish prisoners
of war were brought from Judea to Rome and sold into slavery. After
these Jewish slaves were manumitted, they settled permanently in Rome on the right bank of the Tiber as traders. In 37 BCE, the forces of the Jewish client king Herod the Greatcaptured Jerusalem
with Roman assistance, and there was likely an influx of Jewish slaves
taken into the diaspora by Roman forces. In 53 BCE, a minor Jewish
revolt was suppressed and the Romans subsequently sold Jewish war
captives into slavery. Roman rule continued until the First Jewish-Roman War,
or the Great Revolt, a Jewish uprising to fight for independence, which
began in 66 CE and was eventually crushed in 73 CE, culminating in the Siege of Jerusalem
and the burning and destruction of the Temple, the centre of the
national and religious life of the Jews throughout the world. The Jewish
diaspora at the time of the Temple's destruction, according to Josephus,
was in Parthia (Persia), Babylonia (Iraq), Arabia, as well as some Jews
beyond the Euphrates and in Adiabene (Kurdistan). In Josephus' own
words, he had informed "the remotest Arabians" about the destruction. Jewish communities also existed in southern Europe, Anatolia, Syria,
and North Africa. Jewish pilgrims from the diaspora, undeterred by the
rebellion, had actually come to Jerusalem for Passover prior to the arrival of the Roman army, and many became trapped in the city and died during the siege. According to Josephus, about 97,000 Jewish captives from Judea were sold into slavery by the Romans during the revolt. Many other Jews fled from Judea to other areas around the
Mediterranean. Josephus wrote that 30,000 Jews were deported from Judea
to Carthage by the Romans.
Exactly when Roman Anti-Judaism began is a question of scholarly debate, however historian Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson has proposed that the "Crisis under Caligula" (37–41) was the "first open break between Rome and the Jews". Meanwhile, the Kitos War,
a rebellion by Jewish diaspora communities in Roman territories in the
Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, led to the destruction of Jewish
communities in Crete, Cyprus, and North Africa in 117 CE, and
consequently the dispersal of Jews already living outside of Judea to
further reaches of the Empire.
Jerusalem had been left in ruins from the time of Vespasian. Sixty years later, Hadrian, who had been instrumental in the expulsion from Palestine of Marcius Turbo after his bloody repression of Jews in the diaspora in 117 CE, on visiting the area of Iudaea, decided to rebuild the city in 130 CE, and settle it, circumstantial evidence suggesting it was he who renamed it Ælia Capitolina, with a Roman colonia
and foreign cults. It is commonly held that this was done as an insult
to the Jews and as a means of erasing the land's Jewish identity, Others argued that this project was expressive of an intention of
establishing administratively and culturally a firm Roman imperial
presence, and thus incorporating the province, now called
Syro-Palaestina, into the Roman world system. These political measures
were, according to Menachem Mor, devoid of any intention to eliminate
Judaism, indeed, the pagan reframing of Jerusalem may have been a strategic move
designed to challenge, rather, the growing threat, pretensions and
influence of converts to Christianity, for whom Jerusalem was likewise a
crucial symbol of their faith. Implementation of these plans led to violent opposition, and triggered a full-scale insurrection with the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), assisted, according to Dio Cassius, by some other peoples, perhaps Arabs who had recently been subjected by Trajan. The revolt was crushed, with the Jewish population of Judea devastated.
Jewish war captives were again captured and sold into slavery by the
Romans. According to Jewish tradition, the Romans deported twelve
boatloads of Jews to Cyrenaica. Voluntary Jewish emigration from Judea in the aftermath of the
Bar-Kokhba revolt also expanded Jewish communities in the diaspora. Jews were forbidden entrance to Jerusalem on pain of death, except for the day of Tisha B'Av. There was a further shift of the center of religious authority from Yavne, as rabbis regrouped in Usha in the western Galilee, where the Mishnah
was composed. This ban struck a blow at Jewish national identity within
Palestine, while the Romans however continued to allow Jews in the
diaspora their distinct national and religious identity throughout the
Empire.
The military defeats of the Jews in Judaea in 70 CE and again in
135 CE, with large numbers of Jewish captives from Judea sold into
slavery and an increase in voluntary Jewish emigration from Judea as a
result of the wars, meant a drop in Palestine's Jewish population was
balanced by a rise in diaspora numbers. Jewish prisoners sold as slaves
in the diaspora and their children were eventually manumitted and joined
local free communities. It has been argued that the archaeological evidence is suggestive of a Roman genocide taking place during the Second revolt. A significant movement of gentiles and Samaritans into villages formerly with a Jewish majority appears to have taken place thereafter. During the Crisis of the Third Century,
civil wars in the Roman Empire caused great economic disruption, and
taxes imposed to finance these wars impacted the Jewish population of
Palestine heavily. As a result, many Jews emigrated to Babylon under the
more tolerant Sassanid Empire,
where autonomous Jewish communities continued to flourish, lured by the
promise of economic prosperity and the ability to lead a full Jewish
life there. Between the 3rd and 7th centuries, estimates indicate that the
Babylonian Jewish community numbered approximately one million, which
may have been the largest Jewish diaspora population of the time,
possibly outnumbering those in the Land of Israel.
