so let's continue our discussion of the diaspora in antiquity by looking at mesopotamia
and although we saw that egypt was an incredibly important center of jewish settlement babylonia is
perhaps more distinguished because it is the location of the forced resettlement of jews
which was the original home of the patriarch abraham but nevertheless
jews were forced to live there in the context of the invasions of the assyrians and the babylonians
in the eighth and the sixth centuries those two centuries were periods in which there were forced
removals of jews from israel to the region of babylonia and it's more appropriate to use the
term exile or galut in that context but even those exiles were partial they only represented
a small portion of the overall population the majority of the population remain behind in israel
impoverished probably gender imbalance because men may have been taken in greater numbers than women
but otherwise many jews the majority still remain behind in israel now here's a look at a map and
you can see where the arrow is pointing to the region of mesopotamia that term as i've said
before represents the area between the rivers that's what mesopotamos means between the rivers
and it's sometimes called simply babylonia uh although that's a term that obviously changes
over time uh let's zoom in here to passage from jeremiah uh in which he famously says
on the occasion of the 6th century exile to babylonia he says
thus saith the lord of hosts this is jeremiah 29 verse 4 the god of israel unto all the
captivity whom i have caused to be carried away captive from jerusalem unto babylon build ye
houses and dwell in them and plant gardens and eat the fruit of them take ye wives and beget
sons and daughters and takes wives for your sons and give your daughters to husbands that they may
bear sons and daughters and multiply ye there and be not diminished and seek the peace of the city
whether whither i have cause to be carried with captive pray for the lord for it for it is for in
the peace thereof shall ye have peace this is kind of like the mission statement of the concept of
exile in the jewish tradition the notion that this exile is galu to this diaspora to use neutral term
is something that is god ordained and that jews are to commit themselves to the lands in which
they now live to work to build it up with houses and vineyards and so on to raise families there
and to pray for the welfare of the government which of course is part of the standard ritual
of the synagogue to this very day but at the same time we should understand that
this represented a huge theological spiritual challenge for babylonian jewry because
up until now although the jews worshipped an invisible god their only conception of god was
one in which god was associated with a particular place now they were in a foreign place where they
somehow abandoned by their god i know that you know much more modern thinking
understands the concept of god as universal and is not being connected to a specific base
but in the ancient period there's lots of indications to suggest that jews would be
worried that now perhaps their god you know was not interested in in taking care of them in an
exiled land that's why jeremiah's prophecy rang so famously throughout the generations as a a measure
of consolation for their newfound exilic condition now what's going on in babylonia in the uh the
period of antiquity that we're looking at so one of the most fascinating collections that we have
from the period is the so-called murashu archive now this represents 730 clay tablets from the 5th
century from the bane murashu which is a banking family it's not impossible that they are jewish
but there's no real data to prove it one or the other however when the archaeologists go through
these cuneiform tablets there are lots and lots of names right it's a business archive with receipts
and agreements and contracts and stuff like that about eight percent of the names mentioned
in this massive archive are jewish and the way they tell is because they are so-called theophoric
meaning they invoke the name of the jewish god right built into their own ways of referring to
each other my own children have theophoric names it's very common if you have a name like let's say
i don't know um jonathan right means uh god-given that's right they all like invoke the name of god
in some kind of like active way and so it's it's relatively easy it's not foolproof it's a pretty
good sense that these are probably jews so there are eight percent of the names in this archive
are jewish and they're located in 28 out of the 200 place names mentioned there there's another
collection by the way that refers to a place that seems to be like a concentration of jews called
al-yahudu yahood of course would mean jewish and there's lots and lots of theophoric names in this
separate collection as well which was discovered um quite some time after the murasha archive was
unnamed earth and one of the things i find really amazing about the morocco archive is not only are
the names theophoric but the jews always use a patronymic meaning one is normally named
with a given name son or daughter of one's parent in most circumstances in jewish practice one is
named after one's father not after one's father but one is named by one's father so for example
my hebrew name is hillel my father's name is yaakov so i would be hillel ben yakov right hillel
the son of yak in almost all usages you would rely on one your father's name but under certain
