Th is essay delineates and summarizes the positive and negative features of the Jew-ish experience as a minority in lands of its ever-changing Diaspora from ancient to modern times. Being a minority posed immense challenges for Jewish survival but in the long run contributed the fl exibility of the Jewish tradition. Diff erences be-tween the context in premodern and modern times are stark, but there are conti-nuities that merit analysis.
A Jewish Diaspora existed since the Babylonian Exile of 586 BCE in the sense of a network of permanent settlements of a people outside its original homeland that maintained its ancestral legacy. Even though Jews were a majority within the Land of Israel at least until the Bar Kokhba revolt against Rome (132–135 CE), the greater part of the Jewish people may have lived in Diaspora conditions as a semiautono-mous group with its own social institutions in a Gentile environment for several hundred years. Th e fi rst-century CE historian Josephus quotes the Greek geogra-pher Strabo to the eff ect that there was hardly any place in the inhabited world without the presence of the Jews (Antiquities XIV, 115). Th e New Testament remarks that in the time of Jesus and his apostles, “there were devout Jews from every na-tion under heaven living in Jerusalem, . . . Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judaea, Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs” (Acts 2:5–11). Even though the densest Jewish population was in the Galilee region of the Land of Israel and in the Mesopo-tamian region of the Persia Empire until these areas were conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century, there is ample evidence of long-standing Jewish settlements by then, ranging from settlements on the Rhine River to the northern shore of the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains, from the Iberian peninsula across both shores of the Mediterranean Sea to the Roman Middle East and Sassanian Iran, and south to the Arabian peninsula.
Although the liberties and limitations defi ning the status of the Jews in pre-modern times diff ered from land to land and era to era, everywhere Jews were ex-cluded from the ruling elite (except for a very few instances, such as the Khazar kingdom of the steppes and a short time in Yemen where there were Jewish kings, or notable Jewish courtiers in Islamic and Christian Spain). Jews were not part of the military or feudal hierarchy. Th e Jewish community had its own courts to han-dle disputes according to Jewish law, although arrangements concerning transfer of property and contracts posed no problem because of the Talmudic dictum dina demalkhuta dina (the law of the kingdom is the law). Special taxes and other fi -nancial exactions were applied to the Jews. In some situations the number that could marry annually was limited. In addition, Jews were specifi cally excluded from many businesses and professions, prohibited from owning land, and segregated as to residence (although Jews preferred to live in proximity to their religious institu-tions and each other). If they resided in a locality, that meant they had the right to
practice Judaism as they saw fi t; if Jews were not allowed to worship in their own way, rear their children in their own religious tradition, observe the laws of kashruth, bury their dead according to Jewish practice, and so forth, they could not live as a community in that place.
By 1000 CE, the center of gravity in the Diaspora was shifting westward to Eu-rope from the Middle East, but its scope was even greater than before, from Kievan Rus to the cities of Central Asia and on to Kaifeng, the capital of Sung China, from Yemen to Cochin on the Malabar Coast of India and the African highlands of Ethio-pia. Some communities fl ourished for a while (for example, southern Italy in the early Middle Ages) and then disappeared, whereas other formerly outlying regions surged ahead in Jewish population and cultural hegemony (Poland after the Black Death). In modern times, there is almost no region on any continent in the Old or New Worlds that has not possessed a Jewish minority.
Even though considered galut (exile) in the Jewish theology of the traditional prayer book and other classical works, the Diaspora condition can in retrospect be seen to have been an impetus for the continued vitality of Judaism as an intellec-tual tradition. Not only did Jews borrow extensively from the popular cultures in their multiple environments, but in certain challenging eras they interacted with the high civilizations in times of their greatest fl ourishing. Jewish communities ex-isted in Egypt during the Achaemenid Empire of the fi fth and fourth century BCE, but when the Ptolemaic dynasty occupied that land after the conquests of Alexan-der the Great, the burgeoning Jewish community of Alexandria gave rise to a Helle-nistic Judaism of vast historical importance, a Judaism without which there would have been no Christian Church. Th e Jews of the region that was called “Babylonia”
(central Iraq) long after the disappearance of the ancient Babylonian Empire, in the third century CE, developed its own rigorous version of rabbinic discourse, eventu-ating in the Babylonian Talmud. Without the presence of Judaism in sixth-century Arabia, there might have been no Islam. During the Abbasid caliphate, the yeshiva of Baghdad were the most important centers of Jewish religious law for most of the Diaspora, except for the dissident Karaites who, rejecting rabbinic authority and the Talmud, also fl ourished in that region. Similar accounts could be given for Jews in other arenas of intense cultural creativity: the Maghreb, Andalucia, and Provence, as well as the cities of the Rhineland in the Middle Ages; northern Italy during the Renaissance; and the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania and the Ottoman Em-pire in the early modern period.