Palestine and Babylon were both great centers of Jewish
scholarship during this time, but tensions between scholars in these two
communities grew as many Jewish scholars in Palestine feared that the
centrality of the land to the Jewish religion would be lost with
continuing Jewish emigration. Many Palestinian sages refused to consider
Babylonian scholars their equals and would not ordain Babylonian
students in their academies, fearing they would return to Babylon as
rabbis. Significant Jewish emigration to Babylon adversely affected the
Jewish academies of Palestine, and by the end of the third century they
were reliant on donations from Babylon.
The effect that the destruction of Jerusalem had on the Jewish diaspora has been a topic of considerable scholarly discussion. David Aberbach has argued that much of the European Jewish diaspora, by
which he means exile or voluntary migration, originated with the Jewish
wars which occurred between 66 and 135 CE.Martin Goodman
states that it is only after the destruction of Jerusalem that Jews are
found in northern Europe and along the western Mediterranean coast. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan challenge the "widespread notion" the
Jews in Judea were only expelled after the destruction of the Second
Temple in 70 CE and the Jewish defeat during Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. They also contend it is "misleading" that the expulsion from Judea created the diaspora.
Israel Bartal contends that Shlomo Sand is incorrect in his claim that the original Jews living in Israel were not exiled by the Romans, instead arguing that this view is negligible among serious Jewish study scholars. These scholars argue that the growth of diaspora Jewish communities was
a gradual process that occurred over the centuries, starting with the
Assyrian destruction of Israel, the Babylonian destruction of Judah, the
Roman destruction of Judea, and the subsequent rule of Christians and
Muslims. After the revolt, the Jewish religious and cultural center
shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. For the
generations that followed, the destruction of the Second Temple event
came to represent a fundamental insight about the Jews who had become a
dispossessed and persecuted people for much of their history.
Erich S. Gruen
contends that focusing on the destruction of the Temple misses the
point that already before this, the diaspora was well-established. Gruen
argues compulsory dislocation of Jews during the Second Temple period
(516 BCE – 70 CE) cannot explain more than a fraction of the eventual
diaspora. Rather, the Jewish diaspora during this time period was
created from various factors, including through the creation of
political and war refugees, enslavement, deportation, overpopulation,
indebtedness, military employment, and opportunities in business,
commerce, and agriculture. Avrum Ehrlich also states that already well before the destruction of
the Temple in 70 CE, more Jews lived in the Diaspora than in Israel. Jonathan Adelman estimated that around 60% of Jews lived in the diaspora during the Second Temple period. According to Gruen:
Perhaps three to five million Jews dwelled outside Palestine in the roughly four centuries that stretched from Alexander to Titus.
The era of the Second Temple brought the issue into sharp focus,
inescapably so. The Temple still stood, a reminder of the hallowed past,
and, through most of the era, a Jewish regime existed in Palestine. Yet
the Jews of the diaspora, from Italy to Iran, far outnumbered those in
the homeland. Although Jerusalem loomed large in their self-perception
as a nation, few of them had seen it, and few were likely to.
Israel Yuval
contends the Babylonian captivity created a promise of return in the
Jewish consciousness which had the effect of enhancing the Jewish
self-perception of Exile after the destruction of the Second Temple,
albeit their dispersion was due to an array of non-exilic factors. According to Hasia R. Diner,
the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, followed by the
dissolution, in 132 CE, of Jewish sovereignty over the territory renamed
Syria Palaestina, had launched the second dispersion of the diaspora,
the first being the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. She writes that, "Although many Jews had lived outside Judea even
before that [the destruction of Judea], the ending of home rule set in
motion the world's longest diaspora."
In the 4th century, the Roman Empire split and Palestine came under the control of the Byzantine Empire.
There was still a significant Jewish population there, and Jews
probably constituted a majority of the population until some time after Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century. The ban on Jewish settlement in Jerusalem was maintained. There was a minor Jewish rebellion against a corrupt governor from 351 to 352 which was put down. In the 5th century, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire
resulted in Christian migration into Palestine and the development of a
firm Christian majority. Judaism was the only non-Christian religion
tolerated, but the Jews were discriminated against in various ways. They
were prohibited from building new houses of worship, holding public
office, or owning slaves. The 7th century saw the Jewish revolt against Heraclius, which broke out in 614 during the Byzantine–Sasanian War. It was the last serious attempt by Jews to gain autonomy in the Land of Israel prior to modern times. Jewish rebels aided the Persians in capturing Jerusalem, where the Jews were permitted autonomous rule until 617, when the Persians reneged on their alliance. After Byzantine Emperor Heraclius
promised to restore Jewish rights, the Jews aided him in ousting the
Persians. Heraclius subsequently went back on his word and ordered a
general massacre of the Jewish population, devastating the Jewish
communities of Jerusalem and the Galilee. As a result, many Jews fled to
Egypt.
