Over green tea in Amichai Chikli’s office, with sweeping views of Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim high-tech neighborhood and surrounding mountains, JNS asked the Israeli minister for diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism how he defines “Diaspora.”
“I look at it very—from the tachlis side, the pragmatic side,” the 43-year-old minister, who arrived at the meeting in February toting a bike helmet, told JNS. “We are in a pragmatic framework. We are in a government office. So ‘the Jews who live outside of Israel.’ The Diaspora. As simple as that.”
The bookshelves in Chikli’s office suggested an omnivorous reader: Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer’s 1862 Seeking Zion, which advocated for agricultural training for Jewish settlement; an apparent copy of Judah Halevi’s 12th-century philosophical work Kuzari; and the memoirs of the Arab Legion commander Abdullah Tal, a Jordanian sentenced to death in absentia for the assassination of Abdullah I in 1951.
JNS also spotted a two-volume set of writings related to the pre-state, underground Fighters for the Freedom of Israel (Lehi), several books by the Israeli military leader Yigal Allon (including Curtain of Sand and The Making of Israel’s Army), a five-volume Torah interpretation called Eshel Avraham, a pocket-sized Chabad daily study Chitat and Israeli geographer Zev Vilnay’s The Campaign for the Liberation of Israel.
Above a bookcase, a poster showed a blown-up image of a postcard with a portrait of Theodor Herzl, his head resting on his hand, flanked by an angel, with broken shackles, bearing the Zionist flag.
When JNS asked Chikli if he thought that the Jewish Diaspora was l’chatchilah, “ideal,” or b’dieved, “suboptimal,” the minister quoted first in Hebrew from Psalm 126:1 and then from part of the amidah prayer, which is based on several Isaiah verses.
“I think that when we are praying ‘the returners of Zion, we are as dreamers,’ and ‘lift up a flag to gather our exiles from the earth’s four corners,’ I mean it,” he told JNS. “I don’t see the Diaspora as the idealized reality. I think that we should dream, pray for having the vast majority of the Jewish people in Eretz Yisrael.”
Though Chikli sees Jewish ingathering to Israel as “part of the Zionist vision,” he told JNS that he is aware “of the fact that the reality of thousands of years of the galut,” or exile, “creates the conditions in which many people live outside of the State of Israel.”
As the son of two immigrants to Israel, Chikli said that he knows how “extremely tough” it is to make aliyah. “I’m not judging anyone for not making aliyah,” he told JNS.
JNS asked the minister if he hopes that his job, with its diasporic and antisemitism portfolio, will become outdated. “Sure,” he said. “I believe in the basic Zionist aspiration. Nothing new.”
‘Not a self-evidently useful category’
Malka Simkovich’s research for her 2024 book Letters From Home: The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity emerged from her “longtime fascination” with the Second Temple period, which spans from about 515 BCE to 70 C.E. and “bridges the world of the Hebrew Bible with the world of rabbinic Judaism that Jews are familiar with today,” the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society told JNS.
“The study of this era has been neglected by traditional rabbinic scholars, who have focused either on interpreting the Hebrew Bible, which was mostly composed prior to 515 BCE, or on rabbinic texts that were recorded after the Second Temple fell,” said the visiting professor at Yeshiva University’s Revel Graduate School for Jewish Studies and former Jewish studies chair at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. “Until recently, academic scholars of biblical literature have also neglected this era.”
Scholars have assumed that Jewish life centered on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem during the Second Temple period and that Jewish documents produced outside the Holy Land were produced by Jews who “practiced a form of Judaism that became increasingly corrupted over time, as Jews became more exposed to Hellenistic culture,” according to Simkovich.
But scholars came around in recent decades to see Jewish life outside of Israel as thriving, even as its connection to Israel weakened. When Simkovich began working on the book five years ago, she was surprised to find so many Jewish texts that expressed “love and concern for the well-being of Jews across the diasporic line.”
She was also surprised to learn that Jews in Israel invented the word “Diaspora.”
“These Judean Jews—and not those living abroad—used this new word. Jews living in the actual ‘Diaspora,’ meanwhile, did not use the word, or think with the concept of a cohesive, homogenous Jewish population outside the land of Israel,” she told JNS.
For the book, she pored over texts that were essentially hiding in plain sight, including those preserved in the Apocrypha. One of her favorites is a Greek version of the story of Esther, penned in the second century BCE.
Though the book features “Hellenized additions that add dramatic flair to the story,” a small line at the end of the text identifies one Jew named Lysimachus, of Jerusalem, as the author. It also states that two Jews, a father and son, brought the book to Egypt.
