Diasporas

Rome's imperial aims involved the destruction of Jewish political independence. Once that had been achieved and Judea no longer represented a threat to Rome's territorial advances, Jews were as readily absorbed into the empire as other conquered peoples. In 212 C.E., an edict extended Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants, including Jews. Judaism was officially recognized, and Jews were free to pursue an autonomous communal life without interference from the Roman state. Although they were banned from Jerusalem, they could move and settle freely throughout the rest of the empire. This situation began to change with the spread of Christianity, as the church fathers found it imperative that they distinguish the new faith from its predecessor. In 313, the emperor Constantine issued an edict granting freedom of worship to all religious sects. For the first time, the Christian religion was no longer suppressed and it quickly came to predominate within the empire. This had negative consequences for Jews, as the Christian Church began to call for the official separation of Jews from Christians.

Initially, the Jewish diaspora throughout the Mediterranean had helped to advance the diffusion of Judaism into regions where it had previously been unknown. By the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E, Jewish communities were well-established in sites throughout the Roman world, from Asia Minor to Spain. Rome itself had at least thirteen synagogues. A wider Jewish presence led to better knowledge of Judaism, and upon occasion to conversion of local populations. About 700 C.E., for example, Bulan, leader of the nomadic Khazar people of Central Asia, decided to convert his nation to Judaism, creating an autonomous Jewish state that lasted for some five hundred years. However, after 500, Judaism faced growing threats from the spread of Christianity and (after 632) Islam, both of which found the continuing evolution of Jewish thought threatening to their respective theological postures as successors to Judaism.

Jewish leaders of medieval Europe such as Rabbi Moses ben Nachman (otherwise Nachmanides) saw the Roman conquest of Israel as the beginning of a permanent Jewish diaspora within the Christian world. This understanding of the Jewish diaspora was grounded in personal experience with the Holy Roman Church and its dictates. By 1215, the Roman Catholic Church's Fourth Lateran Council advocated the wearing of special insignia by Jews living in Christian lands, to identify them for an uneducated Christian populace as people to be avoided and as a "badge of shame" to highlight the inferiority of their religious beliefs. Moreover, Jews living in diaspora in Europe faced successive waves of expulsion, forced conversion, and segregation into ghettos as Christians attempted different tactics to control and constrain the development of a Jewish communal presence in their midst. From the Jewish perspective, the sense of diaspora as exile was also acutely heightened (particularly during the Crusades) by the inability of Jews to return to the Holy Land to rebuild the Temple and gather in Jewish exiles—that is, to reestablish a Jewish state as an independent political and theological entity. Exile became the dominant understanding of the diaspora in subsequent generations of both Jews and Christians. Jewish and Christian thinkers put a different spin on the notion of "exile" however. For Jews, the exile, although painful, was part of God's plan for the Jews as a test of their faith and commitment to the Torah. Christians saw the diaspora as God's just punishment of the Jews for their role in the death of Christ. While Islamic rulers treated Jews less harshly than did their Christian counterparts. Muslims similarly distinguished themselves from Jews and Judaism and there were scattered instances of persecution, including forced conversions, in Muslim lands.

By the late eighteenth century many Jews had come to believe that their exile from the Jewish state was permanent. For some, accepting that the diaspora was inescapable meant developing the means for resolving persistent questions about the place of Jews in the various societies within which they resided. Influenced by the developing Enlightenment, Jewish intellectuals in Europe believed that the contemporary mission of the Jewish people was to adapt to their surroundings and find ways to participate in the nation state on equal terms with other citizens. The most important of these advocates was Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin. Following Mendelssohn's call for civil integration of the Jews, later generations of Reformers suggested a series of modifications to Jewish ritual practice that were intended to harmonize Judaism with modern life and make it possible for Jews to present their community as well disposed for social and political participation. The Reformers had great success and influence in Germany and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In other places, the idea of Jewish integration and acculturation was not as readily embraced. The outbreak of violence after the death of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 pushed the Jews of Russia and Poland in the opposite direction, toward Jewish nationalism, and awakened interest in reestablishing a Jewish state at the site of the original Jewish homeland. After the anti-Semitic debacle of the Dreyfus Affair in France, a broad range of European and American Jewish intellectuals were forced to the conclusion that the kind of complete civil integration imagined by the Reformers would never be possible. Accordingly, the first Zionist Congress was held at Basel, Switzerland, in 1897, to organize the push for the Jewish return to Palestine. Zionism, in effect, called for an end to the demeaning conditions in which diaspora Jews were generally forced to live through the creation of a new, modern Jewish state in Palestine.