The story of the Diaspora is a key element in the history of the Jewish people and in the focus of their aspirations and purposes in the world. The word "Diaspora" is derived from the Greek for "a scattering" or "to scatter about." The word has come to signify the body of Jews today living not in Israel but scattered outside the boundaries of Israel. Diaspora is much more than this, however, being seen as both a way of life and an intellectual concept, as a state of being and a state of mind. An examination of the way the idea is treated in the Bible and in other writings of the time will help point out the variety of Jewish experience in the Diaspora.
Some historians date the Diaspora from the time of the destruction of the first kingdom of Judah and the captivity in Babylon, but this would make Diaspora synonymous with exile. It is more proper to see the Diaspora as beginning with the Persian conquest of Babylonia. The Persians permitted the Jews to return to their homeland, but most of them chose to remain where they were instead of returning to Palestine. These Jews were now living in Diaspora, something that had become a voluntary absence from their homeland. The preservation of Jewish ideas became of paramount importance in the Diaspora, the scattering of the Jewish people to other parts of the world, but always with a sense of belonging to Palestine and of maintaining certain traditions as a consequence. This is the problem that faced Jewish intellectuals:
How does one go about preventing the disappearance of a people which has lost its country, which has been fragmentized into thousands of segments, and which has been strewn over vast land masses amidst alien tongues and alien religions? What measures does one take to preserve the identity of such a people, and how does one enforce such measures when there is no political power, no police, no army to make these measures enforceable? (Dimont 123).
This is the ...