“This detail transforms the way we should understand the Greek version of Esther,” Simkovich said. “Rather than thinking about Greek Esther as an inauthentic, Hellenized version of the older biblical story, a more accurate understanding is that the Jerusalemite Jew who produced Greek Esther wanted to send it to Jews living in Egypt to establish that, while the story of Esther takes place outside the Jewish homeland, its authority derives from Jerusalem.”
Thus, Simkovich told JNS, the text, “which contains numerous letters between Persians and other Persians, and Jews and other Jews, can be read as a kind of a letter from Jews in Jerusalem to Jews in Egypt in order to establish themselves as religious authorities over all Jews, even those who live abroad.”
‘A dialogue with ourselves’
Much of what she discovered researching the book reminds Simkovich of “the complex dynamics between Jews living within and without Israel today,” she told JNS.
“The parallels between Israel-Diaspora relations today and in antiquity are striking, both in terms of what Jews within and without Israel were saying about Jewish life outside the homeland, and in terms of how they communicated these ideas,” she said.
In the Hellenistic era, Jews in and outside of Israel were ventriloquists speaking in the voices of fellow Jews across the diasporic line, according to Simkovich.
“They did so with different goals in mind. Judean Jews wrote documents which imagined Jews abroad admiring Jerusalem and its temple as the epicenter of Jewish life and begging God to enable them to return home,” she said. “Jews abroad wrote texts which imagined Jews in Judea accepting them as their equal and legitimate kin.”
Neither group had it right. Many Jews outside Judea didn’t try to return to Israel, and many Judeans didn’t accept their fellow Jews outside Israel as equals.
“These Judean Jews invented the word ‘Diaspora’ and the concept behind it,” Simkovich said. “The ‘Diaspora’ as a word and category was not used by Jews who lived outside the land of Israel.” And outside of Israel, it’s rare for Jews to self-identify as “diasporan Jews” today, according to Simkovich.
“The notion of ‘Diaspora’ does not resonate with most ‘Diaspora’ Jews,” she said.
She thinks that is because Jews abroad don’t find the notion of a “homogenous Jewish population outside of Israel” to be useful, and since most “Diaspora” Jews don’t think they practice “a kind of Judaism that contrasts with the practices of Israeli Jews.”
A “striking” difference between the way that “Diaspora” is talked about today and in ancient times is that Hellenistic-era Jews abroad “seem to have mostly ignored Judean arguments about the Diaspora and happily lived as observant Jews in regions such as Alexandria, Antioch and Rome,” according to Simkovich.
“Today, however, I find that many observant Jews living outside Israel, particularly those in Modern Orthodox communities, unquestioningly accept the notion that Judaism cannot be authentically practiced outside the Land of Israel,” she said.
The result, she said, is that Jews abroad who see themselves as “imitators of authentic Jewish practice rather than rightful practitioners” put themselves on a path to “their own erasure” and to “self-negation.”
“The Diaspora is not a self-evidently useful category, or even a category that needs to exist,” she told JNS. “One can fully support the Land of Israel without enforcing a category which suggests that to live outside the Land of Israel is to live in sin and on the outskirts of Jewish authenticity.”
“Meaningful dialogue and meaningful relationships only emerge when one party allows the other to define themselves,” she added. “When we tell another person who they are, we end up having a dialogue with ourselves.”
Positive alternative to ‘exile’
Jews didn’t use the Greek term Diaspora until recently. Instead, they referred to “exile,” which was “seen as a punishment and therefore negative, but a negative that had positive qualities or outcomes,” according to David Kraemer, librarian and professor of Talmud and rabbinics at Jewish Theological Seminary and author of the May 2025 book Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora.
The “punishment” of exile atoned for Jewish sins, and “brought reconciliation between the people and God,” Kraemer told JNS. “Moreover, just because the people were in ‘exile’ didn’t mean that they were abandoned by God.”
The word “Diaspora” is used today as a “more neutral, and even positive, alternative to ‘exile,’” he said.
Kraemer thinks that the term is useful and worth keeping, and that it represents an “important phenomenon.”
Jews have become “very divided” since Oct. 7 on the question of whether Israel or other places with significant Jewish populations are the center of Jewish gravity and identity, according to Kraemer.
“I have spoken with several expat, or nearly expat, Israeli authors recently who are interested in relocating their art and culture to lands outside of Israel,” he told JNS. “I’m happy to say there are more Diaspora Jews today who refuse to be dismissed as a secondary phenomenon, insisting that Jewish life and culture grows and contributes in Diaspora as much as in Israel.”
