Exiles, Expulsions, and Migrations

Jewish history is, perhaps more than any other, traversed by movement: forced displacements, flights, wanderings, and recompositions. The very word galout — exile — has never designated a mere geographical dispersion, but an existential and theological condition, a distance from the land and the Temple that structures collective Memory as much as lived experience. At the crossroads of Memory and History, the present work follows the thread of these displacements, from the fall of Jerusalem to the massive departures from the Arab world in the twentieth century.

It is worth tempering from the outset a persistent representation. The Jewish diaspora was not born in a single instant or from a single event: as early as the Hellenistic period, flourishing communities existed in Egypt, in Babylonia, in Asia Minor, and throughout the Mediterranean world, long before Rome destroyed the Second Temple. Exile is therefore at once a documented historical reality and a founding narrative, a category of thought that informs liturgy, law, and the imagination. It is this tension — between the archive and tradition, between the hardship endured and the creativity of new beginnings — that this book endeavors to illuminate.

A methodological question runs throughout the work: how to articulate what tradition transmits and what the archive establishes? Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi showed that Judaism commands remembrance — Zakhor — without always commanding that history be written in the modern sense; collective Memory and critical historiography proceed according to distinct, sometimes competing logics. It is in this fertile gap that the intelligence of exile resides: the liturgical remembrance of galout is not a chronicle of expulsions, but it orients the reading of them, conferring meaning and duration. Thus this book strives, section by section, to honestly name its register — Memory, History, or Intersection — without ever conflating them.

In the year 70 of the common era, at the conclusion of the Great Jewish Revolt against Rome, the legions of Titus took Jerusalem and burned the Second Temple. The destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 marked the beginning of the Jewish Diaspora [Britannica, Temple of Jerusalem]. This event, which occurred during the first Jewish-Roman war, put an end to centralized sacrificial worship and provoked a profound reorientation of religious life.

Traditional historiography has often presented the year 70 as the singular moment of a total exile. Modern scholarship calls for greater caution: the Jewish dispersion was already ancient, and the rupture of 70, followed by the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135, accelerated an already ongoing process rather than inaugurating it. Nevertheless, the collapse of the sanctuary had decisive structural consequences. The aftermath of the destruction saw the rise of rabbinic Judaism and a shift toward prayer and the study of Torah [Scripture Analysis].

It is here that Memory and History answer each other with particular clarity. The 9th of Av — Tisha BeAv — became the preeminent day of mourning in the Jewish calendar. Tisha BeAv is a day of mourning, commemorating the destruction of both Temples [Scripture Analysis]. This date condenses a series of catastrophes into a single memorial focus, and its selection by later authorities to signify other expulsions is never arbitrary. The loss of the Temple ceased to be a mere political fact and became the very paradigm of exile, reconfigured as messianic expectation and fidelity to the Law.

Medieval Jewish thought elaborated a genuine theology of this condition. Galout is not merely geographical: it is a rupture of the bond, an expectation, and at times an exile of speech itself, as André Neher emphasized in his meditation on biblical silence. Yitzhak Baer showed how profoundly the imaginary of exile organized collective consciousness, transforming imposed displacement into a spiritual and messianic horizon. Thus the destroyed sanctuary did not disappear: it was transmuted into book, study, and prayer, the material Temple giving way to an inner and portable Temple carried along the roads of dispersion.

Before Rome entered the scene, exile had already shaped Jewish experience. The Babylonian deportation, in the sixth century before the common era, established the very archetype of forced departure and the nostalgic song of Zion. Yet it also inaugurated a paradoxical lesson: far from dissolving identity, the exile of Babylon gave rise to one of Judaism's most powerful spiritual creations. It was on the banks of the Euphrates that, over the course of centuries, the great center of learning took shape from which the Babylonian Talmud would emerge — a monument of rabbinic law and thought.