Semiautonomous minority status did not prevent premodern Jewry from inter-acting with the surrounding population and culture. Jews spoke the vernacular language of their neighbors, sometimes developing a Jewish dialect of it such as Judeo-Persian, Ladino, or Yiddish. Th ey borrowed customs and symbols from their neighbors and reworked them to fi t the Jewish religious context. Premodern Jewish theological speculation drew on the high scientifi c and philosophical traditions de-rived from Plato and Aristotle. Modern scholars have noted the infl uence of the Franciscan system of penances on the Hasidei Ashkenaz (the pietists of the Cru-sade era), and of neo-Platonism on the Kabbalah (the Jewish mystics of 13th- to 15th-century southern France and northern Spain).
Had the vast bulk of the Jewish people remained in an increasingly stagnant Mid-dle East after 1200, the Jewish tradition would have found itself isolated from those regions where dynamic intellectual and economic developments were taking place.
Th e critical diff erence between being a premodern minority and a modern mi-nority lay in the sweeping transformation of the entire historical context. Premod-ern societies were characterized by some form of social and legal segmentation, such as the division into polis-citizens, slaves, and resident aliens of classical Greece; the dhimmi of the Islamic realm, the millets of the Ottoman Empire; or the aristocracy, clergy, bourgeoisie, and peasantry of ancien régime Europe. “Moder-nity,” a long, contradictory, and apparently unending series of drastic social, cul-tural, and political transformations that began in 17th- and 18th-century Europe and some of its overseas possessions, gradually but inexorably demolished those circumscribed social units, each with its with diff erent privileges and obligations to the ruling elite. Of all the characteristic features of modernity—such as the emer-gence of a class of entrepreneurial capitalists more daring and independent than any before, a greatly increased secular sphere of life, a heightened sense of individ-ual autonomy over against traditional religious imperatives, the ascendancy of sci-entifi c and pragmatic modes of explanation and planning—the most decisive for the Jews was the modern justifi cation of sovereignty as grounded in the “people”
rather than in a divinely appointed monarch.
Th e modem Jewish communities that gradually took shape in Western Europe and North America in the 18th century, in Central Europe during the 19th century, and in Eastern Europe and elsewhere in the 20th century, each had to respond to this new polity as it worked itself out unevenly in one country after another. Earlier the absolutist regimes of the early modern period had sought greater direct control over the Jews. Th e full-fl edged nation-state after the era of the French Revolution dismantled the legal basis of premodern estate-system and other internal social di-visions, erasing the privileges and disabilities attached to each of them. In theory, every citizen (a term that acquired broad new meaning) was to be equal before the law—though there remained a considerable gap between theory and practice. In the 1820s, this process came be called Jewish “emancipation.” Jews no longer paid their taxes as a group but as individuals. Jewish religious courts lost their quasi-political authority. Jews were emancipated as individuals, not as a group. Th e ideo-logical force that shaped the new political order in Europe and the United States was the Enlightenment and its continuation in classical liberalism. Jews were not emancipated by a movement specifi cally directed to them alone; on the contrary, they were conceded to deserve equal status before the law to other citizens because they were subsumed under the universal category of human beings as such.
