124-788: Dimona Radar Facility ( Hebrew : מתקן המכ"ם בדימונה) is a radar facility near Dimona , Israel , owned and operated by the United States. The Dimona Radar facility has two 400 meter (1,300 feet) tall radar towers designed to track ballistic missiles through space and provide ground-based missiles with the targeting data needed to intercept them. The towers of the facility, which are situated at 30°58′07″N 35°05′50″E / 30.9685905°N 35.097121°E / 30.9685905; 35.097121 ( Dimona Radar Tower ) and at 30°58′32″N 35°05′55″E / 30.9756831°N 35.0986823°E / 30.9756831; 35.0986823 ( Dimona Radar Tower ) , are
248-485: A Geresh , represent the consonants [ t͡ʃ ] , [ d͡ʒ ] , [ ʒ ] . The consonant [ t͡ʃ ] may also be written as "תש" and "טש". [ w ] is represented interchangeably by a simple vav "ו", non-standard double vav "וו" and sometimes by non-standard geresh modified vav "ו׳". Modern Hebrew has fewer phonemes than Biblical Hebrew but it has developed its own phonological complexity. Israeli Hebrew has 25 to 27 consonants, depending on whether
372-518: A Hebrew form. Medieval Hebrew added 6421 words to (Modern) Hebrew. The approximate number of new lexical items in Israeli is 17,000 (cf. 14,762 in Even-Shoshan 1970 [...]). With the inclusion of foreign and technical terms [...], the total number of Israeli words, including words of biblical, rabbinic and medieval descent, is more than 60,000. Modern Hebrew has loanwords from Arabic (both from
496-611: A Roman colonia and foreign cults. It is commonly held that this was done as an insult to the Jews and as a means of erasing the land's Jewish identity, Others argued that this project was expressive of an intention of establishing administratively and culturally a firm Roman imperial presence, and thus incorporating the province, now called Syro-Palaestina, into the Roman world system. These political measures were, according to Menachem Mor, devoid of any intention to eliminate Judaism, indeed,
620-604: A clear paternal link between the Bene Israel and the Levant." "The most parsimonious explanation for these observations is a common genetic origin, which is consistent with an historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant." In conclusion the authors are stating that the genetic results are concordant "with the dispersion of the people of ancient Israel throughout
744-643: A common noun. It was originally used to describe a blazed trail. The flower Anemone coronaria , called in Modern Hebrew kalanit , was formerly called in Hebrew shoshanat ha-melekh ('the king's flower'). For a simple comparison between the Sephardic and Yemenite versions of Mishnaic Hebrew, see Yemenite Hebrew . Modern Hebrew is classified as an Afroasiatic language of the Semitic family ,
868-452: A denigrated minority, stripped of such rights, in the host society. Sometimes diaspora and galut are defined as 'voluntary' as opposed to 'involuntary' exile. Diaspora, it has been argued, has a political edge, referring to geopolitical dispersion, which may be involuntary, but which can assume, under different conditions, a positive nuance. Galut is more teleological , and connotes a sense of uprootedness. Daniel Boyarin defines diaspora as
992-694: A disputed province of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria. In the early part of the 2nd century BCE, a revolt against the Seleucids led to the establishment of an independent Jewish kingdom under the Hasmonean dynasty. The Hasmoneans adopted a deliberate policy of imitating and reconstituting the Davidic kingdom, and as part of this forcibly converted to Judaism their neighbours in the Land of Israel. The conversions included Nabateans ( Zabadeans ) and Itureans ,
1116-572: A figure of 6,944,000 Jews in the Roman world. Salo Wittmayer Baron considered the figure convincing. The figure of seven million within and one million outside the Roman world in the mid-first century became widely accepted, including by Louis Feldman . However, contemporary scholars now accept that Bar Hebraeus based his figure on a census of total Roman citizens and thus, included non-Jews. The figure of 6,944,000 being recorded in Eusebius' Chronicon . Louis Feldman, previously an active supporter of
1240-533: A firm Christian majority. Judaism was the only non-Christian religion tolerated, but the Jews were discriminated against in various ways. They were prohibited from building new houses of worship, holding public office, or owning slaves. The 7th century saw the Jewish revolt against Heraclius , which broke out in 614 during the Byzantine–Sasanian War . It was the last serious attempt by Jews to gain autonomy in
1364-411: A full one-tenth (10%) of the population of the ancient city of Rome itself. Finally, if the sums confiscated by the governor Lucius Valerius Flaccus in the year 62/61 BCE represented the tax of a didrachma per head for a single year, it would imply that the Jewish population of Asia Minor numbered 45,000 adult males, for a total of at least 180,000 persons. The 13th-century author Bar Hebraeus gave
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#17327906620251488-494: A lesser extent Latin. In the Middle Ages, Hebrew made heavy semantic borrowing from Arabic, especially in the fields of science and philosophy. Here are typical examples of Hebrew loanwords: Jewish diaspora The Jewish diaspora ( Hebrew : גוֹלָה , romanized : gōlā ), dispersion ( Hebrew : תְּפוּצָה , romanized : təfūṣā ) or exile (Hebrew: גָּלוּת gālūṯ ; Yiddish : golus )
1612-589: A majority of the population until some time after Constantine converted to Christianity in the 4th century. The ban on Jewish settlement in Jerusalem was maintained. There was a minor Jewish rebellion against a corrupt governor from 351 to 352 which was put down. In the 5th century, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire resulted in Christian migration into Palestine and the development of
1736-741: A military class that successively served the Persian , the Ptolemaic and Roman governments down to the early decades of the second century CE, when the revolt against Trajan destroyed them. Their presence was buttressed by numerous Jewish administrators who joined them in Egypt's military and urban centres. According to Josephus , when Ptolemy I took Judea, he led 120,000 Jewish captives to Egypt, and many other Jews, attracted by Ptolemy's liberal and tolerant policies and Egypt's fertile soil, emigrated from Judea to Egypt of their own free will. Ptolemy settled
1860-541: A reminder of the hallowed past, and, through most of the era, a Jewish regime existed in Palestine. Yet the Jews of the diaspora, from Italy to Iran, far outnumbered those in the homeland. Although Jerusalem loomed large in their self-perception as a nation, few of them had seen it, and few were likely to. Israel Yuval contends the Babylonian captivity created a promise of return in the Jewish consciousness which had