In 638, Palestine came under Muslim rule with the Muslim conquest of the Levant. One estimate placed the Jewish population of Palestine at between 300,000 and 400,000 at the time. However, this is contrary to other estimates which place it at 150,000 to 200,000 at the time of the revolt against Heraclius. According to historian Moshe Gil, the majority of the population was Jewish or Samaritan. The land gradually came to have an Arab majority as Arab tribes
migrated there. Jewish communities initially grew and flourished. Umar
allowed and encouraged Jews to settle in Jerusalem. It was the first
time in about 500 years that Jews were allowed to freely enter and
worship in their holiest city. In 717, new restrictions were imposed
against non-Muslims that negatively affected the Jews. Heavy taxes on
agricultural land forced many Jews to migrate from rural areas to towns.
Social and economic discrimination caused significant Jewish emigration
from Palestine, and Muslim civil wars in the 8th and 9th centuries
pushed many Jews out of the country. By the end of the 11th century the
Jewish population of Palestine had declined substantially.
During the First Crusade,
Jews in Palestine, along with Muslims, were indiscriminately massacred
and sold into slavery by the Crusaders. The majority of Jerusalem's
Jewish population was killed during the Crusader Siege of Jerusalem
and the few thousand survivors were sold into slavery. Some of the Jews
sold into slavery later had their freedom bought by Jewish communities
in Italy and Egypt, and the redeemed slaves were taken to Egypt. Some
Jewish prisoners of war were also deported to Apulia in southern Italy.
Relief for the Jewish population of Palestine came when the Ayyubid dynasty defeated the Crusaders and conquered Palestine (see 1187 Battle of Hattin). Some Jewish immigration from the diaspora subsequently took place, but this came to an end when Mamluks took over Palestine (see 1291 Fall of Acre).
The Mamluks severely oppressed the Jews and greatly mismanaged the
economy, resulting in a period of great social and economic decline. The
result was large-scale migration from Palestine, and the population
declined. The Jewish population shrunk especially heavily, as did the
Christian population. Though some Jewish immigration from Europe, North
Africa, and Syria also occurred in this period, which potentially saved
the collapsing Jewish community of Palestine from disappearing
altogether, Jews were reduced to an even smaller minority of the
population.
The result of these waves of emigration and expulsion was that
the Jewish population of Palestine was reduced to a few thousand by the
time the Ottoman Empire
conquered Palestine, after which the region entered a period of
relative stability. At the start of Ottoman rule in 1517, the estimated
Jewish population was 5,000, composed of both descendants of Jews who
had never left the land and migrants from the diaspora.
During the Middle Ages, due to increasing geographical dispersion and re-settlement, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings: the Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe, and the Sephardic Jews of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), North Africa and the Middle East.
These groups have parallel histories sharing many cultural similarities
as well as a series of massacres, persecutions and expulsions, such as
the expulsion from England in 1290, the expulsion from Spain in 1492, and the expulsion from Arab countries in 1948–1973.
Although the two branches comprise many unique ethno-cultural practices
and have links to their local host populations (such as Central Europeans for the Ashkenazim and Hispanics and Arabs
for the Sephardim), their shared religion and ancestry, as well as
their continuous communication and population transfers, has been
responsible for a unified sense of cultural and religious Jewish identity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim from the late Roman period to the present.
By 1764 there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The worldwide Jewish population (comprising the Middle East and the rest of Europe) was estimated at 1.2 million.
Classical period
After the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, Judah (יְהוּדָהYehuda) became a province of the Persian empire. This status continued into the following Hellenistic period,
when Yehud became a disputed province of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid
Syria. In the early part of the 2nd century BCE, a revolt against the
Seleucids led to the establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom
under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans adopted a deliberate policy of imitating and reconstituting the Davidic kingdom, and as part of this forcibly converted to Judaism their neighbours in the Land of Israel. The conversions included Nabateans (Zabadeans) and Itureans, the peoples of the former Philistine cities, the Moabites, Ammonites and Edomites. Attempts were also made to incorporate the Samaritans,
following takeover of Samaria. The success of mass-conversions is
however questionable, as most groups retained their tribal separations
and mostly turned Hellenistic or Christian, with Edomites perhaps being the only exception to merge into the Jewish society under Herodian dynasty and in the following period of Jewish–Roman Wars.
Middle Ages
Ashkenazi Jews
Ashkenazi Jews is a general category of Jewish populations who immigrated to what is now Germany and northeastern France during the Middle Ages and until modern times used to adhere to the Yiddish culture and the Ashkenazi prayer style. There is evidence that groups of Jews had immigrated to Germania during the Roman Era;
they were probably merchants who followed the Roman Legions during
their conquests. However, for the most part, modern Ashkenazi Jews
originated with Jews who migrated or were forcibly taken from the Middle
East to southern Europe in antiquity, where they established Jewish
communities before moving into northern France and lower Germany during
the High and Late Middle Ages.
