If I forget you, O Jerusalem,
let my right hand wither;let my tongue stick to my palate
if I cease to think of you,
if I do not keep Jerusalem in memory
even at my happiest hour.(Psalms 137:5 – 6, JPS 1985 translation)
These words, composed by the Psalmist, displaced to Babylonia, depict the commonly held perception of the Jewish diasporic condition. In the Jewish tradition, exile (in Hebrew, galut), is commonly understood as a punishment for sin. Redemption (geulah) will occur when the Jewish people have repented for the sins that caused exile. David Kraemer, a renowned historian of Jewish antiquity, argues that a negative view of exile is just one perspective on the Jewish Diaspora.
Embracing Exile: The Case for Jewish Diaspora illuminates how Jewish people have, for millennia, cultivated vibrant communities, and produced profound intellectual and artistic achievements by adapting to and integrating into new communities. While acknowledging the centrality of the biblical lands in Jewish liturgy, Kraemer argues that a hoped-for messianic return to Jerusalem and the biblical lands of Israel was not in tension with Jews’ full commitment to living in the Diaspora or a significant threat to maintaining a distinctive Jewish identity. Jews “prayed to return ‘home’ while making homes in their diasporas.”.
Kraemer’s panoramic account begins in the biblical period. Biblical books, including Isaiah and Daniel, grapple with the fear of divine abandonment, as ancient people tended to believe deities were bound by specific places such as temples or geographical areas. These concerns were heightened for post-biblical Jews after the second temple was destroyed in 70 CE. The Babylonian rabbis of the Talmud developed a conception of their preeminent authority in Jewish law. Medieval Kabbalists and Hasidic masters developed a view of the divine presence that is accessible to Jews in the physical realm of the diaspora, called Shekhinah. Moreover, Hasidim conceptualized the holiness of the biblical land as malleable, with Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav provocatively claiming that the sacredness of the Holy Land was in exile along with the Jewish people. Twentieth-century Jews contended with mass migration, the unfathomable destruction of the Holocaust, and the establishment of the state of Israel.
Kraemer’s book cogently puts perspectives from a vast array of historical and geographical contexts into conversation with each other. However, non-male voices are almost entirely absent from the narrative. Kraemer notes that extant sources (at least until the modern period) are almost exclusively written by men of considerable social standing. Nonetheless, the material conditions of exile shaped women in distinctive ways.
Kraemer proffers the remarkable intellectual achievements of rabbis in Ashkenaz, some subject to the violence of the crusades, as evidence that Jews flourished in exile despite occasional violence. Kraemer conjectures that Rashi’s ability to write extensive commentaries on the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud shows that he was “free and secure enough to pursue the loftiest of Jewish goals.” But why should intellectual achievement demonstrate that conditions in exile were decent for the majority of the Jewish population? In a similar vein, Kraemer cites the fact that, in medieval Egypt, Jews were “merchants, traders, shopkeepers and many other professions … They married and divorced, had children … [and] had their choice of multiple synagogues. But when only men can initiate divorce and perform certain public prayers, does this show that life in exile was relatively comfortable for women?
These considerations somewhat limit the book’s scope. However, Embracing Exile shines as a work of intellectual history detailing the vicissitudes of how elite Jewish men living in diaspora understood exile and how they integrated in their community.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
