Jeremy Rosen
Babylonia Jewry

Jeremy Rosen | Babylonia Jewry | 06.21.22

- So everybody, welcome to talk about Babylon. Now, Babylon is a generic term and it covers three or four or more different empires in Mesopotamia; the area of the Middle East, in areas that are sometimes called Babylon, Media, Persia. It’s a very interesting topic because the fact is, that for most of Jewish life, this area of the world has been the dominant Jewish community. It has been part of various empires in which the Jews have coexisted and lived quite happily most of the time. And at one stage, they were almost 20% of the Persian empire. And it is in the Persian Empire that we have the crucible that in a sense, according to some, actually created the Judaism we have today. Because the Judaism we have today is very different to the Judaism that we see that Moses had in the Bible, in many different ways. And this is one of the topics we’re going to cover in the course of today’s lecture, as to how the religion developed and evolved over this period. But first of all, we need to start with a little bit of history. And so, for the purposes of history, I’m going to share my screen with you and I’m going to offer you an overview of the area and the time, or rather, the time that we are talking about. So if you look at what I’ve just opened up, you’ll see under the title of “Assyria, Babylonia and Persia,” the history of this area, which has been so crucial to the evolution of the Jewish people. The most famous name most people associate with this early period, is the famous Hammurabi and the Hammurabi code, which you’ll see at the top, is about 1792 to 1749 before the common era. That’s almost 4,000 years ago.

The people who lived in that area had various names and they were constantly fighting with each other. They were constantly destroying and building. But because this area was watered by the Great Tigris and the Euphrates, it was the Fertile Crescent. It was such a fertile, creative area, and it was the area that rivalled the other fertile area of the Nile. And these two empires, Nile and Egypt and the area of the Tigris and the Euphrates Mesopotamia were the two powers that dominated that era. They were eventually taken over by the Greeks and the Romans, but at this stage, they were there. So initially we’re talking about Assyria. Assyria was known as the great military empire. They were incredibly militaristic and tough. And the first Assyrian name that we have in the Jewish Bible, is a man called Tiglat Pilezer, otherwise known as Pul. Now, I want to say something about this in general. We have a lot of accurate information about this period of the time and the people, the kings who were there, because the kings all made a point of recording their genealogy, and who they were, who the sons they were of, so we have a very accurate list of genealogy; just as if you notice you read the Bible, they’re so concerned with the genealogy of Adam and then of Noah and then of Essau and of Jacob. That’s how the world functioned. We don’t have a lot of information about other things we will call “cultural.” We have some myths and some other sources, but the who the Kings were, we know quite accurately. There is some disagreements and we’re going to come to those. We are not so well recorded in terms of narrative.

That’s to say, the stories, ‘cause the stories were always told from different points of view, and they weren’t considered as quite as important as the records that were carved in stone. So Tiglat Pilezer and Pul, called different names by different parts of the world, but he was the first person who led an army against the northern kingdom of Israel. So remember, we have two kingdoms going back at this time. The kingdom of Judea in the South, with the tribe of Judah and with the tribe of Benjamin. And the 10 northern tribes known as Joseph dominated by Ephriam and Manasseh, the two sons of Joseph in the north. And the north bordered Assyria. It bordered the Assyrian empire. And so whenever there was a king in the north who the Assyrians didn’t like, they sent an army to beat him up. Usually they just beat him up, took as much money away they could, and then disappeared back. Judah isn’t mentioned in their records. And some people say because Judah was not so significant, only two tribes, it was relatively minor. The northern Kingdom was more powerful. Following Tiglat Pilezer and his initial attack, there was an emperor called Shalmanezer, who again, came in, attacked them, took some of them away, imposed taxes on them.

But it wasn’t until Sargon, the third of these emperors mentioned in the Bible, that the northern kingdom was utterly destroyed and its inhabitants almost entirely taken away and scattered around the Assyrian Empire, which basically was an empire that ran from Kurdistan and the caucuses in the north, all the way down to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. And they were replaced by other people we’re going to talk about as being the Samaritans, because they lived in Samaria in the north, which overlapped for a couple of hundred years with Judea in the South. And there were some cross-fertilization. Those in the north picked up some of the religion of the South. And so you almost had two versions of Judaism at the time, the Southern and the Northern. But the Southern one, in terms of Jewish life, was self-contained and quite independent. And then the Jewish Kingdom of the South, which was Judea, was attacked by another Assyrian emperor called Sennacharib, Snḥryb, and he had invested, Jerusalem was about to destroy it, when he was called back home because there was trouble at home. His two sons had rebelled against him and he couldn’t survive. And he was followed by the famous Ashurbanipal, where anybody who’d been to the British Museum, will know his sculptures and sources are plastered all over the place, and we have a lot about him. But Ashurbanipal, unfortunately, was the last great powerful king of what we call the Assyrian Empire. The Assyrian Empire was conquered by the Babylonian Empire. And we know of the Babylonian empire, there were lots of other kings otherwise, but we know Nebuchadnezzar.

In fact, he was Nebuchadnezzar the Second and Nebuchadnezzar the Second, he was the one who had most trouble with Judea. Because Judea kept on supporting the North, the South, sometimes pro Egypt, sometimes anti Egypt, and Nebuchadnezzar was insistent that the Judean people should be loyal to him. And any king who wasn’t loyal would face his wrath. And Jewish politicians, at that time, were as incompetent as they are to this day and they kept on backing the wrong leadership. And as a result of not being able to be honest and straight with Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonians started invading, either directly or using the Chaldeans and others to take over Judea. And in fact, over a period of time, there were three different exiles from Judea. The first one was under the Jewish King Yehoakim, and that was followed by Yehoachin, and that was followed by Tzidqiyyahu, Zedekia. In the case of Yehoakim, the king came in, sent his men in, they took him into exile, and they took some of his inner court with him and replaced him with the Jewish Yehoachin. Yehoachin, otherwise known as “Coniah,” his advisors got him into trouble and after barely three years of reign, he was taken back to Babylon. And he was taken back to Babylon with aristocrats and senior members of his court. And they were, both of them, settled in one place, unlike the Assyrians where they scattered all over. The exiles that came first were the Yehoakim, and then with the Yehoachin, otherwise known as Coniah, we’re going to come back to him in a minute, they were settled in one area. And they built up an area which was actually named Medīnat Yəhuda, the area or the state of Judea in Babylon, under the Babylonian control.

