Behold Thy God, Oh Jerusalem: Judah’s Journey from Exile to Redemption
The dispersal of Jews from their promised land was the result of two different circumstances.
1/ Failed armed resistance to the Roman occupation.
2/ Voluntary relocation for economic reasons.
The last armed resistance of the Jews against the Romans (known as the Bar-Kochba Revolt) took place in 132 A.D. The rebels were put down and wiped out. The Jewish population was reduced by 50%, most having been killed, deported as slaves or escaped into Egypt and Galilee. The countryside was laid to waste, towns flattened or abandoned. Of the 75 known towns none were left with a single soul to walk their empty streets. The Romans erased the name of Judah from its usage on maps and replaced it with the name “Aelia Capitolina”. In Jerusalem, all that was left standing was the retaining wall of the temple. Everything else was seeded with salt to prevent vegetation from growing. The intellectual and religious life of the community was gone. Any study of Jewish history or culture was punishable by death.
Fortunately, new, more lenient governments followed Hadrian’s rule and, over time, most anti-Jewish laws were repealed. A revival of Jewish spiritual life was begun and flourished. Many of the exiles returned.
Learning was the essence by which the Jews survived, and spiritual strength became the priority of generations to come. The centre of their activities shifted from Jerusalem to Galilee. The old institutes were replaced with an imbued loyalty to the past glories of Israel, the memory of the temple and to their core survival.
The Romans, in an attempt to pacify the country, collaborated with the Rabbis in their peaceful ambitions. Soon the cities began to transform into centres of study attracting teachers and students from all lands. The loss of the temple, as can be imagined, caused a major traumatic shifting of worship and focus. Rabbis introduced a custom of marking all events as they related to the day of the destruction of the temple. All Jews continued to pay tithing. Pilgrims to the temple were encouraged. Prayer became a substitute for service, and rituals were adopted to link the Synagogue to the temple. Migration from Palestine had reached such a level as to be a serious threat to the survival of the community. The Rabbis encouraged people to remain as a symbolic sign of their faith. Most of the people spoke Greek or Aramaic but Hebrew was revived to become the National language. Speaking Hebrew was put on the same spiritual level as residence in the Holy Land.
This centralizing of educators also made possible the forming a consolidation and codification of the Oral Laws. Alongside the Torah (or Written Law), Oral Laws had been handed down for centuries by memory to many generations in an accumulation of chaotic mass writings. They had no order whatsoever. A work began, which lasted over half a century and resulted in what was called the “Mishnah”, a great literary and legal document drawn from 13 collections of case histories from 150 scholars. After passing Biblical justification, the traditions were supplemented, scrutinized and rearranged into subject divisions. The whole was arranged into six orders, Seeds, Feasts, Women, Damages, Hallowed affairs, Cleanliness and Sacred things. Each of the divisions were further divided into Tractates, Chapters, and Clauses.
These factors led to a more cohesive and united community of Jewishness, its culture and its self confidence. The Romans had left them alone with no interference or religious persecution for just sufficient time for this restoration to firmly set before conditions once more began to change.
With the decline of the economic and social fabric of the Empire, coupled with the constant rise of taxation, the Jews began to realize they could not flourish as a segregated society. This was further exacerbated by the adoption of Christianity as the Religion of the Roman Empire. This expanded the Christian Church Fathers throughout the Empire. Now, there was no room for both the Jewish Patriarch in Palestine and the Christian Bishop in Jerusalem. Jewish communities had already expanded into Babylon, Syria, Persia and Armenia and as the situation deteriorated, the pressure mounted for the Palestinian Jews to migrate to those centres. The effect was that the influence of the Palestinian Rabbis declined while the influence of the Rabbis in Babylon grew in importance.
For some time, the two schools in Palestine and Babylon worked together on the Mishnah, but then a disharmony began to grow. The teachers came to the conclusion that the Mishnah as it was then constituted, did not include all the Laws or legal materials. Most certainly not the additional laws that had been implemented since the work had begun. They also felt that many of the explanations referred exclusively to the Palestinian traditions and too little consideration had been given to the Babylonian traditions. The Palestinian scholars continued to become enfeebled by the widespread adoption of Christianity, so the rift widened. Babylonian and Palestinian academics eventually chose their own ways. The additional legal entries and codified additions were combined with the original Mishnah thus forming the Talmud. But, as the two groups worked separately, it resulted in the creation of two Talmuds, the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud.
