Title: Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity
By: Malka Z. Simkovich
Publisher: Eisenbrauns (Penn State University Press)
Bare-headed and luxuriously bearded, Israeli comedian Yohay Sponder has a shtick that’s making the rounds on social media since October 7. Speaking in a caricature Israeli accent, he gently berates a woman in his audience who made aliyah from South Africa: “Zionism is only, it is only if you came from a better place than Israel. Zionism is not if you upgraded your life; it’s if you downgraded your life to help us get to the status of your country. Very simple.
“If you came from South Africa? Not Zionism. If you came from America, depends where. If you came from South America, not Zionism. If you came from Miami, Zionism. You’re Zionist!…California? Before the fire, Zionist.” Sponder’s routine points to one of the most enduring aspects of the Jewish condition: what, precisely, is the meaning of Diaspora? In this brief but penetrating collection of essays, Malka Simkovich probes the question as it is presented in some of the earliest texts of our millennial tradition.
Simkovich demonstrated her mastery of Jewish sources written in antiquity with her 2018 work, Discovering Second Temple Literature, skills she now puts to use with a more focused agenda. Recognizing that prominent Jewish communities flourished in Egypt, Babylonia, and elsewhere well before the Great Revolt of the year 66, how did Jews come to terms with the viability of life outside of the Jewish homeland? Was Jewish life in ancient Alexandria, with all its wealth and power, somehow an extension of the punishment inflicted on a wayward people, or was it rather an affirmation of the power of the idea of Judaism, allowing Jewish culture to survive in foreign (and sometimes hostile) environments? Did Jewish sovereignty during the Hasmonean era mean that Jews who continued to live in Diaspora were negating their Jewish heritage, or was it sufficient that a Jewish state existed to provide an anchor for thriving communities elsewhere? Sponder, speaking of French aliyah, quips, “No, it’s a shelter! You welcome. But not Zionism.”
One of the most fascinating chapters of Simkovich’s book is an exploration of the origins of word diaspora itself. The term is a neologism of the Septuagint, meaning, it was invented by the 3rd century BCE translators of the Bible into Greek, a major project of the Egyptian Jewish community. “To readers coming across it for the first time,” writes Simkovich, “diaspora would have conveyed an image of seeds being scattered upon foreign lands. Its prefix dia- indicates a motion of moving through or over a particular space and refers to separation or division. Its main root, the verb speirō, means ‘to sow.’”
In other words, diaspora evoked an image of Jewish communities spread out across the globe, taking root and flourishing like Greco-Roman Chabad houses. But the term preserved a distinctly negative aspect as well: it is first used in the Septuagint to translate the word za’avah (“horror”) in Deuteronomy 28:25, a passage from the terrifying section known as “the rebuke:” The L-rd will cause thee to be smitten before thine enemies; thou shalt go out one way against them, and shalt flee seven ways before them; and thou shalt be a horror unto all the kingdoms of the earth. The scattering is definitely a punishment, and returning from exile would qualify on the Sponder scale for Zionism, even from sun-drenched Miami.
Yet the survival of Jewish communities outside Israel demonstrated how ex-pats could simultaneously maintain “that Jerusalem remained at the center of their spiritual lives, and they affirmed the idea that they could properly worship G-d right where they were.” This, for Simcovich, constituted the “biggest theological problem for Jews in the Hellenistic era” (perhaps a bit of an overreach – the challenge of “why do the righteous suffer” is the top of my list – but nevertheless at least part of the top ten). Her book looks at a wide range of Jewish writings, primarily Greek-language extra-biblical texts from antiquity like The Letter of Aristeas and The Wisdom of Ben Sira but also looking at the fascinating communications between Judea and the Jewish outpost of Yeb in Elephantine, and demonstrates how some authors sought to propagandize an image of the diaspora as fundamentally negative, while others affirmed its value for the ongoing survival of Judaism. The book is gem-like in its precisely defined area of focus, but I would have liked to read more of her analysis of earlier texts relating to her theme, such as key passages in Nehemiah, Daniel and the Hebrew version of Esther (rather than the Septuagint translation). Still, it is a fascinating look into the ancient origins of a perennial debate endemic to the Jewish condition: Zionist or not Zionist?