They also descend to a lesser degree from Jewish immigrants from
Babylon, Persia, and North Africa who migrated to Europe in the Middle
Ages. The Ashkenazi Jews later migrated from Germany (and elsewhere in
Central Europe) into Eastern Europe as a result of persecution.Some Ashkenazi Jews also have minor ancestry from Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain, first during Islamic persecutions (11th–12th centuries) and later during Christian reconquests (13th–15th centuries) and the Spanish Inquisition
(15th–16th centuries). Ashkenazi Jews are of mixed Middle Eastern and
European ancestry, as they derive part of their ancestry from non-Jewish
Europeans who intermixed with Jews of migrant Middle Eastern origin.
In 2006, a study by Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion
and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, Israel demonstrated that the vast
majority of Ashkenazi Jews, both men and women, have Middle Eastern
ancestry. According to Nicholas Wades' 2010 Autosomal study Ashkenazi Jews share a
common ancestry with other Jewish groups and Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews have roughly 30% European ancestry with the rest being Middle Eastern. According to Hammer, the Ashkenazi population expanded through a series
of bottlenecks—events that squeeze a population down to small
numbers—perhaps as it migrated from the Middle East after the
destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, to Italy, reaching the Rhine Valley in the 10th century.
David Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist and director of the
Duke Center for Human Genome Variation, has said that the work of the
Technion and Ramban team served only to confirm that genetic drift
played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA),
which is inherited in a matrilineal manner. Goldstein argues that the
Technion and Ramban mtDNA studies fail to actually establish a
statistically significant maternal link between modern Jews and historic
Middle Eastern populations. This differs from the patrilineal case,
where Goldstein said there is no doubt of a Middle Eastern origin.
In June 2010, Behar et al. "shows that most Jewish samples form a
remarkably tight subcluster with common genetic origin, that overlies
Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine
populations or paired diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian
Jews (Beta Israel) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini)
cluster with neighboring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and
western India, respectively, despite a clear paternal link between the
Bene Israel and the Levant." "The most parsimonious explanation for these observations is a common
genetic origin, which is consistent with an historical formulation of
the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite
residents of the Levant." In conclusion the authors are stating that the
genetic results are concordant "with the dispersion of the people of
ancient Israel throughout the Old World". Regarding the samples he used
Behar points out that "Our conclusion favoring common ancestry (of
Jewish people) over recent admixture is further supported by the fact
that our sample contains individuals that are known not to be admixed in
the most recent one or two generations."
A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA by Costa et al.,
reached the conclusion that the four major female founders and most of
the minor female founders had ancestry in prehistoric Europe, rather
than the Near East or Caucasus. According to the study these findings
'point to a significant role for the conversion of women in the
formation of Ashkenazi communities" and their intermarriage with Jewish
men of Middle Eastern origin.
A study by Haber, et al., (2013) noted that while previous
studies of the Levant, which had focused mainly on diaspora Jewish
populations, showed that the "Jews form a distinctive cluster in the
Middle East", these studies did not make clear "whether the factors
driving this structure would also involve other groups in the Levant".
The authors found strong evidence that modern Levant populations descend
from two major apparent ancestral populations. One set of genetic
characteristics which is shared with modern-day Europeans and Central
Asians is most prominent in the Levant amongst "Lebanese, Armenians,
Cypriots, Druze and Jews, as well as Turks, Iranians and Caucasian
populations". The second set of inherited genetic characteristics is
shared with populations in other parts of the Middle East as well as
some African populations. Levant populations in this category today
include "Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians, as well as North Africans,
Ethiopians, Saudis, and Bedouins". Concerning this second component of
ancestry, the authors remark that while it correlates with "the pattern
of the Islamic expansion", and that "a pre-Islamic expansion Levant was
more genetically similar to Europeans than to Middle Easterners," they
also say that "its presence in Lebanese Christians, Sephardi and
Ashkenazi Jews, Cypriots and Armenians might suggest that its spread to
the Levant could also represent an earlier event". The authors also
found a strong correlation between religion and apparent ancestry in the
Levant:
all Jews (Sephardi and Ashkenazi) cluster in one branch;
Druze from Mount Lebanon and Druze from Mount Carmel are depicted on a
private branch; and Lebanese Christians form a private branch with the
Christian populations of Armenia and Cyprus placing the Lebanese Muslims
as an outer group. The predominantly Muslim populations of Syrians,
Palestinians and Jordanians cluster on branches with other Muslim
populations as distant as Morocco and Yemen.
Another 2013 study, made by Doron M. Behar of the Rambam Health Care
Campus in Israel and others, suggests that: "Cumulatively, our analyses
point strongly to ancestry of Ashkenazi Jews primarily from European and
Middle Eastern populations and not from populations in or near the
Caucasus region. The combined set of approaches suggests that the
observations of Ashkenazi proximity to European and Middle Eastern
populations in population structure analyses reflect actual genetic
proximity of Ashkenazi Jews to populations with predominantly European
and Middle Eastern ancestry components, and lack of visible
introgression from the region of the Khazar Khaganate—particularly among
the northern Volga and North Caucasus populations—into the Ashkenazi
community."