The final battle with Tzidqiyyahu; Tzidqiyyahu, again, appointed by the Babylonians, rebelled. The Babylonians killed his sons in front of his eyes, then killed him, and they took the rest of the educated, skilled, middle classes back to Babylon. The workers were left behind under a man called Gedalia. Those left, it was policy of the Babylonians to keep some people in the land in order to work the land. It wouldn’t go to waste. And they fled down to Egypt and founded, which was to become the big Egyptian community. But at this moment, in 586, in 586, after Tzidqiyyahu, the whole of the dominant Jewish community is now plunked down in one place in Babylon. And not just put in one place in Babylon, but also valued; because King Coniah, that’s the three-year-old who was deposed, was brought by the next emperor, Evil Merōdaḵ in the Bible, But Marduk in the Babylonian, he was freed. He was placed at the king’s table, given a pension by the king and established the Jewish community under the official title of Exilarch, the ruler of the exile. So you have a recognised Jewish community, under a royal head, who’s considered to be their leader, and he’s brought with him the priests from Jerusalem. And so they can continue to have this structured community of aristocracy, but with the skills in Babylon. And clearly they were considered to be very important. Precisely for this reason, as we’re going to to learn, one of the things that the Persians did when they took over, was to train many of these Jews in government and in power and integrate them into the system.

Well, Evil Marduk was followed by Nabonidus, Nabonidus is followed by Balshazzar, and then soon, as we know from the Balshazzar’s writing on the wall, the Babylonians were destroyed by the Persians and it becomes Persia under King Cyrus, actually Cyrus II, but Cyrus the Great. Now, there’s little talk in between of a Darius the Mede as opposed to Darius The Great of Persia, but that’s just a by-the-by for the moment and not particularly significant. So this establishment of people coming from Judea, came from Judea with their traditions. Which was essentially, traditions of a sanctuary, of tabernacle or a temple. But they didn’t have that there. And so already there, they had to create a particular structure that was appropriate for Jewish life in Babylonia. And they did this in one of two ways. One way was to start emphasising the scholarship, the texts that they brought with them from Judea. Many people argue to this day what texts they brought back, and whether the texts were there beforehand or whether they were written anew in Babylon. What is certainly true is, that in Babylon they changed the script from the Canaanite Script, which was the one the Torah was originally written in and the one the Samaritan still retained, to what’s called the Assyrian script, Ktav Asuri, which was the script that we have today. That is Babylonian script, which shows what an impact Babylonian had on Judaism. So they emphasise the idea of script and the idea of teaching. So although the priests may or may not have continued with a sacrificial system there, they may have, parallel with them, there were the scholars, the Soefrim; those who as scribes or who counted the letters, who are servicing the rest of the community. And for want of a sanctuary, they created what we would call community centres, which in due course, are going to turn into what we call Beit Knesset, the gathering place, which turns into Synagogues, or alternatively the Beit Midrash, the place where you go to study. These are the origins, the early origins, but of a process of constant evolution.

Now, once they are there, we know about life in the Babylonian community, other than the dates we know from kings, from books like “The Book of Daniel.” Daniel is somebody who comes into Babylonia, who manages to reach a senior position in the administration, who, together with people you’ll know as Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego, or which is really Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah, who are brought in to government. And according to the book of Daniel, they tried in government, when they came in, to maintain their religious traditions, their dietary laws. They maintained the idea of having time to pray. And they struggled, very often against odds, in order to maintain that tradition. But in the end it seems that they did and they were able to combine their religious commitment with loyalty to the government in Persia. Then there are stories of competition, of people envious of them, of telling tales, of going to the kings and saying, look, you know, these people you brought in to senior places of power, they’re not really loyal to you. They won’t bow down you, they bow down to some other God. And this kind of political tension and rivalry, it’s not necessarily what we would call antisemitism, but it’s part of the rivalry of all courts, of all political systems everywhere, where you have rivals trying to undo the other by whispering in ears. And so you have the famous case that Daniel mentions of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, that they were accused of not worshipping , respecting the Babylonian gods, and so they were thrown into the fire, into the furnace, and somehow they managed to survive, so maybe it was metaphorical, and they came out and they were restored to their position.

A similar thing happened with Daniel. In fact, with Daniel, it happened twice. And there’s a famous story, as you know, of Daniel in the lion’s den. And one of the problems is, that whereas Daniel is talking about the reign, the early reign of Nebuchadnezzar, later on, we are talking about the reign of Darius. And so we don’t know which Darius we are talking about, whether we talk about Darius the Mede or Darius the Great of the Persians. And that’s one of the confusions as to who was who, and who came into exile at what stage. when did Mordecai come in? There’s one version of when he came in, but it doesn’t always match with other versions. And in this period, we then have, all of a sudden, the arrival of great Cyrus. Cyrus, famous Cyrus Stele in the British Museum, was not interested in what religion you took on. Whatever you want to worship, that’s your business, so long as you are loyal to me. And it was this loyalty that led Cyrus to give official permission for those from Israel, for the Jewish community in Judea who wanted to, to go back to reestablish a community in the land of Israel. And obviously he wanted this. He has an empire that runs from India in the East all the way to Egypt or to the Mediterranean, it’s in his interest to have a loyal community there. And therefore, Cyrus the Great approached Sheshbazzar, who happened to be the Exilarch, and said, I’m giving you permission to go back. I’m giving you back some of the temple treasures, no mention at all of the ark or of the menorah, but of knives and forks and other bits and pieces. You can go back. And this was the first Aliyah, if you like; the first migration back.