1984-494: A result, many Jews emigrated to Babylon under the more tolerant Sassanid Empire , where autonomous Jewish communities continued to flourish, lured by the promise of economic prosperity and the ability to lead a full Jewish life there. Between the 3rd and 7th centuries, estimates indicate that the Babylonian Jewish community numbered approximately one million, which may have been the largest Jewish diaspora population of
2108-460: A similar semantic range, bear some distinct differences in connotation. The former has no traditional equivalent in Hebrew usage. Steven Bowman argues that diaspora in antiquity connoted emigration from an ancestral mother city, with the emigrant community maintaining its cultural ties with the place of origin. Just as the Greek city exported its surplus population, so did Jerusalem, while remaining
2232-736: A single event. There is no sudden expansion of the population base of 30,000 and no credible indication of any special interest in Yehud . Although most of the Jewish people during this period, especially the wealthy families, were to be found in Babylonia, the existence they led there, under the successive rulers of the Achaemenids , the Seleucids , the Parthians , and the Sassanians ,
2356-522: A spoken language. By the late 19th century, Russian-Jewish linguist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda had begun a popular movement to revive Hebrew as a living language, motivated by his desire to preserve Hebrew literature and a distinct Jewish nationality in the context of Zionism . Soon after, a large number of Yiddish and Judaeo-Spanish speakers were murdered in the Holocaust or fled to Israel , and many speakers of Judeo-Arabic emigrated to Israel in
2480-411: A state where people have a dual cultural allegiance, productive of a double consciousness , and in this sense a cultural condition not premised on any particular history, as opposed to galut, which is more descriptive of an existential situation, that properly of exile, conveying a particular psychological outlook. The Greek word διασπορά (dispersion) first appears as a neologism in the translation of
2604-568: A state's function would be to 'sustain Jewish nationhood' in the diaspora. In 722 BCE, the Assyrians , under Sargon II , successor to Shalmaneser V , conquered the Kingdom of Israel , and many Israelites were deported to Mesopotamia . The Jewish proper diaspora began with the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BCE. After the overthrow of the Kingdom of Judah in 586 BCE by Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon (see Babylonian captivity ) and
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#17327906620252728-554: A study by Doron Behar and Karl Skorecki of the Technion and Ramban Medical Center in Haifa, Israel demonstrated that the vast majority of Ashkenazi Jews, both men and women, have Middle Eastern ancestry. According to Nicholas Wades' 2010 Autosomal study Ashkenazi Jews share a common ancestry with other Jewish groups and Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews have roughly 30% European ancestry with the rest being Middle Eastern. According to Hammer,
2852-518: Is 8198, of which some 2000 are hapax legomena (the number of Biblical Hebrew roots, on which many of these words are based, is 2099). The number of attested Rabbinic Hebrew words is less than 20,000, of which (i) 7879 are Rabbinic par excellence, i.e. they did not appear in the Old Testament (the number of new Rabbinic Hebrew roots is 805); (ii) around 6000 are a subset of Biblical Hebrew; and (iii) several thousand are Aramaic words which can have
2976-404: Is genealogically a hybrid with Indo-European. Those theories have not been met with general acceptance, and the consensus among a majority of scholars is that Modern Hebrew, despite its non-Semitic influences, can correctly be classified as a Semitic language. Although European languages have had an impact on Modern Hebrew, the impact may often be overstated. Although Modern Hebrew has more of
3100-540: Is no doubt of a Middle Eastern origin. In June 2010, Behar et al. "shows that most Jewish samples form a remarkably tight subcluster with common genetic origin, that overlies Druze and Cypriot samples but not samples from other Levantine populations or paired diaspora host populations. In contrast, Ethiopian Jews ( Beta Israel ) and Indian Jews (Bene Israel and Cochini ) cluster with neighboring autochthonous populations in Ethiopia and western India, respectively, despite
3224-454: Is not the consensus among scholars. Modern Hebrew is considered to be a koiné language based on historical layers of Hebrew that incorporates foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution. A minority of scholars argue that the revived language had been so influenced by various substrate languages that it
3348-455: Is now used for ' plum ', but formerly meant ' jujube '. The word kishū’īm (formerly 'cucumbers') is now applied to a variety of summer squash ( Cucurbita pepo var. cylindrica ), a plant native to the New World . Another example is the word kǝvīš ( כביש ), which now denotes a street or a road, but is actually an Aramaic adjective meaning 'trodden down' or 'blazed', rather than
3472-531: Is only after the destruction of Jerusalem that Jews are found in northern Europe and along the western Mediterranean coast. Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan challenge the "widespread notion" the Jews in Judea were only expelled after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE and the Jewish defeat during Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE. They also contend it is "misleading" that the expulsion from Judea created
3596-647: Is the dispersion of Israelites or Jews out of their ancient ancestral homeland (the Land of Israel ) and their subsequent settlement in other parts of the globe. In terms of the Hebrew Bible , the term "Exile" denotes the fate of the Israelites who were taken into exile from the Kingdom of Israel during the 8th century BCE, and the Judahites from the Kingdom of Judah who were taken into exile during
3720-524: Is the official language of the State of Israel and the only Canaanite language still spoken as a native language. The revival of Hebrew predates the creation of the state of Israel, where it is now the national language . Modern Hebrew is often regarded as one of the most successful instances of language revitalization . Hebrew, a Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic language family ,
3844-452: Is used in handwriting. When necessary, vowels are indicated by diacritic marks above or below the letters known as Nikkud , or by use of Matres lectionis , which are consonantal letters used as vowels. Further diacritics like Dagesh and Sin and Shin dots are used to indicate variations in the pronunciation of the consonants (e.g. bet / vet , shin / sin ). The letters " צ׳ ", " ג׳ ", " ז׳ ", each modified with
