Place · Syria, Mesopotamia and Persia
Babylon
Mesopotamia had long been home to a Jewish community formed in the wake of the exile.
32.5373°N 44.4250°E · representative coordinate · Pleiades 893951 ↗
Statements linked to this place
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Jewish communities had long existed outside Judah, in Mesopotamia and Egypt: certain ones, like the community in Babylonia, arose from the exile; others, like the one at Elephantine, came about in other ways. Under Hellenistic rule they grew larger and more dispersed, for economic and political reasons, including military careers in Ptolemaic service.
Community: Judahite exiles in Babylonia
Tradition or narrative
The book of Jeremiah, the second-longest prophetic book after Isaiah, shows how Judahites adapted to captivity. In Jeremiah 29, a letter the prophet is said to have written to the exiles does not encourage them to hope for return but urges them to settle down in the cities where they were deported: build houses, plant gardens, marry, have children and seek the city's welfare, for in its welfare will be theirs.
Confronting his society's devastation, Jeremiah does not call for immediate recovery of Canaan, Judahite independence or the Temple. He tells his audience to adapt, accept foreign government temporarily and establish lives in exile, while foretelling a 'new covenant' through which God would eventually renew what had been lost.
The exiles did not lose their connection to their former lives: the same book of Jeremiah that counsels them to settle also urges long-term hope for Israel's restoration, with a renewed relationship with God, a revitalized Davidic dynasty and even a newly reunified Israelite people. Texts such as this are our best evidence of how Judahite society survived the blow, despite losing so many central institutions, through a process of creative adjustment.
Community: Jews of Babylonia
Jewish communities had long existed outside Judah, in Mesopotamia and Egypt: certain ones, like the community in Babylonia, arose from the exile; others, like the one at Elephantine, came about in other ways. Under Hellenistic rule they grew larger and more dispersed, for economic and political reasons, including military careers in Ptolemaic service.
Community: Jews of Babylonia under the Parthians
Roman expansion brought most of the world's Jews under one government, from Judea and Egypt to North Africa, Asia Minor, Greece and the capital itself. By the first century CE only one sizable Jewish community remained outside the empire: that of the Parthian kingdom, which had taken the lands east of the Euphrates from the Seleucids and rivaled Rome.
Almost nothing is known of the Jews of Parthia: the main source, the Babylonian Talmud, only crystallized during the 500s and 600s CE. So from 63 BCE to the Talmudic age, the Jewish history that can be written is in practice that of the Jews of the Roman Empire.
The rebels also counted on Parthia, Rome's great rival in the east, based in today's Iran; the Parthians had briefly occupied Jerusalem in 40 BCE. The link would be the large Jewish community of Mesopotamia, beyond Rome's borders.
Emigrating was another way out. After Bar Kochba, and with the economic crisis of third-century Palestine, even rabbinic sages seem to have left for Syria, Asia Minor and Babylonia, the last especially attractive because it lay outside the empire. The sages who stayed tried to stem this flight, restricting emigration and extolling life in the Holy Land, without success. One of them even read the Babylonian exile as God's way of shielding the Jews from Roman decrees.