A 2014 study by Fernández et al. found that Ashkenazi Jews
display a frequency of haplogroup K in their maternal (mitochondrial)
DNA, suggesting an ancient Near Eastern matrilineal origin, similar to
the results of the Behar study in 2006. Fernández noted that this
observation clearly contradicts the results of the 2013 study led by
Costa, Richards et al. that suggested a European source for 3
exclusively Ashkenazi K lineages.
Sephardic Jews
Sephardi Jews
are Jews whose ancestors lived in Spain or Portugal. Some 300,000 Jews
resided in Spain before the Spanish Inquisition in the 15th century,
when the Reyes Católicos
reconquered Spain from the Arabs and ordered the Jews to convert to
Catholicism, leave the country or face execution without trial. Those
who chose not to convert, between 40,000 and 100,000, were expelled from
Spain in 1492 in the wake of the Alhambra decree. Sephardic Jews subsequently migrated to North Africa (Maghreb),
Christian Europe (Netherlands, Britain, France and Poland), throughout
the Ottoman Empire and even the newly discovered Latin America.
In the Ottoman Empire, the Sephardim mostly settled in the European
portion of the Empire, and mainly in the major cities such as: Istanbul, Selânik and Bursa.
Selânik, which is today known as Thessaloniki and found in modern-day
Greece, had a large and flourishing Sephardic community as was the
community of Maltese Jews in Malta.
A small number of Sephardic refugees who fled via the Netherlands as Marranos
settled in Hamburg and Altona Germany in the early 16th century,
eventually appropriating Ashkenazic Jewish rituals into their religious
practice. One famous figure from the Sephardic Ashkenazic population is Glückel of Hameln.
Some relocated to the United States, establishing the country's first
organized community of Jews and erecting the United States' first
synagogue. Nevertheless, the majority of Sephardim remained in Spain and
Portugal as Conversos,
which would also be the fate for those who had migrated to Spanish and
Portuguese ruled Latin America. Sephardic Jews evolved to form most of
North Africa's Jewish communities of the modern era, as well as the bulk
of the Turkish, Syrian, Galilean and Jerusalemite Jews of the Ottoman
period.
Mizrahi Jews
Mizrahi Jews are Jews descended from the Jewish communities of the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus, largely originating from the Babylonian Jewry
of the classic period. The term Mizrahi is used in Israel in the
language of politics, media and some social scientists for Jews from the
Arab world and adjacent, primarily Muslim-majority countries. The
definition of Mizrahi includes the modern Iraqi Jews, Syrian Jews, Lebanese Jews, Persian Jews, Afghan Jews, Bukharian Jews, Kurdish Jews, Mountain Jews, Georgian Jews.
Some also include the North-African Sephardic communities and Yemenite
Jews under the definition of Mizrahi, but do that from rather political
generalization than ancestral reasons.
Temanim are Jews who were living in Yemen
prior to immigrating to Ottoman Palestine and Israel. Their geographic
and social isolation from the rest of the Jewish community over the
course of many centuries allowed them to develop a liturgy and set of
practices that are significantly distinct from those of other Oriental
Jewish groups; they themselves comprise three distinctly different
groups, though the distinction is one of religious law and liturgy
rather than of ethnicity. Traditionally the genesis of the Yemenite
Jewish community came after the Babylonian exile, though the community
most probably emerged during Roman times, and it was significantly
reinforced during the reign of Dhu Nuwas
in the 6th century CE and during later Muslim conquests in the 7th
century CE, which drove the Arab Jewish tribes out of central Arabia.
Karaite Jews
Karaim are Jews who used to live mostly in Egypt, Iraq, and Crimea during the Middle Ages. They are distinguished by the form of Judaism which they observe. Rabbinic Jews
of varying communities have affiliated with the Karaite community
throughout the millennia. As such, Karaite Jews are less an ethnic
division, than they are members of a particular branch of Judaism. Karaite Judaism recognizes the Tanakh
as the single religious authority for the Jewish people. Linguistic
principles and contextual exegesis are used in arriving at the correct
meaning of the Torah. Karaite Jews strive to adhere to the plain or most
obvious understanding of the text when interpreting the Tanakh. By
contrast, Rabbinical Judaism regards an Oral Law (codified and recorded in the Mishnah and the Talmud)
as being equally binding on Jews, and mandated by God. In Rabbinical
Judaism, the Oral Law forms the basis of religion, morality, and Jewish
life. Karaite Jews rely on the use of sound reasoning and the
application of linguistic tools to determine the correct meaning of the
Tanakh; while Rabbinical Judaism looks towards the Oral law codified in
the Talmud, to provide the Jewish community with an accurate
understanding of the Hebrew Scriptures.
The differences between Karaite and Rabbinic Judaism go back more than a thousand years. Rabbinical Judaism originates from the Pharisees of the Second Temple period. Karaite Judaism may have its origins among the Sadducees
of the same era. Karaite Jews hold the entire Hebrew Bible to be a
religious authority. As such, the vast majority of Karaites believe in
the resurrection of the dead. Karaite Jews are widely regarded as being halachically Jewish by the
Orthodox Rabbinate. Similarly, members of the rabbinic community are
considered Jews by the Moetzet Hakhamim, if they are patrilineally
Jewish.