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3968-435: Is used. Modern Hebrew maintains classical syntactic properties associated with VSO languages: it is prepositional , rather than postpositional, in marking case and adverbial relations, auxiliary verbs precede main verbs; main verbs precede their complements, and noun modifiers ( adjectives , determiners other than the definite article [ה-] Error: {{Lang}}: invalid parameter: |3= ( help ) , and noun adjuncts ) follow
4092-850: Is usually Arabic ; and half a million are expatriate Israelis or diaspora Jews . Under Israeli law, the organization that officially directs the development of Modern Hebrew is the Academy of the Hebrew Language , headquartered at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem . The most common scholarly term for the language is "Modern Hebrew" ( עברית חדשה ). Most people refer to it simply as Hebrew ( עברית Hebrew pronunciation: [Ivrit] ). The term "Modern Hebrew" has been described as "somewhat problematic" as it implies unambiguous periodization from Biblical Hebrew . Haiim B. Rosén [ he ] (חיים רוזן) supported
4216-595: The "Crisis under Caligula" (37–41) was the "first open break between Rome and the Jews". Meanwhile, the Kitos War , a rebellion by Jewish diaspora communities in Roman territories in the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, led to the destruction of Jewish communities in Crete, Cyprus, and North Africa in 117 CE, and consequently the dispersal of Jews already living outside of Judea to further reaches of
4340-487: The 2 Kings 17:23 's reference to the deportation of the Judean elite to Babylonia. Stéphane Dufoix, in surveying the textual evidence, draws the following conclusion: galuth and diaspora are drawn from two completely different lexicons. The first refers to episodes, precise and datable, in the history of the people of Israel, when the latter was subjected to a foreign occupation, such as that of Babylon, in which most of
4464-602: The Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe, and the Sephardic Jews of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), North Africa and the Middle East . These groups have parallel histories sharing many cultural similarities as well as a series of massacres, persecutions and expulsions, such as the expulsion from England in 1290 , the expulsion from Spain in 1492 , and the expulsion from Arab countries in 1948–1973 . Although
4588-424: The Ashkenazi of Northern and Eastern Europe, and the Sephardic Jews of Iberia (Spain and Portugal), North Africa and the Middle East . These groups have parallel histories sharing many cultural similarities as well as a series of massacres, persecutions and expulsions, such as the expulsion from England in 1290 , the expulsion from Spain in 1492 , and the expulsion from Arab countries in 1948–1973 . Although
4712-664: The Canaanite branch of the Northwest Semitic subgroup. While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah eras and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax, some scholars posit that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state. Though this
4836-573: The Jewish exodus from the Muslim world , where many adapted to Modern Hebrew. Currently, Hebrew is spoken by approximately 9–10 million people, counting native, fluent, and non-fluent speakers. Some 6 million of these speak it as their native language, the overwhelming majority of whom are Jews who were born in Israel or immigrated during infancy. The rest is split: 2 million are immigrants to Israel; 1.5 million are Israeli Arabs , whose first language
4960-726: The Jewish-American Zionist academic Simon Rawidowicz , who to some degree argued for the acceptance of the Jewish presence outside the Land of Israel as a modern reality and an inevitability. The Greek term for diaspora (διασπορά) also appears three times in the New Testament , where it refers to the scattering of Israel, i.e., the Ten Northern Tribes of Israel as opposed to the Southern Kingdom of Judah, although James (1:1) refers to
5084-489: The Land of Israel prior to modern times. Jewish rebels aided the Persians in capturing Jerusalem , where the Jews were permitted autonomous rule until 617, when the Persians reneged on their alliance. After Byzantine Emperor Heraclius promised to restore Jewish rights, the Jews aided him in ousting the Persians. Heraclius subsequently went back on his word and ordered a general massacre of the Jewish population, devastating
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5208-735: The Old Testament known as the Septuagint , where it occurs 14 times, starting with a passage reading: ἔση διασπορὰ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς (‘thou shalt be a diaspora (or dispersion) in all kingdoms of the earth’, Deuteronomy 28:25 ), translating 'ləza‘ăwāh', whose root suggests 'trouble, terror'. In these contexts it never translated any term in the original Tanakh drawn from the Hebrew root glt ( גלה ), which lies behind galah, and golah , nor even galuth. Golah appears 42 times, and galuth in 15 passages, and first occurs in
5332-679: The Roman province of Judaea . The Judean population revolted against the Roman Empire in 66 CE in the First Jewish–Roman War , which culminated in the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. During the siege, the Romans destroyed the Second Temple and most of Jerusalem . This watershed moment, the elimination of the symbolic centre of Judaism and Jewish identity motivated many Jews to formulate a new self-definition and adjust their existence to
5456-680: The diaspora uprisings of 116–117 CE resulted in the near-total destruction of Jewish communities in Cyrenaica and Egypt. By the third century, Jewish communities began to re-establish themselves in Egypt and Cyrenaica, primarily through immigration from the Land of Israel. Roman rule in Judea began in 63 BCE with the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey . After the city fell to Pompey's forces, thousands of Jewish prisoners of war were brought from Judea to Rome and sold into slavery. After these Jewish slaves were manumitted, they settled permanently in Rome on
5580-523: The kingdoms of Israel and Judah , during about 1200 to 586 BCE. Scholars debate the degree to which Hebrew remained a spoken vernacular following the Babylonian captivity , when Old Aramaic became the predominant international language in the region. Hebrew died out as a vernacular language somewhere between 200 and 400 CE, declining after the Bar Kokhba revolt of 132–136 CE, which devastated
5704-547: The 6th century BCE. While in exile, the Judahites became known as "Jews" ( יְהוּדִים , or Yehudim ). The first exile was the Assyrian exile , the expulsion from the Kingdom of Israel begun by Tiglath-Pileser III of Assyria in 733 BCE. This process was completed by Sargon II with the destruction of the kingdom in 722 BCE, concluding a three-year siege of Samaria begun by Shalmaneser V . The next experience of exile
5828-647: The Ashkenazi population expanded through a series of bottlenecks—events that squeeze a population down to small numbers—perhaps as it migrated from the Middle East after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, to Italy, reaching the Rhine Valley in the 10th century. David Goldstein, a Duke University geneticist and director of the Duke Center for Human Genome Variation, has said that the work of
