Chapter 1 - Displaced in Diaspora?

Summary

This chapter offers an account of Jewish diaspora communities throughout the ancient Mediterranean that serves as a provocative correction to the origin story of diaspora itself. It contends that the biblical narratives of Jewish exile, so central to modern conceptions of diaspora as involving a painful loss of homeland, a continuous longing for return, and stark relations of isolation or assimilation while inhabiting alien lands – did not reflect the actual everyday conditions of Jews living under Greek or Roman rule. Working with textual and archaeological evidence from the Greco-Roman world, including Hellenistic Jewish writing, Gruen offers a very different picture of Jewish diasporic experience from the biblical narratives of exile. He shows that the Jewish diaspora experience was largely productive and stable, where Jews negotiated between their minority status and the literary, cultural, political, economic, and social milieu of the cities and states in which they resided and very much considered their home.