Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity

By Malka Z. Simkovich, director and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society, is a well-researched, scholarly, and fascinating exploration of the relationship between the Jewish communities of Israel and Egypt in ancient times.

A new book explores the relationship between the Jewish communities of Israel and Egypt in ancient times, examining the integration of the elite into the ruling class in Ptolemaic Egypt and the political failures of the Hasmonean monarchy in Judea.

During the late second century BCE, while Jews in Egypt were well represented in the Ptolemaic government, the political failures of the Hasmonean monarchy in Judea were becoming apparent, with the Jews remaining in conflict with the Seleucid Greeks.

“Jews wanted to show their kin who lived abroad, particularly those living in Egypt, that they were far from powerless. They believed that Jews in Egypt should neither pity nor condescend to them. Instead, Egyptian Jews were to admire them as authorities,” writes Malka Z. Simkovich, director and editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society, in her new book, Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity (Johns Hopkins University Press).

This Stone block portrays the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten as a sphinx. It is kept at the Kestner Museum of Hanover, Germany. (credit: Hans Ollermann/Wikimedia Commons)

Simkovich explains that Judean Jewish texts produced during the Second Temple period for the Jewish community in Egypt quoted biblical heroes and religious leaders who lamented that Jewish suffering outside Judea was a consequence of sin. Meanwhile, Jewish texts produced in Egypt purported to quote Judean Jewish leaders who embraced life outside the homeland as legitimate and long-lasting.

“The idea of diaspora became a flexible template upon which early Jews developed competing cosmologies that addressed the question of how the Land of Israel figured into God’s relationship with the covenantal people,” she writes.

The dynamic between Jews inside Israel and those living outside

LETTERS FROM Home is divided into three sections. The first discusses the dynamic between the Jewish community inside Israel and those living outside.

While the Jews in Israel attempted to explain that Jewish existence outside the land was a result of sin that resulted in God’s anger and rejection, those living outside of Israel “wrote texts that present the family of world Jewry as united in values and bound by a common history” and emphasized that God is equally accessible anywhere.

Simkovich posits that the writers of the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah written in the late 3rd century BCE, were influential in creating a negative attitude toward Jewish life outside of the land, inventing the word diaspora, which means “a scattering of seeds.”

This term was used in translating passages of the Bible that predicted the future expulsions of the Jews from their land and exposure to other nations.

“The Septuagint, which may have been produced in Egypt but was influenced by Judean modes of thinking, can be read as a Judean missive intended for Egyptian Jewry,” she writes. Eventually, the negative connotation of the word became dissonant with the reality of most Jews living outside of Israel.

The second section of the book analyzes 2nd-century BCE Judean texts in which the writers posited that Jewish existence outside of Israel was an indication of divine rejection. The Judean Jews had hoped that the Hasmonean victory over the Seleucid Greeks would signal a new era of Jewish sovereignty and an ingathering of Jews to Israel.

To their dismay, a mass return did not take place. The Jews of Judea exhorted the Egyptian Jews to observe holidays that affirmed Judean authority, and their texts expressed concern that they were not sufficiently devoted to Judea.

The book’s final section discusses how the Egyptian Jews related to the Jews of Israel, embracing both identities – of citizens loyal to their host country while retaining their feelings for their homeland. In these documents, God is presented as universally present and interested in all humankind, thereby strengthening their claim that Egypt could be their home.

What did the success of these Diaspora communities indicate? Would God someday put an end to their state of exile? Or, if God would allow them to remain, what did life outside the land mean, theologically speaking?

Ultimately, the Jewish people never agreed on the answers to these questions. The author points out that the relationship between the two communities created an underlying tension in their relationship, not unlike the modern-day relationship between world Jewry and the Jews of the State of Israel.

With the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis, realizing that Jewish life outside of Israel was a reality that required attention, created a way of Jewish life that could accommodate the absence of a Temple, focusing on study and synagogue attendance.

Their innovations, concludes Simkovich, enabled Jews, wherever they lived, “to embrace sacred space and sacred time as twin pillars of Jewish faith. Even today, these features form a tension that cannot – and need not – be resolved.”