The Palestinian Talmud also known as the Jerusalem Talmud was not finished until the middle of the fourth century because of very extremely adverse political conditions. It has some serious short comings. It was incomplete and lacked continuity. Its greatest contribution was to the history and as a source of information of Jewry in Palestine.
The Babylonian Talmud also has short comings. While it reflects 10 centuries of customs and history of Jewry in Palestine as well as Babylonia, it includes a plethora of fables, sagas, legends, tales, poems, allegories, ethical reflections and historical reflections. The Bible is its starting point, but somewhere in its 2 1/2 million words, more than a third became devoted to the nonlegal part of the Mishnah. Much of the teachings are reflections and personal opinions of the teachers and scholars who wrote them.
As the Bible became the core of Christian living, so did the Talmud become the daily companion of the Jewish culture including the very existence of the entity. As hostility and forced expulsion from society pressed in on them, the Jews became dependent on their traditions and customs honoured by their forefathers. The Talmud also provided an identity which gave them purpose and cohesion.
The next major force that impacted the life of Jewry occurred in the early fourth century. Constantine converted to Christianity and brought the religion to the Roman Empire by force. In an attempt to save his crumbling Empire, he shifted the Capital to Constantinople which was to become a new centre of power. No doubt his thinking for such a move was to leave the corruption and immorality of the old system behind. However, this scheme was stillborn. What was born in its place, was the Byzantine Empire. Just before the lights went out in the East, the Papacy was established. Arguments and contentions caused the world of the Roman Church to split in two parts, East and West. These shifting tectonic plates caused new waves of persecution and intolerance to come crashing down upon the Jews.
Constantine unleashed Christianity with Empirical edict and might. Singled out for degradation were the Jews because, as a whole, they would not submit to compulsory baptism. They suffered greatly under the Persian and Byzantium Empires.
Meanwhile, the new European states that were the outcome of the disintegrated Roman Empire, began to collate. Originally, the Edict of Caracalla in 212 A.D. had given Jews the right to citizenship. Now under the Theodosius Code of 438 A.D., an enforced, sustained policy of intolerance began to demand strict regulations regarding their freedoms. The Jews were not permitted to marry Christians, could not have Christian slaves, could build no synagogues, and were restricted in their occupation choices. For the next 1½ centuries, and the continuing during the rise of Islam, the Jews were harassed in and banished from one location after another. With the collapse of the Empire, the various states remaining were free to impose whatever conditions they wanted upon the nation-less Jews. All relics from the Christian period were removed from the Holy lands, as well as any evidences from Biblical prophets. Churches were built over original historical holy sites. Jews were banned from entering such places as Jerusalem.
When the Babylonians, Cyrus and Alexander the Great conquered the Holy Land, they were mostly tolerant of the Jews and allowed them to practice their religion. This was not the case when the Jews fell into the hands of the Christians. Now they were forced to be baptized as Christians or be deported as Jews.
These were desperate times. Thousands were baptized while the rest of the Jews migrated to Italy, Franco/ Germany, and Spain. The Jews who settled in Spain (who became known as Sephardic Jews) endured particularly harsh treatment because they were labelled “Christ Killers”. Regardless of where they sought shelter, they tended to live in urban communities, isolating themselves in Ghettos. Almost without exception, they remained as aliens in their new surroundings, permitted to work only in the humblest of occupations.
Like a football between competing teams, both the Jews in Europe and the Jews in Palestine were kicked back and forth between the East Orthodox Church, West Roman Catholics, the Christian Kings, the Persians, the Arabs and the Muslims. As a result, Jews were forced to abandon the pursuit of agriculture and relinquish any ties to the land. Excluded from the economy of all nations they resorted to trades where they eventually achieved a universal prominence. This unfortunately made them a natural target for all kinds of abuse as well.