5952-497: The Babylonian destruction of Judah, the Roman destruction of Judea, and the subsequent rule of Christians and Muslims. After the revolt, the Jewish religious and cultural center shifted to the Babylonian Jewish community and its scholars. For the generations that followed, the destruction of the Second Temple event came to represent a fundamental insight about the Jews who had become a dispossessed and persecuted people for much of their history. Erich S. Gruen contends that focusing on
6076-588: The Crusaders. The majority of Jerusalem's Jewish population was killed during the Crusader Siege of Jerusalem and the few thousand survivors were sold into slavery. Some of the Jews sold into slavery later had their freedom bought by Jewish communities in Italy and Egypt, and the redeemed slaves were taken to Egypt. Some Jewish prisoners of war were also deported to Apulia in southern Italy. Relief for
6200-477: The Empire. Jerusalem had been left in ruins from the time of Vespasian . Sixty years later, Hadrian, who had been instrumental in the expulsion from Palestine of Marcius Turbo after his bloody repression of Jews in the diaspora in 117 CE, on visiting the area of Iudaea , decided to rebuild the city in 130 CE, and settle it, circumstantial evidence suggesting it was he who renamed it Ælia Capitolina , with
6324-532: The Euphrates and in Adiabene (Kurdistan). In Josephus' own words, he had informed "the remotest Arabians" about the destruction. Jewish communities also existed in southern Europe, Anatolia, Syria, and North Africa. Jewish pilgrims from the diaspora, undeterred by the rebellion, had actually come to Jerusalem for Passover prior to the arrival of the Roman army, and many became trapped in the city and died during
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#17327906620256448-672: The Great Revolt, a Jewish uprising to fight for independence, which began in 66 CE and was eventually crushed in 73 CE, culminating in the Siege of Jerusalem and the burning and destruction of the Temple, the centre of the national and religious life of the Jews throughout the world. The Jewish diaspora at the time of the Temple's destruction, according to Josephus , was in Parthia (Persia), Babylonia (Iraq), Arabia, as well as some Jews beyond
6572-587: The Jewish academies of Palestine, and by the end of the third century they were reliant on donations from Babylon. The effect that the destruction of Jerusalem had on the Jewish diaspora has been a topic of considerable scholarly discussion. David Aberbach has argued that much of the European Jewish diaspora, by which he means exile or voluntary migration, originated with the Jewish wars which occurred between 66 and 135 CE. Martin Goodman states that it
6696-442: The Jewish communities of Jerusalem and the Galilee. As a result, many Jews fled to Egypt. In 638, Palestine came under Muslim rule with the Muslim conquest of the Levant . One estimate placed the Jewish population of Palestine at between 300,000 and 400,000 at the time. However, this is contrary to other estimates which place it at 150,000 to 200,000 at the time of the revolt against Heraclius. According to historian Moshe Gil ,
6820-400: The Jewish people to tribute. As early as the third century BCE Jewish communities sprang up in the Aegean islands, Greece, Asia Minor, Cyrenaica, Italy and Egypt. In Palestine, under the favourable auspices of the long period of peace—almost a whole century—which followed the advent of the Ptolemies, the new ways were to flourish. By means of all kinds of contacts, and particularly thanks to
6944-444: The Jewish population of Palestine came when the Ayyubid dynasty defeated the Crusaders and conquered Palestine (see 1187 Battle of Hattin ). Some Jewish immigration from the diaspora subsequently took place, but this came to an end when Mamluks took over Palestine (see 1291 Fall of Acre ). The Mamluks severely oppressed the Jews and greatly mismanaged the economy, resulting in a period of great social and economic decline. The result
7068-453: The Jews in China for pre-Roman (and post-) diasporic populations. King Agrippa I , in a letter to Caligula , enumerated among the provinces of the Jewish diaspora almost all the Hellenized and non-Hellenized countries of the Orient. This enumeration was far from complete as Italy and Cyrene were not included. The epigraphic discoveries from year to year augment the number of known Jewish communities but must be viewed with caution due to
7192-424: The Jews in Egypt to employ them as mercenaries. Philadelphus subsequently emancipated the Jews taken to Egypt as captives and settled them in cleruchs , or specialized colonies, as Jewish military units. Jews began settling in Cyrenaica (modern-day eastern Libya) around the third century BCE, during the rule of Ptolemy I of Egypt, who sent them to secure the region for his kingdom. By the early first century BCE,
7316-442: The Jews in Judaea in 70 CE and again in 135 CE, with large numbers of Jewish captives from Judea sold into slavery and an increase in voluntary Jewish emigration from Judea as a result of the wars, meant a drop in Palestine's Jewish population was balanced by a rise in diaspora numbers. Jewish prisoners sold as slaves in the diaspora and their children were eventually manumitted and joined local free communities. It has been argued that
7440-495: The Jews. Heavy taxes on agricultural land forced many Jews to migrate from rural areas to towns. Social and economic discrimination caused significant Jewish emigration from Palestine, and Muslim civil wars in the 8th and 9th centuries pushed many Jews out of the country. By the end of the 11th century the Jewish population of Palestine had declined substantially. During the First Crusade , Jews in Palestine, along with Muslims, were indiscriminately massacred and sold into slavery by
7564-606: The Middle Ages. The Ashkenazi Jews later migrated from Germany (and elsewhere in Central Europe) into Eastern Europe as a result of persecution. Some Ashkenazi Jews also have minor ancestry from Sephardi Jews exiled from Spain, first during Islamic persecutions (11th–12th centuries) and later during Christian reconquests (13th–15th centuries) and the Spanish Inquisition (15th–16th centuries). Ashkenazi Jews are of mixed Middle Eastern and European ancestry, as they derive part of their ancestry from non-Jewish Europeans who intermixed with Jews of migrant Middle Eastern origin. In 2006,
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#17327906620257688-430: The Old World". Regarding the samples he used Behar points out that "Our conclusion favoring common ancestry (of Jewish people) over recent admixture is further supported by the fact that our sample contains individuals that are known not to be admixed in the most recent one or two generations." A 2013 study of Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA by Costa et al., reached the conclusion that the four major female founders and most of
