Remembering the Lessons of Babylon

After October 7, after the campus chants, after the harassment and the synagogue security details, many Israelis ask a question that increasingly carries the weight of an accusation: why aren’t American Jews coming home?

The numbers make the question sharper. American aliyah ran a few thousand per year before October 7 and has risen modestly since, but nothing resembling the migrations from Iraq, Yemen, the former Soviet Union, or even France. Against an American Jewish population of roughly seven and a half million, the rate is statistically negligible.

The standard explanations — comfort, language, careers, family — are all true and all insufficient. The deeper answer requires looking back further than the question usually does. It requires looking at Babylon.

The Pattern Israelis Underestimate

When Cyrus issued his edict in 538 BCE, allowing the exiled Jews of Babylon to return to Judea, only a minority went. The community that stayed — prosperous, integrated, deeply rooted — went on to produce the Babylonian Talmud, the Geonic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, and roughly a millennium of Jewish intellectual centrality occurring outside the Land. They did not leave when invited. They left, eventually, when forced — in the 1940s and 1950s, after twenty-five hundred years.

This pattern repeats with a consistency that should sober anyone who builds aliyah policy on the assumption that Jews come when called. Spanish Jewry stayed seven centuries until expelled in 1492. Rhineland Jewry stayed centuries until destroyed in the Crusades and later expulsions. Eastern European Jewry stayed roughly a millennium until largely murdered, then pushed out by Soviet hostility. Mizrahi communities stayed one to two millennia until evicted between 1948 and 1979.

The pattern is uncomfortable but clear. Every Diaspora that has ended has ended........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)