circumstances you would refer to your mother's name the reasons for the distinction are not going
to delay us today but what's really fascinating is if you look at the the individuals named and their
patronamics and you see is there a change in the theophoric nature you can see that there's a real
seem that something happened around the year 480 before the common era in which all of a sudden
jews who have regular babylonian names start giving their children super theophoric names
as if they have suddenly discovered religion and they have are much more intent on making sure
that their children identify as jews it's really interesting and in fact that continues for several
generations but what would happen if all of a sudden you had all these jews that had like really
secular names like let's say i don't know chad or thomas or something it's really not christopher
right really not especially jewish names and then all of a sudden their kids get named like
you know eliezer and hana rivka and sarah what happened it seems that around the year 480 for
reasons that we don't know there is a real teshuva movement and they start giving their children
much more jewish names and their grandchildren get jewish names and so on for quite some time
i just think that's cool but let's go on uh what did the jews do so the murasho archive
because it's primarily dealing with business and receipts and things like that doesn't give
us a lot of detail about the nature of their lives but it does say a lot about what kind of
occupations they were involved in it appears that there is a strong contingent of jews who
are active in the military it's fascinating that in a diaspora condition you wouldn't necessarily
immediately think of that first but we see that in egypt we see it also in babylonia
jews of course involved in animal husbandry shepherding well that sounds like a traditional
jewish pursuit right with david and moses and so on jews are involved in buying and selling
real estate uh they're involved in government service like they're they're operating businesses
on behalf of the government or so on uh and we even have a significant population of jews who
are actually enslaved there is a jewish poor it's not one can't imagine that the the vast majority
of jews are sort of like upper middle class no rather they are more middle class and lower
in this archive so much stuff to talk about i wish we had more time so let us just conclude
a little bit by thinking about the political organization of the jews in babylonia because
this would unlike egypt ultimately become the next great center of jewish culture that's what we're
going to be exploring in just a few weeks there's a slow and steady growth of communities after bark
they move from israel and they make their way to mesopotamia and this increases the population
there will be a significant amount of travel going back and forth between the major centers
of jews in israel and in the babylonian region there are the so-called negre which referred to
rabbis who leave jerusalem to go to babylonia and teach the rabbis in babylonia what they're
saying in jerusalem and sometimes they go back and forth many times so there is an increasingly
large population there there's a significant cultural impact as well because this is a
process that started hundreds of years or earlier but aramaic as the state language of the region
becomes the literary lingua franca for much of the eastern mediterranean and and of course it will
be the language of the talmud as well aramaic is by the way the jews write it with hebrew letters
other peoples write it with different letters and it's a semitic language it's not too far away from
hebrew in its grammar and structure and even most of his vocabulary it's probably sort of like
french and italian or french and spanish are close to each other as hebrew is to aramaic we'll come
back to that when we talk more about babylonia the organization of the jews in babylonia was
quite sophisticated they had something called the reish galuta or in english the exilarc the head
of the exile and again i want to postpone a major discussion of this until a little later
on in this next semester but this is basically a figure recognized by the parthian empire
as the head of all jews in the region and uh respected by the jews although sometimes they get
into conflict with their leadership in particular as the academies begin to grow they'll really only
take off in the third century but the various great academies of study which will ultimately
produce the uh the talmud often get into conflict with the resculuta nevertheless just like we saw
with the prayer for the government uh there's also a prayer for the resculuta that is included in
every sabbath service in aramaic in contemporary synagogues as well but you shouldn't think that
it's all you know sort of organized and working together effectively uh we have some fascinating
stories josephus gives us a lot of details of two brothers from the famous city of nehar da named
anaelas and asineos who decided to just you know go off on their own and create for about 15 years
their own kind of like robber state which was kind of like a they were warlords and these were
jewish guys who maintained kind of like regional independence from parthian army uh parthian empire
until finally the uh the parthians took care of it and and destroyed the robber state fascinating
kind of swashbuckling guys uh more to say but i think it'll take us too far away from our topic
okay that's mesopotamia one more short lecture about diaspora coming up thank you for watching