7812-464: The Roman Legions during their conquests. However, for the most part, modern Ashkenazi Jews originated with Jews who migrated or were forcibly taken from the Middle East to southern Europe in antiquity, where they established Jewish communities before moving into northern France and lower Germany during the High and Late Middle Ages . They also descend to a lesser degree from Jewish immigrants from Babylon, Persia, and North Africa who migrated to Europe in
7936-439: The Technion and Ramban team served only to confirm that genetic drift played a major role in shaping Ashkenazi mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), which is inherited in a matrilineal manner. Goldstein argues that the Technion and Ramban mtDNA studies fail to actually establish a statistically significant maternal link between modern Jews and historic Middle Eastern populations. This differs from the patrilineal case, where Goldstein said there
8060-473: The Temple rebuilt. The differences in content and tone of the two decrees, one in Hebrew and one in Aramaic, have caused some scholars to question their authenticity. The Cyrus Cylinder , an ancient tablet on which is written a declaration in the name of Cyrus referring to restoration of temples and repatriation of exiled peoples, has often been taken as corroboration of the authenticity of the biblical decrees attributed to Cyrus, but other scholars point out that
8184-407: The accession of recruits from various quarters, it awoke to a consciousness of itself, and strove once again for national independence and political enfranchisement and sovereignty. The first Jewish diaspora in Egypt arose in the last century of pharaonic rule , apparently with the settlement there, either under Ashurbanipal or during the reign of Psammeticus of a colony of Jewish mercenaries,
8308-445: The archaeological evidence is suggestive of a Roman genocide taking place during the Second revolt. A significant movement of gentiles and Samaritans into villages formerly with a Jewish majority appears to have taken place thereafter. During the Crisis of the Third Century , civil wars in the Roman Empire caused great economic disruption, and taxes imposed to finance these wars impacted the Jewish population of Palestine heavily. As
8432-403: The commencement of the reign of Caesar Augustus , there were over 7,000 Jews in Rome (though this is only the number that is said to have escorted the envoys who came to demand the deposition of Archelaus ; compare: Bringmann: Klaus: Geschichte der Juden im Altertum, Stuttgart 2005, S. 202. Bringmann talks about 8,000 Jews who lived in the city of Rome.). Many sources say that the Jews constituted
8556-411: The creation of political and war refugees, enslavement, deportation, overpopulation, indebtedness, military employment, and opportunities in business, commerce, and agriculture. Before the middle of the first century CE, in addition to Judea, Syria and Babylonia, large Jewish communities existed in the Roman provinces of Egypt, Crete and Cyrenaica , and in Rome itself. In 6 CE the region was organized as
8680-455: The cultural and religious centre or metropolis ( ir-va-em be-yisrael ) for the outlying communities. It could have two senses in Biblical terms, the idea of becoming a ' guiding light unto the nations ' by dwelling in the midst of gentiles, or of enduring the pain of exile from one's homeland. The conditions of diaspora in the former case were premised on the free exercise of citizenship or resident alien status. Galut implies by comparison living as
8804-432: The cylinder's text is specific to Babylon and Mesopotamia and makes no mention of Judah or Jerusalem. Lester L. Grabbe asserted that the "alleged decree of Cyrus" regarding Judah, "cannot be considered authentic", but that there was a "general policy of allowing deportees to return and to re-establish cult sites". He also stated that archaeology suggests that the return was a "trickle" taking place over decades, rather than
8928-524: The day of Tisha B'Av . There was a further shift of the center of religious authority from Yavne , as rabbis regrouped in Usha in the western Galilee, where the Mishnah was composed. This ban struck a blow at Jewish national identity within Palestine, while the Romans however continued to allow Jews in the diaspora their distinct national and religious identity throughout the Empire. The military defeats of
9052-604: The deportation of a considerable portion of its inhabitants to Mesopotamia , the Jews had two principal cultural centers: Babylonia and the land of Israel . Deportees returned to the Samaria after the Neo-Babylonian Empire was in turn conquered by Cyrus the Great . The biblical book of Ezra includes two texts said to be decrees allowing the deported Jews to return to their homeland after decades and ordering
9176-511: The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, more Jews lived in the Diaspora than in Israel. Jonathan Adelman estimated that around 60% of Jews lived in the diaspora during the Second Temple period. According to Gruen: Perhaps three to five million Jews dwelled outside Palestine in the roughly four centuries that stretched from Alexander to Titus . The era of the Second Temple brought the issue into sharp focus, inescapably so. The Temple still stood,
9300-662: The destruction of the Temple misses the point that already before this, the diaspora was well-established. Gruen argues compulsory dislocation of Jews during the Second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE) cannot explain more than a fraction of the eventual diaspora. Rather, the Jewish diaspora during this time period was created from various factors, including through the creation of political and war refugees, enslavement, deportation, overpopulation, indebtedness, military employment, and opportunities in business, commerce, and agriculture. Avrum Ehrlich also states that already well before
9424-577: The development of commerce, Hellenism infiltrated on all sides in varying degrees. The ports of the Mediterranean coast were indispensable to commerce and, from the very beginning of the Hellenistic period, underwent great development. In the Western diaspora Greek quickly became dominant in Jewish life and little sign remains of profound contact with Hebrew or Aramaic, the latter probably being
9548-471: The diaspora. Israel Bartal contends that Shlomo Sand is incorrect in his claim that the original Jews living in Israel were not exiled by the Romans, instead arguing that this view is negligible among serious Jewish study scholars. These scholars argue that the growth of diaspora Jewish communities was a gradual process that occurred over the centuries, starting with the Assyrian destruction of Israel,
