The relationship between Israel and world Diaspora Jews, especially American Jewry, has been deteriorating these past few years. So what else is new?

This is a process that has been going on for the past 2,500 years, ever since the Babylonian exile during the destruction of the First Temple. The Jews who returned a few decades later when Cyrus permitted it represented a minority (mostly lower class) of the overall Jewish population in the Babylonian empire, as many middle and upper class Jews chose to remain behind – mostly for economic reasons. Sound familiar?

The eventual result (admittedly several centuries later, but back then things moved far more slowly than in our modern times): two huge Jewish law books – the Babylonian and the Jerusalem Talmuds. It then took almost a millennium for the former to gain complete primacy.

That wasn’t the only split between them. Whereas the Torah reading cycle among Babylonia’s Jewish community was annual, in the Holy Land it was tri-annual – again until near the end of the first millennium CE, when the Jewish community residing in the Holy Land ended up as a pale shadow of its former great self.

However, far less known is the huge gap that opened between the “Eastern” Jews (Babylon, Iran, Egypt) and “Western” Jewry (Greece, Rome, Spain) during that 1000-year period. In a nutshell, the former spoke Aramaic and also were Hebrew literate; the latter knew only Latin. Thus, those West Jews had no idea about the Talmud and Judaism’s evolving Oral Law tradition – leading to a total disconnect between these two main Jewish communities. (The great........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)