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The Eternal Diaspora
Jews are a nation whose representatives have lived in dispersion – the Diaspora – since ancient times. The books of Isaiah and Jeremiah contain mentions of Jews living in the 8th-6th century BC on "isles afar off" (Jer 31:10) and "islands of the sea" (Isa 11:11) – most probably on the isles of the Greek Archipelago.
The reasons why Jews migrated to Europe lay both in the turmoil of war in Palestine and the search for better living conditions in European economic centres. At the beginning of the 5th century BC, during the wars between Persians and Greeks, the followers of Judaism living in Asia Minor were coming to the European continent as free men or as captives. Their further migrations were fostered by the conquering of the Middle East by Alexander the Great in the years 334-323 BC. In 2nd-1st century BC, Jews lived in almost all bigger Greek and Roman cities, also in Crimea. The number of Jews living in the then Diaspora was probably already greater than the number of Jews living in Palestine.
The influx of followers of Judaism onto the territory of the Roman Empire intensified after Pompey conquered the Jewish state in 63 BC and turned it into a fief of the Roman Republic. In 66, an uprising broke out in Palestine which sowed the seeds of war which was ultimately won by the Romans. The capturing of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple in 70 was a great blow which greatly affected the Jewish community as it was deprived of a religious centre and the remains of its statehood.
The Jewish Diaspora in the Roman Empire grew very quickly, also in the Western and Northern provinces. In the 3rd and 4th century there were numerous Jewish centres on the Iberian Peninsula, in today’s southern France and Rhineland. The Jews also lived in the Noricum province – today’s Bavaria. Jewish centres were also created in Thrace – on the territory of today’s Bulgaria. Thanks to the archaeological excavations, there is a lot of information about the Jewish people living in 3rd and 4th century in Panonia, whose area is roughly equivalent to that of today’s Hungary.
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The basic means of support for the Jews in that epoch were agriculture, trade, crafts and sometimes even civil service. They played a vital role in the life of many cities located on the Rhine and Danube. The ancient Jewish tombs from Panonia prove that there were organized communes and its members were, among others, Roman legionnaires and clerks, e.g. customs houses superiors. These information are of key importance, because, among others things, Panonia was the place where the so-called amber trail began and led northward, through the Polish territories up to the Baltic Sea. It can be inferred that Jewish merchants were also travelling along that trail and that some of them stayed for a longer or shorter period of time in the basins of the Vistula and Oder rivers. Although there is no source evidence for this, archaeological research is still bringing new, often quite surprising information. For example, the discoveries made in Skierniewice-Ławki allow us to suppose that the first Christians came to today’s middle Poland already in the 4th century.
The turn of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, dominated by the journeys of the Germanic and Asiatic peoples, brought about a tremendous diversification of the situation among the European Jews which was only intensified by the Arab conquests in the 7th and 8th century. The economic ties and the trade routes changed. In the 9th and 10th century, the Jewish traders from Arabic Spain, France and Germany were travelling across the European continent from west to east and back, crossing the territories of Poland and taking the route through Silesia and Lesser Poland which led further on towards the Rus. One of these merchants was Abraham ben Jacob whose journey in the mid-10th century had also a diplomatic dimension. He reached only the Czech Prague, but on the basis of the information gathered there he wrote a description of the state ruled by Mieszko I.
Paweł Fijałkowski
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