Crash Course In Jewish History - Rabbi Ken Spiro

"Thus, even while they [the Jewish people] are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject or obliterate them, lest I break my covenant with them by destroying them. For I am the Lord their God; I will remember them because of the covenant I made with their original ancestors whom I brought out from the land of Egypt, in the sight of the nations, so that I might be their God."(Leviticus 26:44) In all of human history, exiles of an entire people out of their country have been very rare. It's a highly unusual phenomenon to take a whole people and throw them out of their country. Multiple exiles are unheard of, since, after the first one, the people generally disappear -- they simply become assimilated among other peoples. As a matter of fact, in human history, multiple exiles and dispersions are unique only to the Jewish people.

And yet the Jews survive despite exile, because God has promised that they will be an "eternal nation."

LIFE IN EXILE The Babylonian attitude toward the Jews is "live and let live." And life in Babylonian turns out not to be too awful.

They even appoint a community leader who is the representative to the Babylonian authorities for the Jewish community, beginning with the exiled King of Judah, Jehoiachin (2 Kings 25:27). He is given the title of Resh Galusa in Aramaic.

(Aramaic was the international language of the ancient Near East. It is a Semitic language, and it is closely related to Hebrew. It is the language in which most of the Talmud is written. The Jews of Babylon speak Aramaic and even when they return to the land of Israel, they continue to speak Aramaic.)

This word Resh Galusa means in Hebrew Rosh Galut, and in English, "Head of the Diaspora is a Diaspora." (Diaspora, incidentally, is a Greek word, meaning "dispersion.") The Resh Greek word, Galusa is a person who is a direct descendant of the House of King David. Even meaning though he's not a king in the land of Israel, he's recognized as not only being the "dispersion." representative of the Jewish community in Babylon but also having noble status. As we shall see, over the next 1,500 years, approximately 40 people will hold that title.

They will all trace their ancestry back to King David. This is a noble line that's always preserved in Jewish history.

The oldest Diaspora community in the world is the Babylonian community. There's no question that Jews have lived in Babylon way before the Iraqis. And when the Jews came back to the land of Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were many so-called "Bavli" Jews coming in from Iraq who could trace their ancestry all the way back to this time of the Babylonian exile.

Why they stayed there so long is because the Babylonians and later the Persians and the Ottomans made life in that part of the world relatively easy. (For example, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, Sultan Bajazet welcomed them with open arms.)

This is not to say, however, that all was peaches and cream. The Book of Daniel tells the story of Jewish young men who refuse to eat non-kosher food or to bow to idols, and who are thrown into a fiery furnace by