The vast majority of Jews in that part of the world were happy to be where they were. And that is the origin of the term “Jew.” The term “Jew” doesn’t come in to previous texts. We talk about B'nei Yisrael, the sons of Israel. You have Jonah talking about Ivrit, I’m a Hebrew, if you like, but the “Jew” comes from Judea. This was the dominant community in Persia, and that’s where Jews get their name from; from the Persian era. But most were happy to stay there. They were in senior positions, they built up businesses, they were comfortable. It’s rather like in our time, most American Jews, most Jews in the diaspora are happy to stay where they are. It’s only persecution that gets 'em to move, or sometimes a small number come out of ideology, but in general, most Jews are happy to stay where they are. We know about the return from the two books of Ezra and Nehemia. And so Daniel we know a lot about, we know from Daniel, for example, that he prayed three times a day, going looking back to Jerusalem. So already we know that there was a lot of Jewish ideas, the idea of prayer coming in, almost to replace sacrifices. We also know that Daniel used language that we now have in our day of atonement, traditions of prayer. So there’s prayer, there’s dietary differences, they’re all coming out during the period of Daniel. But after Daniel, the two dominant names are Ezra and Nehemiah. Ezra and Nehemia, the last two books, before we get to the final book of Chronicles at the end of the Bible. Ezra was the scribe, the religious leader. Nehemiah was the military leader. He was the prime minister, or a senior minister, in the government of a man called Attarxerxes.

So if you look down the list after Cyrus, you’ve got Cyrus, you’ve got Darius the Great, you’ve got Atarxexes, and then you’ve got the Great Aliyah. And there is debate as to the sequence of all that happened here. After Cyrus died, things take a turn for the worst. And the main reason why things take a turn for the worst, is because when the Jews started arriving back in the land of Israel, they faced the Samaritans. And the Samaritans, those people who have been brought in by the Assyrians, had established themselves in the Northern Territory where the West Bank is, Ramallah, Nalbus, today. They had survived the Babylonian exile, because they were in what was the North, but they saw themselves as heir to the Judean religious tradition; the tradition of the Torah, the written law. They had no interest in anything that had happened in Babylon. So when the Jews came back from Babylon with these newfangled ideas of study and prayer and interpreting the laws of the Torah, the oral law, in order to accommodate to new circumstances, they said, you’re fake. You are artificial. You’re not the real thing, we are the real thing. Besides, we’re living here now, it’s our land. You don’t belong, you might’ve been here once upon a time, but you aren’t anymore, so get out of here. And they did whatever they could to block the building of the temple and Jerusalem. And they sent messages back to the United Nations, back home to Persia, sorry, saying all the time that these Jews are disloyal. They’re not to be trusted. They have their own idea. We can’t rely on them. They’re bad people, they’re not good people. And in fact, the result was, that at a moment in time, the Persians sent back messages saying, stop the work. And the main guy in charge of this was a guy called Sunballat. And Sunballat did what he could to block.

And in fact, that’s what happened. It was blocked. There was a second Aliyah when the Jews appealed to Darius the Great, and said to Darius the Great, Look, this has been blocked. But you remember Cyrus, your grandfather, or father, allowed us. And Darius checked back in the archives and he discovered, that’s right. Cyrus had given permission for the Jews to settle. And so he sent back a new Aliyah so to speak with a prince of the royal household, called Zerubavel. And Zerubavel came back with a second Aliyah, roundabout five hundred and twenty, something like that, and records about 42,000 Jews coming, and priests, coming back with him. We don’t know if that number included the earlier Aliot, or did not include the earlier Aliot. And indeed, when Ezra is going to come with a third Aliyah, rather, they mention the same number. So we’ve got confusion as to what number that was. But whatever it is, whatever the number was, most Jews were still back in Babylon. But finally they come back and they start building again. But again, they get blocked by the Samaritans. And it’s not till Atarxerxes, or maybe Xerxes, because there are these different opinions, that Nehemia, who was giving food or filling the cup of his master, had a long face and he was asked why. And he said, because my people can’t rebuild. They’re being destroyed in the holy land, they need help. That he then sent Nehemia back with men, with arms, with force to ensure that everything was done. Now, there’s a little argument, a little question about Ezra in all this. Because the records both in the book of Nehemia and the book of Ezra are ambiguous. Some people say Ezra came with Zerubavel and then gave up and went home. Others say, no, he didn’t come until he came with Nehemia.

Either way, it’s this later Aliyah, which we would call now the fourth Aliyah, which established the Jewish community there and enabled Nehemia to completely rebuild the temple against the opposition of Sunballat and the local governors, against the other allies, and rebuild Jerusalem and establish a Jewish community there on a permanent basis. But, interestingly enough, both Ezra and Nehemia were faced with a massive problem. And the massive problem was that the Jews who had come, in the main, had been the less religious Jews; the more assimilated Jews, in the sense that they were at home in the Persian community, outside of the ghettos of Babylon. Many of them had married into Persian families. Being priests allied with the kings, they insisted on maintaining all the goodies that the text of the Bible offered them, the tithes and the sacrifices and things like that. But they didn’t care too much about adhering to the rules of law. And so what happened was that when Ezra and Nehemia finally come back to the land of Israel, they find a community that has all but assimilated. Virtually all the high priests had married out. Not only that, but many of them had married into the Samaritan families. Some married the daughter of a priest. They were doing business with them. They were, in a sense, Jews in the land of Israel who were on the other side; who Ezra and Nehemia had to battle with. And because of Nehemia’s power granted to him either by Darius or Xerxes, again, we’re not entirely certain which one was which, he was able to impose his will on the Jewish community.