Looking ahead, Kraemer thinks it will be telling to “follow the money” and watch how funding for Jewish projects in the Diaspora compares to monies being sent to Israel.
“Are ‘non-Zionist’ or ‘post-Zionist’ Jews being accepted in mainstream Jewish communities?” he said. “Pledging allegiance to Zionism has been fairly widespread in mainstream Jewish life in recent decades, and it will be interesting to see if this changes.”
‘A near-run thing’
Diaspora communities played an important role in Jewish life by the first century BCE, particularly in Alexandria (Egypt) and Mesopotamia (Iraq), which Jews called Babylonia, according to Barry Strauss, humanistic studies professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of the August 2025 book Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire.
Syria, present-day Lebanon, Asia Minor, Cyprus, Cyrenaica (Libya), Greece and Rome also had large Jewish communities, according to Strauss, also a Hoover Institution fellow. “Yet the Diaspora was not the center of Jewish life then.”
“The Land of Israel, or Judea, as it was then known, was the center of Jewish identity and leadership. It was preeminent while the Temple stood, and even after, it was the seedbed of rabbinic Judaism,” he told JNS.
Though there was a “lively” Greek-speaking Jewish community in Alexandria, which was where the philosopher Philo “tried to reconcile Jewish and Greek thought,” and the Diaspora had large Jewish populations, “the Jews of the Diaspora always looked toward Jerusalem and, after the churban—destruction of the Temple—they aimed at rebuilding it,” according to Strauss.
The scholar’s new book focuses, in part, on the Diaspora Revolt, or Kitos War, which took place from around 116 to 117 C.E. One of the aims of the revolt, “whose western branch was centered in Cyrenaica, Egypt and Cyprus,” was “to return to the Holy Land and restore Jerusalem,” Strauss told JNS. “Unfortunately, the brutal Roman repression of this revolt virtually destroyed Jewish life in those lands.”
“One unexpected result of the presence of Greek-speaking Jewish Diaspora communities was the role that they played in the spread of Christianity,” he said. “It’s a complex story and not strictly a Jewish one, as the gentile element in Christianity soon predominated. But the Jewish presence was significant.”
The destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. was the most significant factor in Jewish practice during the 200-year period that the book covers, 63 BCE to 136 C.E.
“While hoping for—and in two additional revolts, acting towards—the rebuilding of the Temple, Jews also began the process of adjusting to life without the Temple, at least temporarily,” Strauss said. “The result was the beginning of the emergence of rabbinic Judaism with its emphasis on the synagogue and on learning, the foundation of today’s Judaism in which the hope for rebuilding the Temple survives, but the Temple itself, and its sacrifices, plays no role in Jewish practice.”
Other scholars have shown, he told JNS, that “as resilient as the rabbis were, the survival of Judaism was a near-run thing.”
With the destruction, Jewish communities in present-day Libya, Egypt and Cyprus “were all but wiped out,” Strauss said. “In the Land of Israel, Jews were enslaved and deported from most of their historic homeland in the region of Judah, while a remnant found refuge in Galilee and Golan.”
In his research, Strauss was surprised by the large role that ancient Iranians—the Parthian empire—played in the revolts, he told JNS.
“The hope of Parthian intervention spurred the rebels on while it frightened the Romans. Even though the Parthians never did intervene in force, the mere possibility cast a shadow over the events in ways that I hadn’t expected,” he said. “I hadn’t imagined, for example, how Rome’s humiliation in its failed invasion of Parthia contributed to the decision to rebuild Jerusalem as a pagan city.”
He was also surprised by how prominent certain women, including Queen Helena, Berenice, Babatha and Claudia Aster, were in the revolts and “whether they supported the rebels or opposed them,” he said. The women “deserve to be moved to the front page of history,” he added.
A lesson from the Great Revolt that Strauss says is “crystal clear” is the “peril of disunity.”
“At times during the revolt, the rebel leaders in Jerusalem were more interested in fighting the members of the opposing faction than in fighting the Romans. They even burned each other’s food supply, which led to a famine during the siege and thereby precluded any chance of success, slim though it might have been,” he told JNS. “No wonder the Talmud said that the Temple was destroyed because of ‘senseless hatred’ among Jews.”
The determination of the Jewish rebels to survive as a nation is another important lesson, according to Strauss.
“Their rebellions ended in disaster, but they set an example from which the rabbis later benefited; however, much the rabbis rejected the rebels’ tactics,” he said. “The rabbis abjured violent resistance against Rome, choosing spiritual resistance instead, but like the rebels, they were determined that the people of Israel would survive.”
“Jews today, especially in the Diaspora, need to commit themselves to a similar determination,” he said.
