the word diaspora (greek for “scattering”) designates the members of a nation or ethnic group who live outside their nation's original territory. Sooner or later most nations generate a diaspora, though smaller communities tend to blend into their surroundings and lose their distinctive identity. A Jewish Diaspora has existed since the Babylonian Exile, if not earlier; in fact, since early in the Common Era, a majority of world Jewry has lived outside the Land of Israel. No history of the Jews or of Judaism is complete without an examination of this ancient widespread phenomenon.

When the Assyrians conquered the Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE, they displaced its entire population and settled the land with foreigners who had similarly been removed from their homes. The ultimate fate of these Israelite exiles has never been determined. They probably mingled with the peoples of the territories where they were settled and lost their national identity (this was the Assyrians' purpose), though some may have wandered back and merged into the surviving kingdom of the tribe of Judah.

The fate of the Babylonian exiles of 597 and 586 was different. The first set of transfers took place about ten years before the final defeat. This earlier group of exiled leaders naturally stayed in touch with their homeland, because Judah remained an independent if subjugated kingdom. In this way a pattern was created that the second, larger exile group could simply continue.

in 104 bce, the hasmonaean high priest john hyrcanus was succeeded by his son Judah Aristoboulus; after only one year, Judah himself died and was succeeded by his brother Alexander Jannaeus. One of these brothers – it is not clear which – began using the title “king of Judaea.” The kingdom lasted only a brief while – it was abolished under Roman occupation in the year 63 BCE – but these years represent a crucial interval in the history of Judaism.

The Maccabean state began insecurely. Over the 130's BCE, King Antiochus VII sat on the Seleucid throne. The last vigorous king of that dynasty, he barely missed reconquering the newly independent Judaea: Antiochus briefly reasserted royal authority over the territory but was unable to sustain his control. After that, the Jewish territory slowly expanded until finally (and briefly) the Kingdom of Judaea became a regional power in its own right, capable of influencing events throughout the region, sometimes even the royal domains of Syria and Egypt themselves.

That growth was propelled by an increasingly aggressive military policy. The Maccabean brothers, starting with Judah himself, had occasionally expelled the previous inhabitants of a border region and replaced them with Jews: the resolution installing Simon as high priest had specifically praised him and his brother Jonathan for this accomplishment.

the following sketches do not offer biography in the usual sense of the term, because they cannot be grounded in careful analysis of available source material. Rabbinic literature cannot easily be used for biography for the same reason that biblical narratives cannot easily be used as sources of history (see Chapter 1). Like biblical narratives, the stories provided in rabbinic literature receive no corroboration from any other body of material. They can be read as distillations of rabbinic memory, that is, as stories about distinguished predecessors that later rabbis preserved and told. But they must be read as stories, not archival records of historical incidents. Stories change in the retelling. Stories are preserved because later narrators find them interesting or useful or valuable, but later narrators' interests and values affect the way they are told. Surely there is historical information lurking in these narratives, but that information may less concern the people described in the stories than the later narrators who preserved them, and modern readers will not always be able to trace the path that led from the former to the latter. All this, as noted, can be said about the narratives of scripture as well.

However, with rabbinic narrative a further complication arises as well: very often different rabbinic documents, or even different passages in the same document, contain parallel versions of a single story, versions that may differ in numerous significant details or even in the basic presentation of the episode they appear to describe.