9672-406: The domain of history, but of theology.' In Talmudic and post-Talmudic Rabbinic literature, this phenomenon was referred to as galut (exile), a term with strongly negative connotations, often contrasted with geula (redemption). Eugene Borowitz describes Galut as "fundamentally a theological category The modern Hebrew concept of Tefutzot תפוצות, "scattered", was introduced in the 1930s by
9796-546: The early Jewish immigrants to Ottoman Palestine was caused primarily by support from the organisations of Edmond James de Rothschild in the 1880s and the official status it received in the 1922 constitution of the British Mandate for Palestine . Ben-Yehuda codified and planned Modern Hebrew using 8,000 words from the Bible and 20,000 words from rabbinical commentaries. Many new words were borrowed from Arabic, due to
9920-537: The early Roman period, particularly in Alexandria. It was not least for this reason that the Jewish people became a major political factor, especially since the Jews in the diaspora, notwithstanding strong cultural, social and religious tensions, remained firmly united with their homeland. Smallwood writes that, 'It is reasonable to conjecture that many, such as the settlement in Puteoli attested in 4 BCE went back to
10044-408: The effect of enhancing the Jewish self-perception of Exile after the destruction of the Second Temple, albeit their dispersion was due to an array of non-exilic factors. According to Hasia R. Diner , the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, followed by the dissolution, in 132 CE, of Jewish sovereignty over the territory renamed Syria Palaestina, had launched the second dispersion of the diaspora,
10168-482: The features attributed to Standard Average European than Biblical Hebrew, it is still quite distant, and has fewer such features than Modern Standard Arabic. Modern Hebrew is written from right to left using the Hebrew alphabet , which is an abjad , or consonant-only script of 22 letters based on the "square" letter form, known as Ashurit (Assyrian), which was developed from the Aramaic script . A cursive script
10292-456: The figure, now states that he and Baron were mistaken. Philo gives a figure of one million Jews living in Egypt. John R. Bartlett rejects Baron's figures entirely, arguing that we have no clue as to the size of the Jewish demographic in the ancient world. The Romans did not distinguish between Jews inside and outside of the Land of Israel/Judaea. They collected an annual temple tax from Jews both in and outside of Israel. The suppression of
10416-485: The first being the Babylonian exile of 586 BCE. She writes that, "Although many Jews had lived outside Judea even before that [the destruction of Judea], the ending of home rule set in motion the world’s longest diaspora." In the 4th century, the Roman Empire split and Palestine came under the control of the Byzantine Empire . There was still a significant Jewish population there, and Jews probably constituted
10540-594: The following period of Jewish–Roman Wars . Ashkenazi Jews is a general category of Jewish populations who immigrated to what is now Germany and northeastern France during the Middle Ages and until modern times used to adhere to the Yiddish culture and the Ashkenazi prayer style . There is evidence that groups of Jews had immigrated to Germania during the Roman Era ; they were probably merchants who followed
10664-464: The former, while consequential on the latter, was a psycho-spiritual framework that was not wholly dependent on the conditions of life in diasporic exile, since one could technically remain in galut even in Eretz Israel . Whereas Theodor Herzl and his follows thought that the establishment of a Jewish state would put an end to the diasporic exile, Ahad Ha-am thought to the contrary that such
10788-592: The geographer Strabo identified Jews as one of the four main groups residing in the city of Cyrene . While communities in Alexandria and Rome dated back to before the Maccabean Revolt , the population in the Jewish diaspora expanded after the Pompey's campaign in 62 BCE. Under the Hasmonean princes, who were at first high priests and then kings, the Jewish state displayed even a certain luster and annexed several territories. Soon, however, discord within
10912-421: The head noun; and in genitive constructions, the possessee noun precedes the possessor. Moreover, Modern Hebrew allows and sometimes requires sentences with a predicate initial. Modern Hebrew has expanded its vocabulary effectively to meet the needs of casual vernacular, of science and technology, of journalism and belles-lettres . According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann : The number of attested Biblical Hebrew words
11036-429: The influence of different contact languages to which its speakers have been exposed during the revival period and over the past century. The word order of Modern Hebrew is predominately SVO ( subject–verb–object ). Biblical Hebrew was originally verb–subject–object (VSO), but drifted into SVO. In the modern language, a sentence may correctly be arranged in any order but its meaning might be hard to understand unless אֶת
11160-583: The lack of precise evidence of their numbers. According to the ancient Jewish historian Josephus, the next most dense Jewish population after the Land of Israel and Babylonia was in Syria , particularly in Antioch , and Damascus , where 10,000 to 18,000 Jews were massacred during the great insurrection. The ancient Jewish philosopher Philo gives the number of Jewish inhabitants in Egypt as one million, one-eighth of
11284-662: The language's common Semitic roots with Hebrew, but changed to fit Hebrew phonology and grammar, for example the words gerev (sing.) and garbayim (pl.) are now applied to 'socks', a diminutive of the Arabic ğuwārib ('socks'). In addition, early Jewish immigrants, borrowing from the local Arabs, and later immigrants from Arab lands introduced many nouns as loanwords from Arabic (such as nana , zaatar , mishmish , kusbara , ḥilba , lubiya , hummus , gezer , rayḥan , etc.), as well as much of Modern Hebrew's slang. Despite Ben-Yehuda's fame as
11408-464: The late (pre-Roman Empire) Roman Republic or early Empire and originated in voluntary emigration and the lure of trade and commerce." Many Jews migrated to Rome from Alexandria due to flourishing trade relations between the cities. Dating the numerous settlements is difficult. Some settlements may have resulted from Jewish emigration following the defeat of Jewish revolts. Others, such as the Jewish community in Rome, were far older, dating back to at least
11532-568: The late Roman period to the present. By 1764 there were about 750,000 Jews in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth . The worldwide Jewish population (comprising the Middle East and the rest of Europe) was estimated at 1.2 million. After the Persian conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, Judah ( יְהוּדָה Yehuda ) became a province of the Persian empire . This status continued into the following Hellenistic period , when Yehud became