And this will on the Jewish community was the will of Ezra. Of Ezra the Scribe. And Ezra the Scribe lays down certain laws. He sees that people are not keeping Shabbat. He sees that people are not marrying into the faith. He sees that the priests are stealing when they shouldn’t be stealing, and not behaving according to the religious standards. And he, together with Nehemia, impose a new system altogether on the land of Israel. First of all, they are the first to lay down the law saying if you marry out, you can’t serve. It’s your choice. You want to marry out, marry out. But you can’t have it both ways. You want to receive the benefits of being a priest, you’ve got to keep the law, which is keeping Shabbat. You don’t want to keep Shabbat, okay, give up getting the benefits. And so, they managed to impose this strictness, which seems to mirror, now, what was going on in Babylon. And so from a religious point of view, you’ll now have, in Israel, a dual system; a dual system that includes both the biblical tradition and this new tradition we will call the “oral law,” involving changes that took place. Now, at this moment, I’m just going to take rid of, get down that particular plans of kings to show you roughly what they were. Again, you can look them up on the internet and see that I’ve, in a sense, eliminated those who ruled for half a month, for six months or for a year and only put in the main ones. That’s just the main overview. The situation now is that, very similar, incredibly similar to the situation that existed in our day; or at least roundabout our day. In which the Jews of the diaspora, whether it is in the Oriental world or the Occidental world, are very interested in maintaining the idea of a Jewish presence in the holy land.

But not all of them are prepared to put their money on it and to go on Aliyah, and they’re happy to stay in Babylon and support from a distance. But nevertheless, they do start going regularly on pilgrims to the holy land, it’s still part of the Persian empire, and they’re able to maintain a kind of a dual system. This dual system is the unique contribution that Babylon makes to the evolution of Judaism and the establishment of what we will call the rabbinic version of Judaism. Because at the same time, there are rivals, they are the Samaritans; and the Samaritans are saying, no, we don’t want all this new fangled stuff. We’re sticking to the text of the five books of Moses. And amongst the priests, you have those priests who say, we are fed up with these are rabbis, with Ezra trying to interfere in our lives. We’d rather be with the Persian, Greek, Roman aristocracy. We don’t want to be with you lot. We have inherited this position, it’s all right by tradition, we’re not going to give it up. But who are you to tell us what to do? And so you have tension between what became known as the Sadducees, the ṣāddūqim from the house of Zadok the priest, who don’t like the oral law, and the Pərūšīm, the Pharisees, who are concerned with the masses, with the ordinary people, not with the aristocracy, who do see the evolution of law as being very important and like the meritocratic idea of study that makes you a significant person, not the accident of birth turning you into a priest. And this dual system is going to survive and continue for a while, until the destruction of the second temple, in which case the others slowly fall away. But this issue of who does the land belong to is such a current issue. It’s exactly what the Palestinians are saying.

Look, we’re here now. We’ve been here before. You were here once upon a time, but you don’t belong here anymore. And secondly, your culture, that’s not an indigenous culture, it’s an imported culture; it comes from somewhere else. And if you are not prepared to accept our authority, we’re going to fight you over it. And so, the famous, you know, revolts and things of this kind where you have a clash between Arab nationalism and Jewish nationalism. And the question of, who does this land belong to? Well, at what stage, who did it originally belong to? Who did it belong to afterwards? It was constantly in a state of flux. Everybody was a colonialist. Everybody was an imperialist. Everybody was coming in whenever they could, and lasted as long as the political circumstances permitted it. And so on that level, the situation that we have today in that part of the world, is almost identical to the one that existed all those thousand years ago, with the return of the Jews from Babylon under Ezra and Nehemia, and the reestablishment of a Jewish community there. But then, interesting things are going to happen. Because, as you know, over time the Persian empire was conquered by the Greek empire and the Greek empire was subjected to the Roman Empire. And the Roman Empire came to be the dominant community in the West. And the Jews living under the Roman Empire ended up as the Jews of the land of Israel, the Jews of Egypt, and the Jews of the Mediterranean. Meanwhile, all this time, the Jewish community in Babylon had continued to survive and to thrive. Numerically it was far greater. It had many more academies. And even though there was something snobbishly superior about the land of Israel, in the way that, nowadays, the best yeshiva in the world are in Israel as opposed to America and Europe and elsewhere, although no doubt they will argue the . And so you had this similar tension between them. But throughout this period, it was the community of Babylonia living under the Persians that thrived with its major academies of Surah, Pumbedita, Mahoza, went on thriving and surviving right through, almost until the Islamic invasion in the seventh century of the common era.

One stage, you even had a Jewish king maintaining a kingdom and independent kingdom under the Persians. And you had, during this period, a lot of queens who were Jewish. We know about Esther, although we can’t entirely identify her, but we know of others of Ifra Hormizd, the mother of Shapur. We know of various other queens, who were Jewish, during this period of time. And in some respects, the Book of Esther mirrors, in short and probably condensed terms, the whole of this era and this period. We don’t know, exactly, who was who and when. And the name Esther and Marduk are clearly names that come from Persian, Zoroastrian, non-Jewish sources. Ishtar for Esther, Marduk for Mordecai, and they adopted local names. And they were part of the government, as a scroll of Esther indicates, and they were involved in government, but they were also caught up in rivalry. And therefore, sometimes, the Jews did get caught up in political conflict and Jews did suffer. But on the main, the Jews living in the Persian era did extremely well. Ironically, there are still Jews living in Persia today. Not very many of them, about 20,000, and they have to be very careful what they say. But that has been the longest continued settlement of Jews in the world. Of course, it’s been added to. Spanish refugees came and added to them, others at different times, but that has been the longest, and in one sense, the most influential. There was a debate always, later on during the early Talmudic period, as to who had greater authority: The Babylonian authorities or the Palestinian authorities the Israeli authorities? And in general, they tended to defer. But when the Byzantium world was destroyed by Islam, and the land of Israel came under the Islamic power, it was the Islamic community of Babylon that ended up providing all the religious leadership throughout the Muslim empire into Spain and back out of Spain, which is why until relatively recently, the Sephardi, the Oriental Babylonian community, was the dominant community in Jewish life.