Modern era
Israeli Jews
Jews of Israel comprise an increasingly mixed wide range of Jewish communities making aliyah from Europe, North Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East. While a significant portion of Israeli Jews
still retain memories of their Sephardic, Ashkenazi and Mizrahi
origins, mixed Jewish marriages among the communities are very common.
There are also smaller groups of Yemenite Jews, Indian Jews and others,
who still retain a semi-separate communal life. There are also
approximately 50,000 adherents of Karaite Judaism,
most of whom live in Israel, but their exact numbers are not known,
because most Karaites have not participated in any religious censuses.
The Beta Israel, though somewhat disputed as the descendants of the ancient Israelites, are widely recognized in Israel as Ethiopian Jews.
The ancestry of most American Jews goes back to Ashkenazi Jewish
communities that immigrated to the US in the course of the 19th and
20th centuries, as well as more recent influxes of Persian and other
Mizrahi Jewish immigrants. The American Jewish community is considered
to contain the highest percentage of mixed marriages between Jews and
non-Jews, resulting in both increased assimilation and a significant
influx of non-Jews becoming identified as Jews. The most widespread
practice in the U.S. is Reform Judaism,
which does not require members to prove, or consider the Jews to
possess direct descent from the ethnic Jews or Biblical Israelites. These attitudes had been present in Reform Judaism for many years but were codified in a 1983 decree by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, On Patrilineal Descent. Among other assertions, the 1983 decree holds that matrilineal descent is not necessary for a person to be considered Jewish. This is in marked contrast to Orthodox Judaism,
whose adherents represent around 30% of the Jews in Israel. Orthodox
Judaism considers the Jewish people to be a closed ethnoreligious
community and consequently possesses very strict procedures for
conversion, a practice that it does not generally encourage.
French Jews
Expulsion of French Jews, 1182
The Jews of modern France number around 400,000 persons, largely
descendants of North African communities, some of which were Sephardic
communities that had come from Spain and Portugal—others were Arab and Berber Jews
from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, who were already living in North
Africa before the Jewish exodus from the Iberian Peninsula—and to a
smaller degree members of the Ashkenazi Jewish communities, who survived
WWII and the Holocaust.
The Kaifeng Jews are members of a small Jewish community in Kaifeng, in the Henan province of China who have assimilated into Chinese society while preserving some Jewish traditions and customs.
Cochin Jews, also called Malabar Jews, are the oldest group of Jews in India, with possible roots that are claimed to date back to the time of King Solomon. The Cochin Jews settled in the Kingdom of Cochin in South India, now part of the state of Kerala. As early as the 12th century, mention is made of the Black Jews in southern India. The Jewish traveler, Benjamin of Tudela, speaking of Kollam (Quilon) on the Malabar Coast, writes in his Itinerary:
"...throughout the island, including all the towns thereof, live
several thousand Israelites. The inhabitants are all black, and the Jews
also. The latter are good and benevolent. They know the law of Moses and the prophets, and to a small extent the Talmud and Halacha." These people later became known as the Malabari Jews. They built synagogues in Kerala beginning in the 12th and 13th centuries. They are known to have developed Judeo-Malayalam, a dialect of the Malayalam language.
Paradesi Jews are mainly the descendants of Sephardic
Jews who originally immigrated to India from Sepharad (Spain and
Portugal) during the 15th and 16th centuries in order to flee forced
conversion or persecution in the wake of the Alhambra Decree
which expelled the Jews from Spain. They are sometimes referred to as
White Jews, although that usage is generally considered pejorative or
discriminatory and it is instead used to refer to relatively recent
Jewish immigrants (end of the 15th century onwards), who are
predominantly Sephardim.
The Paradesi Jews of Cochin are a community of Sephardic Jews whose ancestors settled among the larger Cochin Jewish community located in Kerala, a coastal southern state of India.
The Paradesi Jews of Madras
traded in diamonds, precious stones and corals, they had very good
relations with the rulers of Golkonda, they maintained trade connections
with Europe, and their language skills were useful. Although the
Sephardim spoke Ladino (i.e. Spanish or Judeo-Spanish), in India they learned to speak Tamil and Judeo-Malayalam from the Malabar Jews.
The Georgian Jews are considered ethnically and culturally distinct
from neighboring Mountain Jews. They were also traditionally a highly
separate group from the Ashkenazi Jews in Georgia.
During the history of the Jewish diaspora, Jews who lived in
Christian Europe were often attacked by the local Christian population,
and they were often forced to convert to Christianity.
