Intro
After beingforcibly exiled from their land, the people kept faith with it throughout
their Dispersion and never ceased to pray and hope for their return to it and for
the restoration in it of their political freedom . -The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1948
As a result of the historic catastrophe in which Titus of Rome destroyed Jerusalem
and Israel was exiled from its land, I was born in one of the cities of the Exile.
But always I regarded myself as one who was born in Jerusalem. -S. I. Agnon, accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1966
Even Israelis who are not familiar with the historic opening passage of their
Proclamation of Independence must have held a fifty-shekel note that bears
the moving words spoken by S. I. Agnon when he received the Nobel Prize.
Just like the authors of the proclamation, and like most of Israel’s citizens, the
eminent author knew that the “Jewish nation” was exiled after the fall of the
Second Temple in 70 CE, then wandered about the world, inspired by the “two
thousand-year-long hope … of being a free people” (in the words of the Israeli
national anthem) in its ancient homeland.
Uprooting and deportation are concepts deeply embedded in Jewish tradition
in all its forms. But their significance has changed over the history of the reli
gion; they did not always bear the secular meaning with which they came to be
imbued in modern times. Jewish monotheism began to take shape among the
cultural elites who were forcibly deported after the fall of the kingdom of Judah
in the sixth century BCE, and the imagery of exile and wandering already rever
berates, directly or metaphorically, in a major part of the Torah, the Prophets,
and the Writings (the final section of the Old Testament). From the expulsion
from Eden, through Abraham’s migration to Canaan and Jacob’s. descent irlto
Egypt, to the prophesies of Zachariah and Daniel, Jewish religion gazed back
through a perspective of wanderings, uprootings, and returns. The Torah already
stated: “And the Lord shall scatter thee among all people, from one end of the
earth even unto the other, and there thou shalt serve other gods, which neither
thou nor thy fathers have known” (Deut. 28:64). The fall of the First Temple was
associated with expulsion, and this literary-theological memory helped shape
subsequent Jewish religious sensibilities!
However, a close examination of the historical event that apparently
engendered the “second exile” in the year 70 CE, and an analysis of the
Hebrew term golah (exile) and its connotation in late Hebrew, indicate that
the national historical consciousness was a patchwork of disparate events
and traditional elements. Only in this way could it function as an effective
myth that provided modern Jews with a pathway to ethnic identity. The
ultra-paradigm of deportation was essential for the construction of a long
term memory wherein an imaginary, exiled people-race could be described
as the direct descendants of the former “people of the Bible.” As we shall see,
the myth of uprooting and exile was fostered by the Christian tradition, from
which it flowed into Jewish tradition and grew to be the truth engraved in
history, both the general and the national.
Exiled in 70 CE
Exile Without Expulsion
Against Its Will
All Nation Shall Flow Unto It
Hasmoneans Impose Judaism
Hellenistic Sphere
Judaizing
Rabbinical Judaism Viewed Proselytizing
Sad Fate of Judeans
Remembering and Forgetting