“Return” from that displacement, the Diaspora was already a fact, not to be
reversed. Jews dwelled in Egypt in the sixth century, as papyri from a Jew-
ish military colony at Elephantine reveal. And an archive of documents
from Babylon attests to Jews in a variety of trades and professions even af-
ter their supposed restoration to Judah.
The pace quickened, however, and the scattering multiplied from the
late fourth centuryb.c.e.The conquests of Alexander the Great sent
Greeks into the Near East in substantial numbers. The collapse of the Per-
sian Empire prompted a wave of migration and relocation. New commu-
nities sprang up, old ones were repopulated or expanded. Mobility in-
creased, and a host of settlements beckoned to the restless and the
adventurous. As Greeks found the prospects abroad enticing, so also did
the Jews. A burgeoning Jewish Diaspora, it appears, followed in the wake
of the Greek Diaspora.
Precise numbers elude us. But they were clearly substantial. By the late
second centuryb.c.e., the author of 1 Maccabees could claim that Jews had
found their way not only to Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and the Iranian
plateau, but to the cities and principalities of Asia Minor, to the islands of
the Aegean, to Greece itself, to Crete, Cyprus, and Cyrene. We know fur-
ther of Jewish communities in Italy, including large settlements in Rome
and Ostia. The Greek geographer Strabo, writing at the end of the first
centuryb.c.e.(and he had no axe to grind on the subject), remarked that
there was hardly a place in the world that did not possess members of this
tribe and feel their weight. And all of this occurred well before the demoli-
tion of the Temple. Even without explicit figures we may be confident that
Jews abroad far outnumbered those dwelling in Palestine — and had done
so for many generations (see map 13).
The fact needs to be underscored. Diaspora life in the Second Temple
period was no aberration, not a marginal, exceptional, temporary, or fleet-
ing part of Jewish experience. In important ways it constituted the most
characteristic ingredient of that experience. The Temple stood in Jerusa-
lem. Yet the vast majority of Jews dwelled elsewhere. The physical and
emotional world of the Jews cannot be grasped without placing the Dias-
pora under scrutiny.
What motivated the mass migration? Some of it, to be sure, was invol-
untary and unwelcome. Many of those who found themselves abroad had
come as captives, prisoners of war, and slaves. Conflicts between the Egyp-
tian and Syrian kingdoms in the third centuryb.c.e.caused periodic dis-
location. Internal upheavals in Palestine in the following century created96erich s. gruenEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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