11656-438: The late Roman period to the present. Diaspora has been a common phenomenon for many peoples since antiquity, but what is particular about the Jewish instance is the pronounced negative, religious, indeed metaphysical connotations traditionally attached to dispersion and exile ( galut ), two conditions which were conflated. The English term diaspora , which entered usage as late as 1876, and the Hebrew word galut though covering
11780-509: The local Palestinian dialect and from the dialects of Jewish immigrants from Arab countries ), Aramaic , Yiddish , Judaeo-Spanish , German , Polish , Russian , English and other languages. Simultaneously, Israeli Hebrew makes use of words that were originally loanwords from the languages of surrounding nations from ancient times: Canaanite languages as well as Akkadian. Mishnaic Hebrew borrowed many nouns from Aramaic (including Persian words borrowed by Aramaic), as well as from Greek and to
11904-416: The majority of nouns and adjectives are formed by the classically Semitic devices of triconsonantal roots ( shoresh ) with affixed patterns ( mishkal ). Mishnaic attributive patterns are often used to create nouns, and Classical patterns are often used to create adjectives. Blended words are created by merging two bound stems or parts of words. The syntax of Modern Hebrew is mainly Mishnaic but also shows
12028-445: The majority of the population was Jewish or Samaritan . The land gradually came to have an Arab majority as Arab tribes migrated there. Jewish communities initially grew and flourished. Umar allowed and encouraged Jews to settle in Jerusalem. It was the first time in about 500 years that Jews were allowed to freely enter and worship in their holiest city. In 717, new restrictions were imposed against non-Muslims that negatively affected
12152-416: The mid second century BCE, although it expanded greatly following Pompey’s campaign in 62 BCE. In 6 CE the Romans annexed Judaea. Only the Jews in Babylonia remained outside of Roman rule. Unlike the Greek speaking Hellenized Jews in the west the Jewish communities in Babylonian and Judea continued the use of Aramaic as a primary language. As early as the middle of the 2nd century BCE the Jewish author of
12276-492: The more prevalent. Jews migrated to new Greek settlements that arose in the Eastern Mediterranean and former subject areas of the Persian Empire on the heels of Alexander the Great 's conquests, spurred on by the opportunities they expected to find. The proportion of Jews in the diaspora in relation to the size of the nation as a whole increased steadily throughout the Hellenistic era and reached astonishing dimensions in
12400-408: The now widely used term "Israeli Hebrew" on the basis that it "represented the non-chronological nature of Hebrew". In 1999, Israeli linguist Ghil'ad Zuckermann proposed the term "Israeli" to represent the multiple origins of the language. The history of the Hebrew language can be divided into four major periods: Jewish contemporary sources describe Hebrew flourishing as a spoken language in
12524-455: The occurrences are found. The second, perhaps with a single exception that remains debatable, is never used to speak of the past and does not concern Babylon; the instrument of dispersion is never the historical sovereign of another country. Diaspora is the word for chastisement, but the dispersion in question has not occurred yet: it is potential, conditional on the Jews not respecting the law of God. . . It follows that diaspora belongs, not to
12648-506: The pagan reframing of Jerusalem may have been a strategic move designed to challenge, rather, the growing threat, pretensions and influence of converts to Christianity, for whom Jerusalem was likewise a crucial symbol of their faith. Implementation of these plans led to violent opposition, and triggered a full-scale insurrection with the Bar Kokhba revolt (132–136 CE), assisted, according to Dio Cassius , by some other peoples, perhaps Arabs who had recently been subjected by Trajan. The revolt
12772-553: The peoples of the former Philistine cities, the Moabites , Ammonites and Edomites . Attempts were also made to incorporate the Samaritans , following takeover of Samaria. The success of mass-conversions is however questionable, as most groups retained their tribal separations and mostly turned Hellenistic or Christian, with Edomites perhaps being the only exception to merge into the Jewish society under Herodian dynasty and in
12896-732: The population of Judea . After the exile , Hebrew became restricted to liturgical and literary use. Hebrew had been spoken at various times and for a number of purposes throughout the Diaspora, and during the Old Yishuv it had developed into a spoken lingua franca among the Jews of Palestine . Eliezer Ben-Yehuda then led a revival of the Hebrew language as a mother tongue in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Modern Hebrew used Biblical Hebrew morphemes , Mishnaic spelling and grammar, and Sephardic pronunciation. Many idioms and calques were made from Yiddish . Its acceptance by
13020-670: The population. Alexandria was by far the most important of the Egyptian Jewish communities. The Jews in the Egyptian diaspora were on a par with their Ptolemaic counterparts and close ties existed for them with Jerusalem. As in other Hellenistic diasporas, the Egyptian diaspora was one of choice not of imposition. To judge by the later accounts of wholesale massacres in 115 CE , the number of Jewish residents in Cyrenaica , Cyprus , and Mesopotamia must also have been large. At
13144-399: The preexilic emigrants in Egypt. . . Galut is a religious–nationalist term, which implies exile from the homeland as a result of collective sins, an exile that will be redeemed at YHWH’s pleasure. Jewish messianism is closely connected with the concept of galut.’ In Zionist debates a distinction was made between galut and golus/gola . The latter denoted social and political exile, whereas
13268-506: The prospect of an indefinite period of displacement. In 132 CE, Bar Kokhba led a rebellion against Hadrian , a revolt connected with the renaming of Jerusalem as Aelia Capitolina . After four years of devastating warfare, the uprising was suppressed, and Jews were forbidden access to Jerusalem. During the Middle Ages , due to increasing migration and resettlement, Jews divided into distinct regional groups that today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings:
13392-475: The renewer of Hebrew, the most productive renewer of Hebrew words was poet Haim Nahman Bialik . One of the phenomena seen with the revival of the Hebrew language is that old meanings of nouns were occasionally changed for altogether different meanings, such as bardelas ( ברדלס ), which in Mishnaic Hebrew meant ' hyena ', but in Modern Hebrew it now means ' cheetah '; or shezīph ( שְׁזִיף ) which
13516-543: The right bank of the Tiber as traders. In 37 BCE, the forces of the Jewish client king Herod the Great captured Jerusalem with Roman assistance, and there was likely an influx of Jewish slaves taken into the diaspora by Roman forces. In 53 BCE, a minor Jewish revolt was suppressed and the Romans subsequently sold Jewish war captives into slavery. Roman rule continued until the First Jewish-Roman War , or