The Ashkenazi, the Westerners, arrogant as Westerners always are, like to think they were the original ones. But the fact, if anybody was original, if anybody’s nearer to the origin, it’s them; the Persians, the Yemenites, those Jews who are living under the Orient, of course the Assyrians will definitely want to tell you that they are the best and the Iraqis too. And each one rivalled with each other for power, which continues to this day within the Sephardi world. Whereas in the Ashkenazi world, you have conflict between, let’s call it ultra-Orthodox, Orthodox, modern-Orthodox, conservative, reconstruction, reform, light reform, heavy reform. You didn’t have those divisions in the Sephardi world, but you did have the competition between the Moroccans versus the Egyptians, versus the Iraqis versus the Syrians, versus the Persians versus the Yemenites. And each one had its own specific customs. And yet magically, magically, they all had the same fundamental constitution, the written and the oral law, which was able to keep them together. So when we look at the world in which we live today, as I mentioned before, we have this split. We have the split between those who were Zionists and those who were not Zionists, which was similar to the split then, between those who wanted to come to Israel and those who didn’t. You have the split between those who adhere to the written law, but not the oral law. You have those who adhere to neither of them, but they’re more interested in assimilating into the dominant culture, whatever that dominant culture is. And you have those who argue about, do we do more, or do we do less? And what matters? Every single one of those issues were issues debated three and a half thousand years ago and they are still being debated today.

So it is to Babylonia that we need to look, to see how Judaism began the process of evolution from the Bible. People argue that the Bible was written much, much later, but if you look at what we know from Babylon, you can see they’re always referring back to the Bible. Now, we dunno exactly what text and whether they all agreed on the text, but there are constant references back to the Bible, in the book of Daniel, Ezra, Nehemia, about keeping things that they used to keep back home. We also know, as I mentioned, that there were innovations in Babylon. They set the stage for creating a Judaism in which you can move away from the temple process, to a meritocratic process. That was a transition period that took hundreds of years. So change in Judaism moves very, very slowly, but it certainly does move and it is moving. And anybody who thinks it’s particularly static at this moment, is looking at it from a very narrow perspective because it is changing before our very eyes in so many different ways. But what has kept us together has been, we’ll call it, this culture, this history, this tradition of our past, however we interpret it, and we’ve all been interpreting it in different ways. And there is no single way of interpreting it.

But the one thing you can say, is that those who are committed, and commitment can come in many ways, in many forms, in many shapes. Those who are committed in whichever way, they are the ones who keep it going. And those who are not committed will drop by the wayside as they always did. If you think about it, 3000 years ago, 10% of the Persian empire was Jewish. Some people say it was as much as 20%. Similarly in the Roman Empire, some people range from two to 10%. Some people go even more. If we would’ve extrapolated from that, today, we’d be millions, but we’re not. Why are we not? Well, for two reasons. One of them, we’ve been always the outsider and been attacked, particularly by those religions who were religions who believed in imposing their view on everybody else and had a vested interest in reducing the number of Jews, either through violence or persuasion. So one of them was that factor, of the people who wanted to remove us from our tradition, and many did. And the other was those who simply wanted to assimilate, make life easier, make more money being part of the masses. And so with that, I will now turn to questions and start dealing with what we have before us.

Q&A and Comments

So Robert starts off by saying, “What proportion of Babylonian Jewry stayed in Babylon after release from captivity by Hiram? Well, I don’t know who you mean by Hiram. Hiram I know is primarily somebody of the Mediterranean coast. But anyway, it doesn’t matter who we’re talking about. We don’t have an accurate number of how many people went. Some people think that only about a hundred thousand people went to Babylon. If only a hundred thousand people went to Babylon and from those, some 40,000 came back, then you know you are looking at a small number. But again, we can only speculate. We have no absolutely accurate information about the numbers.

Q: "Dear Rabbi, what was the connection, if any, between Assyria and Syria?” A: Well, it’s interesting. Syria was known as a culture of Damascus, called “Aram.” The Arameans. And the Arameans of Damascus were usually ruled over by a king called Hadad, Ben Hadad, and they were the main rivals of the northern kingdom. Assyria took over Syria, but extended it into Turkey, Kurdistan was much greater. Also, although Syria was a powerful nation, Aram kept on fighting the North, and the South sometimes. So did the Ammonites, and so did the Moabites, and all kinds of different groups. Nevertheless, Syria was small chicken feed compared to Assyria.

Rose says, “This is how by we don’t seem to learn unless we’re united, we’re surrounded by enemies.” Well, in one way, Rose, you are absolutely right. It does look like all political battling is a battle for power, for money, for status and egos and they take care of everything else and waste so much money, you wouldn’t believe. It’s just funny. I was telling somebody earlier today that when I said, it’s so terrible, not another election, think of all those millions and millions of dollars that could be spent providing for the poor and the weak and the homeless in Israel, and are going to be wasted on an election. And so, what happened is, somebody replied to me and says, hold on, hold on, on, hold on. Just stop and think for a minute. The present government has arranged to spend almost a hundred million on providing homes and care for stray cats and dogs in Israel. So that’s because, within a different kind of government, different people have different pet projects. Each one wants money to be spent on their pet project, their road connecting their village, or their bridge over the river. Every politician, it’s all pork barrel politics wherever you look. In America, it’s certainly pork barrel politics. And in Israel, it’s pork barrel politics, what are we going to do? Are we going to get rid of it? Ideally, I would like to have seen a change. There was a time when both Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin, together, could have changed the political system in Israel in order to get rid of all the small parties, and have it more like either Britain or America, to lesser extent France, where you have dominant blocks. But they didn’t, because each one wanted the minority votes of the smaller parties. And as a result, it’s the smaller parties who hold the country to ransom, whether it’s religious or secular. Each one wants what it wants. And that’s the political position we have. I no more see a resolution of that problem, than I can see a resolution of the problem with the Palestinians. I see no chance, much as I would love to, of a peaceful settlement, I just can’t see it. And therefore, when I really get depressed about both of these things and I get depressed about the state of religious life, which I am very depressed about, I then come to the conclusion, that although you cannot, in any way as far as I’m concerned, prove the existence of God by rational argument, the only argument in favour of God is that somehow or other, we have survived despite the utter mess we make of absolutely everything.