Hellenistic Egypt offered another face of the diaspora. In Alexandria, a numerous and learned community produced the Greek translation of the Bible, the Septuagint, and gave in Philo a thinker who knew how to bring together Torah and Greek philosophy. This Mediterranean diaspora, predating 70 CE, demonstrates that dispersion was not only endured but constituted a structural fact of the ancient Jewish world, possessed of its own languages, institutions, and translations. The plurality of centers — Judean, Babylonian, Alexandrian — therefore precedes the notion of a single catastrophic exile.

This anteriority illuminates all that follows. When the medieval and then modern expulsions would strike, they would find a people already versed in the art of beginning again, heirs to a long Memory of Babylon in which the loss of a land had not meant the loss of a world. The ancient diaspora thus furnished the grammar of the exiles to come: nostalgia for Zion, fidelity to the Law, and the invention of new centers.

The late Christian Middle Ages inaugurated a cycle of royal expulsions, of which England offered the first permanent example. The Edict of Expulsion was a royal decree banishing all Jews from the kingdom of England, promulgated by Edward I on 18 July 1290; it was the first time a European state had durably banned their presence [Edict of Expulsion, Wikipedia]. The choice of date was far from incidental: it was in all likelihood chosen because it coincided with a Jewish holy day, Tisha BeAv, which commemorates the destruction of Jerusalem [Edict of Expulsion, Wikipedia]. The symbolism of ancient exile was thus reactivated by power itself.

The administrative measures were swift. On the very day the edict was proclaimed, writs were sent to the sheriffs informing them that all Jews had until 1 November to leave the kingdom; any Jew remaining after that date was liable to be seized and executed [The National Archives]. Within a matter of months, an ancient and once-prosperous community had been erased from English soil.

Royal France followed a comparable pattern, punctuated by returns and further expulsions according to the Crown's financial needs. In 1306, King Philippe IV expelled the Jews in order to seize their assets and cancel debts owed to them; the Jews were permitted to return in 1315, then expelled once more in 1321 by Charles IV [Rick Steves Travel Forum]. The fiscal motive mingled with religious and popular accusation. The final expulsion came at the end of the century: on 17 September 1394, King Charles VI of France ordered the expulsion of all Jews from the kingdom [The Jerusalem Post]. Prior to this, these communities had endured the burning of sacred religious texts, discriminatory taxation, and had been accused of responsibility for the Black Death that had devastated Europe in the mid-fourteenth century [The Jerusalem Post].

The burning of books warrants particular attention here: the condemnation of the Talmud in Paris in 1242, ordered following the disputation of 1240, saw dozens of cartloads of manuscripts consigned to the flames, striking Judaism not only in its bodies but in its very text. The exile of men was accompanied by an exile of letters, as though the aim were to tear from the people their written Memory along with their land.

These decrees trace a geography of wandering: those expelled from England and France made their way to the Empire, to Italy, to the Iberian Peninsula while it remained welcoming, redistributing the centres of European Judaism eastward and southward.

The expulsion from Spain constitutes, in Sephardic memory, the great foundational catastrophe. The Alhambra Decree, also known as the Edict of Expulsion, was promulgated on March 31, 1492, by the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, ordering the expulsion of non-converted Jews from the crowns of Castile and Aragon and their territories and possessions no later than July 31 of that same year [Alhambra Decree, Wikipedia].

The edict was the culmination of a long process of suspicion and coercion. The authorities suspected certain conversos of continuing to practice Judaism in secret; concerns related to this "judaising" contributed to motivating the creation of the Spanish Inquisition in 1478, which investigated cases of heresy and, in certain cases, resorted to torture and imposed penalties that could extend to the execution of the impenitent [Expulsion of Jews from Spain, Wikipedia]. To these suspicions were added the statutes of limpieza de sangre, the "purity of blood," which gradually racialized what had initially been a religious exclusion.

