The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition

by Richard Rhodes

The dispersion of the Jewish people from Palestine—the Diaspora—began in the sixth century B.C. when Babylon conquered the southern Palestinian kingdom of Judah, destroyed Solomon’s temple and carried a large body of Jews into captivity.653 By the beginning of the Christian era, under Roman hegemony, Jews had established communities in Egypt, in Greece, around the Mediterranean and on the shores of the Black Sea and there were Jewish slaves with the Roman legions on the Rhine. Conditions worsened again for the Jews when the Empire was Christianized in the fourth century A.D. with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine; Christianity and Judaism competed, in a Darwinian sense, for the same Holy Land and the same holy books. Under systematic persecution only a small remnant of the Jewish people remained in Judea. The fantasy of Jews as a brotherhood of evil was invented during this era when Christianity fought its missionary way to dominance.