Q: “So how did,” Sylvia, “the Samaritans become the goody-goodies, the good Samaritan?” A: That’s an excellent question. Well first of all, remember: it was the mission of those who wrote the New Testament, St. Paul and the apostles who came afterwards, who were involved in this battle of survival with the Judeans, with the Jews. And therefore they had to do whatever they could to make out the Jews to be the bad guys and the Christians to be good guys. So the Jewish guys were narrow-minded, interested in money, they were petty, they were awful, whereas everybody else was absolutely beautiful. And so, in telling the story of a good Samaritan, the story is saying, look, these rabbis claim to be so religious, but they don’t care. The Samaritan, who they dismiss, is being a better person. Wow. Now it’s interesting, in the Talmud, the rabbis go out of their way to show how non-Jews are just as good as Jews. They respect their parents, they do things, some of them do good things, and we shouldn’t differentiate between them. But there was this agenda of Christianity to suggest that the Samaritans were the good Samaritans, the Jews were the nasty Pharisees, and that’s where the story of The Good Samaritan came from. The reality is there are good Samaritans and bad Samaritans, good Jews and bad Jews, good Christians and bad Christians, but everybody’s trying to sell something and impose their point of view on somebody else.

Q: “How do the Sassoons figure into the story?” A: Well, that’s interesting, Peter. The Sassoons were one of the great Iraqi communities. The one thing that changed the Middle East dramatically, was the split between the Sunni and the Shia. Remember that technically speaking, under Islam, Jews and Christians are considered Dhimmis, that’s to say second class citizens. They have to pay the Jizya tax for the right to live in a Muslim country, but so long as they abide by the law, they should be granted equality under the law with certain exceptions. Jews living under the Sunni regimes, particularly the Ottoman Empire, did pretty well. The Ottoman Empire welcomed Jews in large numbers when they were kicked out of Spain and Portugal. and Jews settled in Israel, in Sefarad, and Jerusalem and other places, and did extremely well. And they rose to senior positions, both medically and politically, in the Ottoman Empire. And as a result of this, there was a much better relationship between Jews under Islam than there was Jews under Christianity. That changed in the 16th century, when the Shia community set itself apart and basically split the Muslim world in the Middle East from the Persian side on the east and who were Shiite, and the Sunni, who were Sunni, were on the left. Jews under the Shiites had a terrible time. There was forced conversion, there was constant assault on the ghetto, they had very rigid laws against the Jews living under Persia.

So for example, Jews were not allowed to go out when it was raining, for fear they were transfer their impurity to the Muslims. They were not allowed to hand money to a Muslim, they had to put it down on the table and the Muslim would pick it up. If a Jew killed a Muslim, he was put to death. If a Muslim killed a Jew, he was not put to death. The Persian community, from the 17th century onwards, was the most degraded, unfortunate Muslim community in the world. And the result is they didn’t have any more of the rabbinic authorities that they did the other side of the Tigris and Euphrates. The other side of the Tigris and Euphrates, the two dominant religious communities were on the one hand, Baghdad, which was the intellectual and religious community of the East, and Aleppo, which was the business community. And of course you had Cairo and Egypt as well. Those were the main centre points. And under those areas, Jews did pretty well and absorbed from the culture. So that when you talk about the great rabbinic figures of the Mediaeval period and into modernity, you are looking primarily at Babylon. And Babylon, which then became Iraq, were the elite. They produced the greatest families, the greatest Rabbinic figures. There were others as well, but they were very, very strong. As you know, Babylon came under British influence in the 19th century and it was extended into the 20th century. And under British influence, Jews in business did extremely well under the Iraqi community. And the Sassoon family was a family, there were other famous families you can point to in Egypt and elsewhere, who rose to the top. And then, they expanded their business. First of all, they expanded their business not into Persia, but into India. And there were Sassoons in India, and then the Sassoons expanded further east until they ended up in Shanghai, and in what was China, where they all did very well. And so the Sassoons were regarded as the great communal leaders and spokesman of the Iraqi community, and of that, a large part of the Sephardi community.

Actually, interesting story about the Sassoons, When I was at Cambridge University, my final exams came on a Shabbat followed by two days of Shavuot, where I couldn’t sit an exam. And Cambridge, the idea was in those days, that if somebody couldn’t, for whatever reason, health or religion or anything like that, they’d be put into seclusion while the exams were going on, and then supervised when they were over to take them and make sure they hadn’t come into contact with anybody. So what was I going to do, locked away for three days in Cambridge? In Letchworth, which is just south of Cambridge, there was a large Jewish family’s settlement that had come there during the war. They had evacuated from London. And amongst them was the Sassoons, Solomon Sassoon’s family. And he was an amazing scholar with a phenomenal memory and a brilliant mathematician. And he had a compound with him and his retinue, of servants, and assistants, and families and subfamilies living in Letchworth. And he was held in such high regard, that the Cambridge universities allowed him to have me brought to him before the exam. He promised to keep me under lock and key over Shabbat and two days of Shavuot, and then returned me to Cambridge in the end. And Solomon Sassoon had a phenomenal library, which eventually sold. He has descendants. I know one of them is in New York, who’s a great scholar. And so that was that part of the Sassoon family. But unfortunately, like almost all those other families from that time, almost every one of them, they all ended up marrying out. They all ended up being more interested in, there were some Sassoons who were horse racing fans of the English aristocracy. They all ended up disappearing. So as always, back to what I was saying before, barely a 10%, or whatever it is, hangs on; but it’s the 10% that’s always kept us going. So I hope that’s answered Susan MullGill. Genetically, yes, there are very similar, they have certain different, and mixtures, because we always, nothing wrong with converts, or we always have marriage with different genetic pools, but they are all very similar with Sefarad, from all the Islamic world.