The choice was relentless: the Jews of Spain were compelled to renounce their faith or leave their millennial homeland within the space of a few months [mjhnyc.org]. This exodus dispersed the Sephardim across the Maghreb, Italy, later the United Provinces, and above all the Ottoman Empire. It gave birth to a diaspora within the diaspora, bearing its own language, Judeo-Spanish, and an acute sense of belonging to a lost Sefarad.

Neighboring Portugal offers an instructive counterpoint. Welcomed in 1492, the exiles were overtaken there as early as 1497 by a forced conversion which, rather than an expulsion, created the vast population of "new Christians," a breeding ground for Marranos, a portion of whom would later return, via Amsterdam or Bordeaux, to the full practice of Judaism. The Iberian Peninsula thus produced two figures of exile: the irreversible departure and the interior concealment, the wandering of bodies and the wandering of consciences [zakhor-online.com, Des temps de l'histoire juive au Portugal].

After 1492, the roads of exile became routes of reconstruction. The Ottoman Empire welcomed the Iberian expellees in great numbers, who revitalized cities such as Salonique, Constantinople, Izmir, and Safed. Tradition holds that Sultan Bayezid II congratulated himself on an edict that impoverished Spain to the benefit of his own domains: he is credited with the remark that the king of Spain had impoverished his country in order to enrich his own [historyofinformation.com, Sultan Bayezid II Welcomes Jewish Refugees]. It is established that Bayezid II ordered that Séfarade refugees be welcomed favorably into his territories, and that these cities became major centers of Hebrew printing, rabbinical law, and mysticism [historyofinformation.com, Sultan Bayezid II Welcomes Jewish Refugees]. Salonique, in particular, was lastingly shaped by a preponderant Séfarade presence.

Safed, in Ottoman Galilee, became in the sixteenth century the radiant hearth of Lurianic Kabbalah: it was there that cosmic exile was conceived as an originary rupture and that the galout found its metaphysics. The historical experience of expulsion thus nourished a mysticism in which the repair of the world — tikkoun — answers the shattering of the vessels and the scattering of the sparks.

The Ashkenaze world knew a parallel but distinct dynamic. Driven out of the Imperial territories and the kingdom of France, harassed by massacres linked to the Crusades and then to accusations of plague, many Rhenish and Germanic communities migrated eastward, into Poland and Lithuania, where princely charters of protection offered a relatively stable legal framework. It is likely that these gradual displacements contributed, over several centuries, to forming the great demographic center of Eastern European Judaism and to shaping the Yiddish language as the vehicle of an autonomous culture.

These two great movements — one Mediterranean and Ottoman, the other continental and eastern — show that exile was never solely loss. It was also the transfer of knowledge, the circulation of books and jurists, the weaving of family and commercial networks on the scale of a world. The diaspora reveals itself here as a principle of recomposition as much as of dispersion, each expulsion giving rise to new centers.

Between the shores of the Mediterranean, the Maghreb served at once as a refuge for those expelled from Iberia and as the seat of very ancient communities, some predating Islam itself. In Tlemcen, Fès, Oran, and Tunis, the arrival of the Séfarades after 1391 and 1492 superimposed upon the indigenous families — the Toshavim — a new elite, the Megorashim, whose liturgical and juridical customs would lastingly reshape communal life. Tlemcen, a crossroads of caravan routes, thus knew nearly a thousand years of Jewish presence woven from prosperity and hardship alike.

The modern and contemporary era witnessed there another movement, slower and more insidious: the transformation of Jewish societies under the effects of colonization and Westernization. In Tunisia, the community of Sousse passed, within a single century, from a traditional Orientality to French acculturation, illustrating how the migration of cultural models sometimes precedes the migration of persons. The décret Crémieux of 1870, which granted French citizenship to the Jews of Algeria, accelerated this shift and set these communities upon a singular trajectory, suspended between Orient and Occident.

This Maghrebi History matters for understanding the departures of the twentieth century: it was not frozen communities that left, but societies already shaped by a century of transformation, torn between fidelity to the Orient and the pull of Europe. The end of the Judeo-Maghrebi world was therefore the culmination of a long process as much as it was a brutal rupture.

