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Diaspora
[Greek, "scattering", galut (Hebrew), golus
(Yiddish, "exile")] - A term used to describe the groups of
Jews who
live outside the Holy Land.
The diaspora began in the sixth century B.C., when Jews
were sent
into exile in Babylon. After the fall of the Second Temple
(first
century A.D.), the Jews lived throughout the Roman Empire-in
Rome, the
Iberian Peninsula, southern Gaul, Alexandria, Northern
Africa, as well
as in Mesopotamia, in the Caucasus, Persia, Central Asia and
India.
A group of Jews known in Polish as the krymczacy settled
in the
Crimea during the first centuries after Christ. These Jews
learned the
Tatar language and formed their own local culture. In the
Caucasus, they
were a pastoral, agricultural, and warlike mountain tribe
that spoke a
Judeo-Tatar dialect, practiced polygamy and believed in the
Persian
origins of their group.
The universalistic elements in Judaism, particularly
strong during
the first centuries after Christ, resulted in the foundation
of Judaized
groups such as the Khazars or the Ethiopian Falasha, whose
origins
probably lie with a heretical faction of the Coptic Church.
Several separate groups of Jews lived in India until
recently. Bnei
Israel [Hebrew, "The Sons of Israel"], who speak the Marathi
language,
believed their roots reached back to the Ten Tribes deported
by the
Assyrians. They were divided into two castes - black and
white. Jews
from the city of Kochin believed their origins were linked
with the
trading activities of King Salomon, though it is more likely
they were
related to the Jews of the Iberian Peninsula, from whence
they were
expelled in the late fifteenth century.
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A group of Jews also settled in China, in the
city of Kaifeng, no earlier than after the destruction of
the Second
Temple in the ninth century; they would have come to China
from Persia
at that time. Losing contact with other Jews for centuries,
their own
culture took shape, blending Chinese customs with those of
Persian
Judaism of the early Middle Ages. Its members were
ethnically Chinese.
Persecuted by the communist authorities, they virtually
ceased to exist
during the Cultural Revolution.
The two largest Jewish cultural branches, the Sephardim
and the
Ashkenazim, settled during the Middle Ages and later in the
Near East,
the Balkans, and in Western and Eastern Europe. While the
tendency was
for Jewish centers to shift towards the east during this
period, during
the mid-seventeenth century the migration once again turned
towards the
west. Jews also arrived with the first settlers to the newly
discovered
American continents. The Jewish Community of New Amsterdam
(now known as
New York) was founded as early as the mid-seventeenth
century. The
largest phase of Jewish emigration to both North and South
America took
place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.
Beginning in the early nineteenth century, they also settled
in
Australia and other colonies.
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Currently, the largest concentrations of Jews
are found in the United States (about 6 million), Israel
(over 3
million), the countries of the former Soviet Union (about 2
million),
France (670,000), South America (Argentina, Brazil and
Mexico, where
they total 500,000), Great Britain (approx. 400,000) and
South Africa
(approx. 100,000). In Poland, which until 1939 was home the
largest
group of Jews in the world (somewhat more than 3 million),
there are
currently 5,000 to 6,000 people of Jewish ancestry; not all
of them keep
in contact with Jewish culture, however.
(A.C./CM)
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