Many, known as "Anusim" ('forced-ones'), continued practicing Judaism
in secret while living outwardly as ordinary Christians. The best known
Anusim communities were the Jews of Spain and the Jews of Portugal, although they existed throughout Europe. In the centuries since the rise of Islam, many Jews living in the Muslim world were forced to convert to Islam,such as the Mashhadi Jews of Persia, who continued to practice Judaism in secret and eventually moved to Israel. Many of the Anusim's descendants left Judaism over the years. The results of a genetic study of the population of the Iberian Peninsula
released in December 2008 "attest to a high level of religious
conversion (whether voluntary or enforced) driven by historical episodes
of religious intolerance, which ultimately led to the integration of
the Anusim's descendants.
The Samaritans, who comprised a comparatively large group in
classical times, now number 745 people, and today they live in two
communities in Israel and the West Bank, and they still regard themselves as descendants of the tribes of Ephraim (named by them as Aphrime) and Manasseh (named by them as Manatch). Samaritans adhere to a version of the Torah known as the Samaritan Pentateuch, which differs in some respects from the Masoretic text, sometimes in important ways, and less so from the Septuagint.
The Samaritans consider themselves Bnei Yisrael ("Children of Israel" or "Israelites"), but they do not regard themselves as Yehudim
(Jews). They view the term "Jews" as a designation for followers of
Judaism, which they assert is a related but an altered and amended
religion which was brought back by the exiled Israelite returnees, and
is therefore not the true religion of the ancient Israelites, which
according to them is Samaritanism.
Y DNA
studies tend to imply a small number of founders in an old population
whose members parted and followed different migration paths. In most Jewish populations, these male line ancestors appear to have been mainly Middle Eastern.
For example, Ashkenazi Jews share more common paternal lineages with
other Jewish and Middle Eastern groups than with non-Jewish populations
in areas where Jews lived in Eastern Europe, Germany and the French Rhine Valley. This is consistent with Jewish traditions which place most Jewish paternal origins in the region of the Middle East.Conversely, the maternal lineages of Jewish populations, studied by looking at mitochondrial DNA, are generally more heterogeneous. Scholars such as Harry Ostrer and Raphael Falk
believe this indicates that many Jewish males found new mates from
European and other communities in the places where they migrated in the
diaspora after fleeing ancient Israel. In contrast, Behar has found evidence that about 40% of Ashkenazi Jews
originate maternally from just four female founders, who were of Middle
Eastern origin. The populations of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish
communities "showed no evidence for a narrow founder effect." Subsequent studies carried out by Feder et al. confirmed the large
portion of the non-local maternal origin among Ashkenazi Jews.
Reflecting on their findings related to the maternal origin of Ashkenazi
Jews, the authors conclude "Clearly, the differences between Jews and
non-Jews are far larger than those observed among the Jewish
communities. Hence, differences between the Jewish communities can be
overlooked when non-Jews are included in the comparisons."
Studies of autosomal DNA,
which look at the entire DNA mixture, have become increasingly
important as the technology develops. They show that Jewish populations
have tended to form relatively closely related groups in independent
communities, with most people in a community sharing significant
ancestry in common. For Jewish populations of the diaspora, the genetic composition of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and Mizrahi
Jewish populations show a predominant amount of shared Middle Eastern
ancestry. According to Behar, the most parsimonious explanation for this
shared Middle Eastern ancestry is that it is "consistent with the
historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant" and "the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout the Old World". North African, Italian and others of Iberian
origin show variable frequencies of admixture with non-Jewish
historical host populations among the maternal lines. In the case of
Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews (in particular Moroccan Jews), who are closely related, the source of non-Jewish admixture is mainly southern European, while Mizrahi Jews show evidence of admixture with other Middle Eastern populations and Sub-Saharan Africans. Behar et al. have remarked on an especially close relationship of Ashkenazi Jews and modern Italians. Jews were found to be more closely related to groups in the north of
the Fertile Crescent (Kurds, Turks, and Armenians) than to Arabs.
According to Eliezer Schweid, the rejection of life in the diaspora is a central assumption in all currents of Zionism.[154]
Underlying this attitude was the feeling that the diaspora restricted
the full growth of Jewish national life. For instance the poet Hayim Nahman Bialik wrote:
And my heart weeps for my unhappy people ...
How burned, how blasted must our portion be,
If seed like this is withered in its soil. ...
According to Schweid, Bialik meant that the "seed" was the potential
of the Jewish people. Preserved in the diaspora, this seed could only
give rise to deformed results; however, once conditions changed the seed
could still provide a plentiful harvest.
In this matter Sternhell distinguishes two schools of thought in Zionism. One was the liberal or utilitarian school of Theodor Herzl and Max Nordau. Especially after the Dreyfus Affair, they held that antisemitism would never disappear and they saw Zionism as a rational solution for Jews.
The other was the organic nationalist school. It was prevalent among the Zionist olim
and they saw the movement as a project to rescue the Jewish nation
rather than as a project to only rescue Jews. For them, Zionism was the
"Rebirth of the Nation".