Emancipation forced a reconfi guration of Jewish institutions because of the transformed legal status of the Jews and the Jewish community, increasingly a vol-untary association of religionists. At the same time a diff erent Jewish economic profi le was emerging as old occupations closed down and new educational and ca-reer opportunities opened up, as a result of the spread of capitalism, the growth of modern schools and universities, the Industrial Revolution, and such notable in-ventions as the railroad and the steamship (which made possible mass migration)
and the popular press (which made possible greater contact between Jews). Fur-thermore, Enlightenment and its successor movements, such as romanticism and nationalism, posed an exacting challenge to Jewish philosophies and ideologies. As the most conspicuous diaspora people in Europe, Jews were one of the earliest of minorities to undergo the transition from the old to the new context of liberation and enfranchisement—pioneers in modernizing a traditional culture in order to cope with a new era of world history.
Modernization of the Jews has its special complications because the Jews are in some sense a group with an ethnic culture, albeit one with distinct subcultures, and as the followers of a religious tradition that embodies a distinctive worldview (the radical monotheism of not only the multiple varieties of historic Judaism but also the font of Christianity and Islam), an elite literary and sophisticated intellec-tual heritage that values learning as an end in itself, and a literature shot through with the imperative of justice in the community, nation, and world and committed to the sanctity of human beings created in “the image of God.” Th erefore, the mod-ernization of Judaism took place on both social and the ideological levels. In the nation-states of the West, the defi nition of Jews as a religious identity predominated, so that in Germany Jewish thought was shaped by the Enlightenment, romanticism, philosophical idealism, and academic Wissenschaft. In Eastern Europe, by the end of the 19th century, other models of modern Jewish communal life took center stage in response to growing political ferment between competing nationalities.
Th e vision of emancipation held by most liberal and socialist ideologists was that the collective legal standing of ethnic minorities was to be constitutionally guaran-teed. At the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I, the successor states to Austria-Hungary and Czarist Russia were forced to sign treaties formally confi rm-ing the legal and cultural rights of their respective minorities. Th is arrangement did not enjoy much success in the interwar years, nor did the total emancipation prom-ised by radical socialism. Zionism, for a long time a minority movement within the Jewish minority, did fi nd fruition after World War II.
As a project of modern Jewish social reintegration, the Zionist movement was predicated on the principle that so long as the Jews remained everywhere a minor-ity, they would remain vulnerable to the forces of persecution and loss of identity.
Only in their own land (and, according to political Zionism, in a sovereign Jewish nation-state) could Jews could fi nd a solution to the diffi culties a minority faced in coping with pressures that the hegemonic culture could bring to bear. Cultural Zionists held that in a “spiritual” center a vibrant modern Hebraic culture would vitalize the Diaspora. Since 1948, the State of Israel provided the Jewish people a recognized voice in the international arena and an eff ective means of rescuing threatened branches of the Diaspora. Ironically, some of the problems of Jews being a minority have been transferred to the State of Israel, which has had to withstand a prolonged state of siege, fi ght four wars in its defense, and be smeared by allega-tions akin to anti-Semitism in Europe before the Holocaust. Like Diaspora Jewry, Israel had to react creatively and energetically to these challenges.
In premodern times the Jews, as a minority everywhere, found it diffi cult to protect themselves eff ectively against the onslaught of military or paramilitary
forces, leaving a heritage of persecution and expulsion that resonated with the bib-lical theme of exile. Th e upsurge of anti-Semitism in Europe and elsewhere be-tween the 1880s and the 1940s demonstrated that modern Jew hatred can be just as murderous or more so than those of the First Crusade (1095), the Black Death (1348–1349), and the Chmielnicki massacres (1648–1649) because of the devastat-ing technology that can be used against the victims. Th e rationale for premodern persecutions was usually religious, but historians detect economic and political reasons that made persecution tempting and convenient: to confi scate the Jewish wealth and eliminate economic competitors, because certain rulers appeared to side with the mob in times of violent social tensions. In modern persecutions the rationale has often been overtly political and economic: Jews had acquired too much power; they were arrogant and dominating; there was no defense against their malevolent cunning but to destroy them root and branch. Singling out a mi-nority to blame gave the illusion of doing something for the insulted and injured.
Under such secular arguments, however, often lay Manichean or apocalyptic no-tions of a quasi-religious nature.