13640-426: The royal family and the growing disaffection of the pious towards rulers who no longer evinced any appreciation of the real aspirations of their subjects made the Jewish nation easy prey for the ambitions of the now increasingly autocratic and imperial Romans, the successors of the Seleucids. In 63 BCE Pompey invaded Jerusalem, the Jewish people lost their political sovereignty and independence, and Gabinius subjected
13764-432: The scattering of all twelve tribes. In modern times, the contrasting meanings of diaspora/galut have given rise to controversy among Jews. Bowman states this in the following terms, (Diaspora) follows the Greek usage and is considered a positive phenomenon that continues the prophetic call of Israel to be a 'light unto the nations' and establish homes and families among the gentiles. The prophet Jeremiah issues this call to
13888-430: The siege. According to Josephus, about 97,000 Jewish captives from Judea were sold into slavery by the Romans during the revolt. Many other Jews fled from Judea to other areas around the Mediterranean. Josephus wrote that 30,000 Jews were deported from Judea to Carthage by the Romans. Exactly when Roman Anti-Judaism began is a question of scholarly debate, however historian Hayim Hillel Ben-Sasson has proposed that
14012-425: The speaker has pharyngeals . It has 5 to 10 vowels, depending on whether diphthongs and vowels are counted, varying with the speaker and the analysis. Modern Hebrew morphology (formation, structure, and interrelationship of words in a language) is essentially Biblical . Modern Hebrew showcases much of the inflectional morphology of the classical upon which it was based. In the formation of new words, all verbs and
14136-412: The tallest towers in Israel, and the tallest used for radar in the world. Modern Hebrew Modern Hebrew ( Hebrew : עִבְרִית חֲדָשָׁה [ʔivˈʁit χadaˈʃa] or [ʕivˈrit ħadaˈʃa] ), also called Israeli Hebrew or simply Hebrew , is the standard form of the Hebrew language spoken today. Developed as part of the revival of Hebrew in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it
14260-685: The third book of the Oracula Sibyllina addressed the "chosen people," saying: "Every land is full of thee and every sea." The most diverse witnesses, such as Strabo , Philo , Seneca , Luke (the author of the Acts of the Apostles ), Cicero , and Josephus , all mention Jewish populations in the cities of the Mediterranean basin . See also History of the Jews in India and History of
14384-602: The time, possibly outnumbering those in the Land of Israel. Palestine and Babylon were both great centers of Jewish scholarship during this time, but tensions between scholars in these two communities grew as many Jewish scholars in Palestine feared that the centrality of the land to the Jewish religion would be lost with continuing Jewish emigration. Many Palestinian sages refused to consider Babylonian scholars their equals and would not ordain Babylonian students in their academies, fearing they would return to Babylon as rabbis. Significant Jewish emigration to Babylon adversely affected
14508-548: The two branches comprise many unique ethno-cultural practices and have links to their local host populations (such as Central Europeans for the Ashkenazim and Hispanics and Arabs for the Sephardim), their shared religion and ancestry, as well as their continuous communication and population transfers, has been responsible for a unified sense of cultural and religious Jewish identity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim from
14632-432: The two branches comprise many unique ethno-cultural practices and have links to their local host populations (such as Central Europeans for the Ashkenazim and Hispanics and Arabs for the Sephardim), their shared religion and ancestry, as well as their continuous communication and population transfers, has been responsible for a unified sense of cultural and religious Jewish identity between Sephardim and Ashkenazim from
14756-492: Was crushed, with the Jewish population of Judea devastated. Jewish war captives were again captured and sold into slavery by the Romans. According to Jewish tradition, the Romans deported twelve boatloads of Jews to Cyrenaica . Voluntary Jewish emigration from Judea in the aftermath of the Bar-Kokhba revolt also expanded Jewish communities in the diaspora. Jews were forbidden entrance to Jerusalem on pain of death, except for
14880-471: Was large-scale migration from Palestine, and the population declined. The Jewish population shrunk especially heavily, as did the Christian population. Though some Jewish immigration from Europe, North Africa, and Syria also occurred in this period, which potentially saved the collapsing Jewish community of Palestine from disappearing altogether, Jews were reduced to an even smaller minority of the population. The result of these waves of emigration and expulsion
15004-512: Was obscure and devoid of political influence. The poorest but most fervent of the exiles returned to Judah / the Land of Israel during the reign of the Achaemenids (c. 550–330 BCE). There, with the reconstructed Temple in Jerusalem as their center, they organized themselves into a community, animated by a remarkable religious ardor and a tenacious attachment to the Torah as the focus of their identity. As this little nucleus increased in numbers with
15128-466: Was spoken since antiquity and the vernacular of the Jewish people until the 3rd century BCE, when it was supplanted by Western Aramaic , a dialect of the Aramaic language , the local or dominant languages of the regions Jews migrated to, and later Judeo-Arabic , Judaeo-Spanish , Yiddish , and other Jewish languages . Although Hebrew continued to be used for Jewish liturgy , poetry and literature , and written correspondence, it became extinct as
15252-653: Was that the Jewish population of Palestine was reduced to a few thousand by the time the Ottoman Empire conquered Palestine, after which the region entered a period of relative stability. At the start of Ottoman rule in 1517, the estimated Jewish population was 5,000, composed of both descendants of Jews who had never left the land and migrants from the diaspora. During the Middle Ages , due to increasing geographical dispersion and re-settlement, Jews divided into distinct regional groups which today are generally addressed according to two primary geographical groupings:
15376-498: Was the Babylonian captivity , in which portions of the population of the Kingdom of Judah were deported in 597 BCE and again in 586 BCE by the Neo-Babylonian Empire under the rule of Nebuchadnezzar II . A Jewish diaspora existed for several centuries before the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE. The Jewish diaspora in the second Temple period (516 BCE – 70 CE) was created from various factors, including through
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