Letters from Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity

by Malka Z. Simkovich

The announcement by the Persian king Cyrus in 538 BCE that exiled Judeans could return to their homeland should have been cause for celebration. Instead, it plunged Judeans into animated debate. Only a small community returned and participated in the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. By the end of the sixth century BCE, Judeans faced a theological Had the catastrophic punishment of exile, believed to mark God’s retribution for the people’s sins, come to an end? While Jews in Judea believed that life abroad signified God’s wrath and rejection, Jews outside of Judea rejected this notion. From both sides of the diasporic line, Jews wrote letters and speeches that conveyed the sense that their positions had ancient roots in Torah traditions. In this book, Malka Z. Simkovich investigates the rhetorical strategies―such as pseudepigraphy, ventriloquy, and mirroring―that Egyptian and Judean Jews incorporated into their writings about life outside the Land of Israel, charting the boundary-marking push and pull that took place within Jewish letters in the Hellenistic era. Drawing on this correspondence and other contemporaneous writings, Simkovich argues that the construct of diaspora at the time―reinforced by some and negated by others―produced a tension that lay at the core of Jewish identity in the ancient world. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of ancient Judaism and to laypersons interested in the questions of a Jewish homeland and Jewish diaspora.

Genres: Judaism, History

230 pages, Hardcover

Published June 18, 2024

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book more than I did. The core argument is that the concept of gola/galut/diaspora can be found in late second temple literature but exclusively as an expression of Judean (and perhaps earlier Judahite) supremacy where those living in the Holy Land looked down on those outside. In contrast, Egyptian Jewry seems to not have felt diaspora as a theological category and stressed universalism and tying Jews together as an ethnic entity (and perhaps a religious one as well, though that is probably a category error and isn’t the focus of the work)

The main part I didn’t like was the overemphasis on “ventriloquism” and “mise en abbye” etc with a focus on the literary structure of the letters and works under discussion. For an academic audience I’m sure it’s important but it felt superfluous and jargon-y

Overall though the question of diaspora and Jewish identity is always relevant. Lots of interesting stuff in here.