Another dilemma experienced by modern Diaspora Jewry (including secular Israelis who settle there) is loss of members through assimilation. Th e creation of a so-called ‘”neutral society” (the term is used by social historian Jacob Katz for a zone neutral to specifi c religious identity) made it easier for individual Jews to pull away from the Jewish community and be absorbed into the majority. To be sure, Jews have always been, in a biblical phrase from 1 Chronicles 4:43, she’erit ha-pele-tah, a “remnant that escaped.” Although the vast majority of Jews are Jews by birth, there have always been converts to Judaism (“Jews by choice” in the current termi-nology). In modern Europe and the United States, Jews by birth increasingly resem-ble Jews by choice because they voluntarily chose to take their Jewish faith seriously and actualize it in their lives.
In premodern Judaism, Jews were a minority in fact but not in their own eyes.
While the traditional Christian replacement theology held that the Old Israel, the Jewish people, was superseded by the Church as the New Israel, Jews viewed them-selves as God’s beloved, a people chosen by the Eternal to provide God’s only Torah with a dwelling place on earth. Jews were the people who assumed the “yoke of the commandments” and the privilege of demonstrating that they were obedient to the covenant with God to which their ancestors had subscribed at Mount Sinai. Th ere was a range of theological explanations for the persecutions Jews were forced to undergo besides that of punishment for the sins of the fathers as articulated in Deuteronomy. Th ese disasters could be understood as echoing the Akedah (bind-ing of Isaac) of Genesis 22; they were yisurin shel ahavah (chastisements of love) from a God who inordinately cared for them; they were a witness of the faithfulness of the people of Israel to its God, so that persecutions seldom ruptured Jewish faith and sometimes strengthened it.
Th e diff erence between premodern and modern experience of living as a vul-nerable minority is captured in the words of Labor Zionist and intellectual Hayim Greenberg:
Until recent times we were . . . a minority statistically only, but not psychologically. . . . Jews survived as a numerical and persecuted minority in an alien world not because they were a separate tribe, a distinct people (in the modern, nationalist sense) or a diff erent race. Tribes, peoples, racial groups disappeared many times when they min-gled with others more numerous and stronger than they. . . . We were . . . the Congre-gation of Israel. Th is is much more than a group sharing common memories (time and environment frequently eradicate group memories and eliminate them as infl u-encing factors); it is more than blood kinship. . . . During many centuries Jews were aware that, in addition to being a people like any other, a collective physical entity, they were also . . . a group of “conspirators” against the forces of darkness and un-cleanness in the world, and that this “conspiracy” was part of Providence’s plan lead-ing to the ‘”end of days” which would come about sooner or later—time was not a factor and it was not desirable to hasten the end. (Greenberg 1955, 65f.)
Modern Jewish theology has had to reinterpret the uniqueness of the people of Israel in line with new assumptions and methodologies. One of the greatest diff er-ences modernity brought was the realization that Jews were “just a minority.” To be sure, modern learning made educated Jews much more aware of the impact that Jews and Judaism have had on human history. Historical consciousness enables a minority to gain a more nuanced and more complete comprehension of its total heritage against the background of world history. Many Jews are now aware of the remarkable varieties of long-forgotten Jewish cultures and “the Jewish contribution to civilization.” But modern Jewish self-awareness drove home how feared, despised, and hated Jews were and how helpless they could be when attacked. Th e new com-munal agencies and structures turned out to have no eff ective power when
Modern Jewish theology has had to reinterpret the uniqueness of the people of Israel in line with new assumptions and methodologies. One of the greatest diff er-ences modernity brought was the realization that Jews were “just a minority.” To be sure, modern learning made educated Jews much more aware of the impact that Jews and Judaism have had on human history. Historical consciousness enables a minority to gain a more nuanced and more complete comprehension of its total heritage against the background of world history. Many Jews are now aware of the remarkable varieties of long-forgotten Jewish cultures and “the Jewish contribution to civilization.” But modern Jewish self-awareness drove home how feared, despised, and hated Jews were and how helpless they could be when attacked. Th e new com-munal agencies and structures turned out to have no eff ective power when