The 20th century witnessed, over the course of a few decades, the closing of a multi-millennial Jewish presence in the lands of Islam. Communities established since Antiquity — in Iraq, Yemen, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Syria — experienced a massive departure in the aftermath of the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, under the combined effect of political tensions, discriminatory measures, local violence, and Zionist aspirations. According to estimates commonly advanced by historians, several hundred thousand Jews left the Arab world during the third quarter of the century.

The archive allows us to trace its key milestones. In Yemen, the operation known as "Magic Carpet" — On Wings of Eagles — transferred to Israel, between 1949 and 1950, the bulk of one of the oldest communities in the world: some fifty thousand people airlifted by an unprecedented aerial bridge. In Iraq, Operation Ezra and Nehemiah organized, in 1951 and 1952, the emigration of virtually the entire multi-millennial Babylonian community to Israel [Operation Ezra and Nehemiah, Wikipedia]. These transfers followed significant acts of violence, such as the Farhoud, the pogrom that struck the Jews of Baghdad in June 1941 and hastened the collapse of trust.

This phenomenon articulates, here again, Memory and History. Family accounts preserve traces of abandoned property, lost citizenships, and deserted synagogues; the archive documents the laws, confiscations, and organized emigration operations. It must nonetheless be emphasized that the pace and causes varied considerably from one country to another, and that a uniform reading would betray the complexity of local situations.

These departures shifted the center of gravity of Eastern and Sephardic Judaism toward Israel, France, and the Americas. They closed a long chapter of coexistence and inaugurated new reconfigurations of identity, in which the memory of the lost East — Mizrah — was transmitted in exile as once that of Sefarad and Jerusalem had been.

Beyond dates and decrees, exile perpetuates itself in the very forms of Jewish life. The liturgy bears its constant trace: prayers turned toward Jerusalem, the fast of Tisha BeAv, the Passover formula "next year in Jerusalem" that transforms waiting into a daily rite. The memory of the galout is not knowledge but practice, internalized and repeated, through which the past replays itself in the present.

The languages of exile bear witness to the same alchemy. The Judeo-Spanish of the Séfarades, the Yiddish of the Ashkénazes, the Judeo-Arabic of the Eastern communities each preserved the memory of a lost world while enriching it with the contributions of their host lands. These idioms were the portable arks in which dispersion became culture: vehicles for poems, tales, chronicles, and law, they proved that exile could give birth to entire literatures.

Finally, transmission itself became the locus of identity. Where other peoples anchored their continuity in a soil, Judaism anchored it in a text and in the gesture of commenting upon it from generation to generation. Yerushalmi named this tension between the injunction of Memory and critical History the very heart of Jewish modernity: to remember, yes, but also to confront the archive, sometimes at the cost of a new inner exile — that of the historian in relation to his own tradition. It is this exile — paradoxical and fertile — that the present work has sought to honor.

From the fall of the Temple to the exoduses of the twentieth century, one same pattern unfolds in ceaselessly renewed forms: the compulsion of departure and the invention of new beginnings. The medieval expulsions from England, France, and Spain, far from being isolated accidents, trace a recurring logic in which the greed of those in power, religious suspicion, and the designation of a scapegoat are intertwined. The repeated choice of Tisha BeAv as the date of expulsion testifies to the persistence of an imaginary of exile that the persecutors themselves mobilized.

Yet the history of Jewish exiles cannot be reduced to a succession of catastrophes. Each dispersion gave rise to new centers — Babylon and Alexandria in Antiquity, Salonique, Safed, and Constantinople after 1492, Poland for the Ashkenazim, Israel and the West for the Jews of the Arab world. Galout was thus as much a condition endured as a matrix of cultural, linguistic, and spiritual creation. At the intersection of Memory and History, the diaspora reveals itself as perpetual movement and obstinate recomposition, in which the loss of a land was ceaselessly transmuted into inherited fidelity and refounded worlds.