Q: “If the Israelites Samaritans was which they did, and still to this day, don’t they understand what the problem was? The Samaritan view was that Jerusalem was not mentioned the Torah, whereas Har Gerizim is. This is where the Almighty wants to be worshipped , don’t the Israelites Samaritans have a point?” A: Jeffrey, that’s a very good point. The whole point of the Samaritans was, that Torah does not mention Jerusalem at all. It only mentions Har Gerizim and Har Ebal, although it doesn’t say you should put a temple there. It merely says that’s where there were curses and blessings given, the other side of the river. So the issue is not whether you have a point, you have a point in interpreting anyway, all interpretation has a point, just as they have a point when they say, no, we are not the strangers brought from the Assyrians and replacing. We were always there. We’re part of the 10 lost tribes. We just managed to escape eviction. And maybe that’s a point too, but the fact is, as with British law, you can’t still say I’m sticking to the Magna Carta. If you want to be a Britain in the modern era or an Israeli or an American, you have to accept that the law has developed. Any law that’s static becomes problematic. So the Samaritans have these static laws, some of them for many years, until recently, wouldn’t have a light on Shabbat because the Torah says don’t have light. Whereas the Rabbi interpreted that to mean you can, as long as you prepare it beforehand, because they were dealing with poor people who didn’t have central heating and have servants look after them. Or, for example, the Samaritans claim that when you are in a state of your annual period, you’ve got to be locked away. The Samaritans would never allow marriage for anybody who was not a Samaritan. And so they were just as rigid in their maintaining their tradition, as people argue we are rigid in maintaining ours. So in the end, it’s a matter of choice. Frankly, I think that a flexible view, which is what Judaism has always been, which is why we can then take Jewish law and apply it to computers and jet planes and modern technology, is a much more sensible way to go. It’s true, we move slowly, but I’d rather move slowly than too fast, and some thing’s better than nothing.

Q: “Was Ezra,” James, “the Scribe, involved in writing or rewriting portions of the Tanakh?” A: Well, remember there’s some parts of the Tanakh that were definitely written in exile. The book of Ezra and Nehemia, the book of Zechariah, some of the other prophets, Daniel, of course. So books were written by other people. There was no question that they were, but Ezra known as the Scribe, isn’t necessarily known as a scribe because he wrote things. He was a scribe because that was his, if you like, profession. It was what they call, what we call rabbis nowadays. He was a religious leader. Now, did he edit? Who knows. We know he changed the script. But there are, as I mentioned before, plenty of examples of texts and of laws and rules that we know from other sources were there before Ezra. So it is speculative. I’m not against speculation, I’m only against treating speculation as if it were the only answer.

Q: “Can you explain the difference between 156 years between Greek history and Jewish history?” A: Now, what you are referring to Shelly, I think, is that when many layers later, in mediaeval times, the Jews set about trying to establish a chronology of dates and started working backwards. They ran up against the fact there were different chronologies in those days. The Greek chronology, the Persian chronology, the Assyrian chronology, there were lots of different chronologies. which is why, as I said at the beginning, it’s so difficult to know who lived at the same time as whom. We have names of kings, but we don’t have details because they only had calendars in those years that went: the third year of the reign of Xerxes, the second year of the reign of Darius. They didn’t have 2022 or 1916 or 1066, they didn’t. So everything working back in time is an approximation. As a result, there are different calendars. Look how many different calendars there’ve been within just the Christian world alone, you know, the Gregorian, the Julian, and so forth and so on. So calendars are problematic. Even to this day, there are so many different calendars in the world. There’s the Muslim calendar, there’s the western calendar, there are Chinese calendars, there are ancient calendars. So it’s impossible to know. But yes, there is a convention and books are being written about it. There is a difference of something like 150 years between the calculations that the rabbis make and the calculations that most other non-rabbis make. And frankly, I tend to go according to the most advanced, the most technologically reliable documentation, rather than earlier ones. When it comes to morality, I like the old morality. I’m sticking with the morality and the value system of the Jewish tradition. But when it comes to technology, I’m a modern person. I want to go with the latest information and the latest facts. Thank you, Carla. I hope to hear good news from you. Thank you, Clara.

Q: Judy, “What was a piece of music you were playing in the beginning?” A: I was playing Mozart’s violin concerto. Let me just check a minute. I’m not certain which one it was, that I was playing. If I can just have a check. Hold on, hold on. Where did I put it? Where did I put this, it was 31; “Violin Concerto, Number 31.” One of my favourites. So let’s go back to question and answer.

Q: “What was the separation of East and West Jewry, Sephardi, Ashkenazi, when was it?” A: Well, the truth of the matter is it was always, when you had the Roman Empire and the Roman Empire collapses, and it breaks up into what we know as Europe today, Christian Europe, which itself broke up into Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, all the other Bulgarian orthodoxies. And they were, and they conquered Spain as well. That became, if you like, the western world of the Ashkenaz, as it was called. Meanwhile, at the same time, you also had Byzantium, which was Christianity, which had moved across into Turkey and it cross into as far as Iraq, and all the way down to Egypt. That was Byzantium. So Byzantium, and to the west was Christianity, and to the right and to the east was the Sephardi. Then Byzantium was conquered by the Ottomans. And so Ottoman, which then extended in to Bulgaria, Romania, actually got as far as Vienna at one stage. But the Balkans, that area became under Islam and under the Sephardi Jews. Although there were a group of Jews known in the Greek world, as the Greek Jews, so to speak, who claim to be neither one nor the other. And indeed the Italian Jews claimed to be neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardi, but they had their own traditions. So you had the Balkan Jews, we had the Sephardi Jews, sorry, the Italian Jews, that were small sects. But the two big blocks were the Muslim block, Sephardi, the Ashkenazi block, Ashkenazi. The Ashkenazi block, initially, only extended into the Rhineland and into what we’d call the Habsburg Empire, the northern part of it. But they were driven out, mainly towards Poland, which ironically welcomed the Jews more than anybody else during the period of the 15th, 16th century. And that’s where Eastern European Jewry developed, coming from Europe. And the proof of that is they spoke Yiddish, which is basically a German based language, which came that way. If some people say they came from the 10 lost tribes from the Orient, they would’ve spoken a different language. So that’s how the division emerged.

Q: Jill, “How do they not all follow the same sect?” A: Listen, here in New York, different synagogues have different customs, or claim to be orthodox in different ways, and some are reform or conservatives. We Jews have this capacity to have our own different customs, our different style of music. If you go into a Sephardi Oriental synagogue, you’ll hear Oriental music. If you’re going into a Western synagogue, you’ll hear Western music. And it depends which one, some of it now is happy-clappy, and some of it’s more choral. There are choices. We are inventive and creative, even within what people claim is a very rigid religious system.