In the 2008 book The Invention of the Jewish People, Shlomo Sand argued that the formation of the "Jewish-Israeli collective memory" had inculcated a "period of silencing" in Jewish history, particularly with regard to the formation of the Khazar Kingdom out of converted gentile tribes. Israel Bartal, then dean of the humanities faculty of the Hebrew University,
countered "that no historian of the Jewish national movement has ever
really believed that the origins of the Jews are ethnically and
biologically 'pure.' [...] No 'nationalist' Jewish historian has ever
tried to conceal the well-known fact that conversions to Judaism had a
major impact on Jewish history in the ancient period and in the early
Middle Ages. Although the myth of an exile from the Jewish homeland
(Palestine) does exist in popular Israeli culture, it is negligible in
serious Jewish historical discussions."
Mystical explanation
Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov (Bnei Yissaschar, Chodesh Kislev, 2:25)
explains that each exile was characterized by a different negative
aspect:
The Babylonian exile was characterized by physical suffering and oppression. The Babylonians were lopsided towards the Sefirah of Gevurah, strength and bodily might.
The Persian
exile was one of emotional temptation. The Persians were hedonists who
declared that the purpose of life is to pursue indulgence and lusts—"Let
us eat and drink, for tomorrow we may die." They were lopsided towards
the quality of Chesed, attraction and kindness (albeit to the self).
Hellenistic civilization
was highly cultured and sophisticated. Although the Greeks had a strong
sense of aesthetics, they were highly pompous, and they viewed
aesthetics as an end in itself. They were excessively attached to the
quality of Tiferet,
beauty. This was also related to an appreciation of the intellect's
transcendence over the body, which reveals the beauty of the spirit.
The exile of Edom began with Rome,
whose culture lacked any clearly defined philosophy. Rather, it adopted
the philosophies of all the preceding cultures, causing Roman culture
to be in a constant flux. Although the Roman Empire has fallen, the Jews
are still in the exile of Edom, and indeed, one can find this
phenomenon of ever-changing trends dominating modern western society. The Romans and the various nations who inherited their rule (e.g., the Holy Roman Empire, the Europeans, the Americans) are lopsided towards Malchut, sovereignty, the lowest Sefirah, which can be received from any of the others, and can act as a medium for them.
The Jewish fast day of Tisha B'Av commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem and the subsequent exile of the Jews from the Land of Israel.
The Jewish tradition maintains that the Roman exile would be the last,
and that after the people of Israel returned to their land, they would
never be exiled again. This statement is based on the verse: "(You
paying for) Your sin is over daughter of Zion, he will not exile you (any)more" ["תם עוונך בת ציון, לא יוסף להגלותך"].
In Christian theology
According to Aharon Oppenheimer, early Christians developed the concept of exile, beginning after the destruction of the Second Temple. They saw the destruction of the Temple as a punishment for Jewish deicide and, by extension, as an affirmation of Christians as God's new chosen people, "New Israel", having superseded
the Jews' chosenness. In the period following the destruction of the
Temple, Jews enjoyed many freedoms under Roman rule. The people of
Israel had religious, economic, and cultural autonomy, and the Bar Kochba revolt
demonstrated Israel's unity and political-military power at that time.
Therefore, according to Oppenheimer, the Jewish exile started only after
the Bar Kochba revolt, which devastated the Jewish community of Judea. Despite popular conception, Jews have had a continuous presence in the Land of Israel despite the exile of the majority of Judeans. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in the 4th century, hundreds of years after the revolt. Moreover, many Jews remained in Israel even centuries later, including during the Byzantine period; many remnants of synagogues are found from this period. Jews have been a majority or a significant plurality in Jerusalem in the millennia since their exile with few exceptions (including the period following the Siege of Jerusalem (1099)
by the Crusaders and the 18 years of Jordanian rule of eastern
Jerusalem, in which Jerusalem's historic Jewish quarter was expelled).
As of 2023, about 8.5 million Jews live outside Israel, which hosts the largest Jewish population in the world with 7.2 million. Israel is followed by the United States with approximately 6.3 million. Other countries with significant Jewish populations include France (440,000), Canada (398,000), the United Kingdom (312,000), Argentina (171,000), Russia (132,000), Germany (125,000), Australia (117,200), Brazil (90,000), and South Africa (50,000). These numbers reflect the "core" Jewish population, defined as being "not inclusive of non-Jewish members of Jewish
households, persons of Jewish ancestry who profess another monotheistic
religion, other non-Jews of Jewish ancestry, and other non-Jews who may
be interested in Jewish matters." Jewish populations also remain in Middle Eastern and North African countries outside of Israel, particularly Turkey, Iran, Morocco, Tunisia, and the Emirates. In general, these populations are shrinking due to low growth rates and
high rates of emigration (particularly since the 1960s).
Metropolitan areas with the largest Jewish populations are listed below though one source at jewishtemples.org, states that "It is difficult to come up with exact population figures
on a country by country basis, let alone city by city around the world.
Figures for Russia and other CIS countries are but educated guesses."
The source cited here, the 2010 World Jewish Population Survey,
also notes that "Unlike our estimates of Jewish populations in
individual countries, the data reported here on urban Jewish populations
do not fully adjust for possible double counting due to multiple
residences. The differences in the United States may be quite
significant, in the range of tens of thousands, involving both major and
minor metropolitan areas."