Q: “Where does the Babylonian Talmud come in historically?” A: Well, that’s very good. Good question. The Talmud was the writing down of this oral law that Ezra had began to expand, and went on expanding during the next 400 years, during the Greek period and the Roman period. After the year 70, that is to say after the Roman conquest and the ongoing Roman laws, there was a fear that these laws that were not written down, intentionally, to keep them more flexible, would be lost. And so that’s why they decided, at that moment, to write it down. And the first person to write down was a rabbi, called Judah the Prince in the first and second century, who wrote down a book of Mishnah, which is a collection of the laws. And as soon as that book of the Mishnah was written, in the land of Israel in Hebrew, it was debated. And it was debated both in Israel and in Babylonia. And this debate was, not only who said what laws, but what are our different traditions? What are our different customs? What are our different histories? What are the different cures, medicines, dream interpretations, anything we could think of, we shoved into this Talmud. And so this was called the Gemara. The Gemara, together with a Mishnah, is called the Talmud. There’s a Jerusalem Talmud, which has the same Mishnah, but a different debate. And there’s the Babylonian Talmud, which has the same Mishnah and a different debate. The Jerusalem Talmud is much, much smaller, 'cause the community was smaller then, and there were fewer scholars then. And they were under so much oppression from the Romans, they weren’t as creative. On the other hand, the Babylonian one is massive. And it’s the one we use today, the one we use in Daf Yomi. And it’s pages and volumes and volumes and volumes, with massive commentaries; because that community was the dominant community, and that’s why the Babylonian Talmud is the dominant one in Jewish life today.

“Brief timeline of temples in Jerusalem.” Well, Solomon is supposed to have built the first one round about the year 900. It lasted to 586 and it was destroyed. Then you have the building of the second temple in Jerusalem, which is completed round about 420 before the common era, and was destroyed in the year 70 after the common era. So they both ran for about 400 years.

Q: “Why is anti-Semitism not found east of Persia?” A: Well, I wish it was as simple as that, but basically anti-Semitism is found both in Christian and in Muslim worlds, where they see themselves as being the dominant religion with a moral obligation to try to bring their version of the truth to the world. The Jews stand in their way, because the Jews, who were there before they were, have the chutzpah to say, “Thank you, but no thank you. We’re happy with what we’ve got.” Both Christianity and Islam saw themselves as an improvement on Judaism and thought that with this improvement, Jews would join them willingly, but they didn’t. So that resistance is there. The truth is that Christianity, it was worse, because the Christian narrative had Jews as killers; killers of Christ. The Jews didn’t have that same negativity within the Islamic world, but they were always considered to be second class citizens. And if they ever got too uppity, they had to be smacked down. And therefore, the idea within the Muslim world that Jews can carve out a little piece of the Middle East and stand up against everybody else, is a problem. Some people can adjust to it and some people just can’t and that’s the problem within Islam with Jihad. There are, most Muslims see Jihad as being a moral challenge, but there are some Muslims who believe Jihad is the right to fight to win, to show that we are the best. Thank you Monique and Danny, Max Diaz,

Q: “Are Mizrachi Jews Sepharadim?” A: Oh, that’s a very good question. There’s a debate about what word to use, because Sefarad means Spain. Sefarad means Spain. And the Jews from Spain, who moved back when they were kicked out into the Sephardi world, took their name with them. Sephardi comes from a less generic term, which really means Oriental, not necessarily Spanish. And there are many Jews who prefer to be known as, Mizrachim, which is Jews from Eastern countries. It’s a very subjective matter. You’ll come to some Jews who hate being called Mizrahi, hate being called Spanish and Portuguese, hate being called Spanish or Sefaradim, or want to be called something altogether, so you never know. So it’s rather like nowadays with gender identity, always checked beforehand and you won’t get into trouble.

Q: “Were the beliefs of Samaritan and Qaraite more or less the same?” A: Yes, they are more or less the same. Indeed, both attitude to the oral law. It’s just that the Qaraites tended to be more allied to traditional Judaism. And they were strict in what they are adhere to, great scholars for a long period of time. At one moment, in the first millennium, they almost became a dominant religion in Judaism, but they consider themselves as Jewish until much, much later. And now it’s an open question, because, many Qaraites who are living in Lithuania in the North, petitioned the Nazis not to be classified as Jews, because they didn’t want to be identified by them as Jews. But during the mediaeval period, during their flourishing and their greatest power, they did consider themselves as being authentic Jews and therefore the rabbis had much less problems with a Qaraite marrying in, than they did with the Samaritan marrying in. So that’s the main difference there. And of course, the Qaraites did adopt the Babylonian script, the script of Ezra, and did accept the same Torah as the rabbis, whereas the Samaritans Torah is different in several respects.

“Had I had someone like you at I might have paid more attention.” Ah, Michelle, thank you very much. Thank you. Yes, it’s been one of the failures of Jewish education. Jewish education has failed dramatically in not making more both of history and of finding people who just love teaching, as opposed to people who have to teach just to earn a penny. And that’s the problem with all education. Thank you Debby,

Q: “Were the Ottomans Shia?” A: No, the Ottomans were definitely Sunni. Definitely Sunni, but there’s a whole lot of argument about which Sunni they were and whether they were also the mystics or not, and there were so many different sects. It’s very difficult to give a simple answer. There’s a very good book I was just reading, called “The Ottomans” by Mark David Baer, B-A-E-R. “The Ottomans,” read that, a very good book about the Ottoman Empire.

Q: “Why didn’t Eastern religions want to dominate Christians and Islam?” A: Oh, they did. They just didn’t succeed. The Byzantians tried their best, they were in control and hoped to remain that way. But in the end, the remnant of Byzantium, the Eastern Christians of course, were those sects that the ISIS tried to eliminate altogether. They were still Syrians, the Syrian church was, still exists in small numbers, but it simply was overpowered by everybody else.

So ladies and gentlemen, that being the last question, thank you very much for listening and I hope to see you again next time, whenever that might be.