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Updated: June 1, 2025
A Jew who has worked for the re-building of our land for over fifty consecutive years in which period he visited the lands of the Diaspora fifteen times and all that he did and profited there was afterwards invested in the re-building of Eretz-Israel such a Jew has indeed merited to be praised even during his life-time.
His fame as the greatest Jew of his time great as a Talmudical authority, which appealed to all classes of Jewish students, great as a physician with the added glory of being a favorite at court, great as the head of the Jewish community in the East, and finally great as a philosopher and scientist all these qualifications, never before or after united in the same way in any other man, served to make him the cynosure of all eyes and to make his word an object of notice and attention throughout the Jewish diaspora.
We know that the Jews of the Diaspora at this period were filled with a proselytising zeal of which the fact is more certain than the details. It is also tolerably plain from Philo that there was a strong tendency to Hellenise and go further than orthodox Jews were willing to tolerate.
The Elephantine papyri have shown that the early Jews of the Diaspora, though untrammeled by the orthodoxy of Jerusalem, maintained the purity of their local cult in the face of considerable difficulties. Hence the gravestones of their Aramaean contemporaries, which have been found in Egypt, can only be cited to illustrate the temptations to which they were exposed.
In that sense, at least, they had made good progress. They showed to the world a spirit of brotherly union; they were on good terms with other Churches; they made their schools and their Diaspora centres homes of Christian influence; and, above all, like a diamond set in gold, there flashed still with its ancient lustre the missionary spirit of the fathers.
At present the Brethren have Diaspora centres in Austrian Silesia, in Wartebruch, in Neumark, in Moravia, in Pomerania, in the Bavarian Palatinate, in Würtemburg, along the Rhine from Karlsruhe to Düsseldorf, in Switzerland, in Norway and Sweden, in Russian Poland, and in the Baltic Provinces.
Leon Pinsker, a prominent communal worker in Odessa, who had at one time looked to assimilation as promising a solution of the Jewish problem. To him the Jewish people in the Diaspora is not a living nation, but rather the ghost of a nation, haunting the globe and scaring all living national organisms.
It is called "sacred" history, and he who acquires a knowledge of it is thought to advance the salvation of his soul. Only a very few, however, recognize the profound, moral content of the second half of Jewish history, the history of the diaspora.
Philo wrote a full account of the events in which he himself had been called upon to play a part. He is always at pains to point the moral and enforce the lesson, but his work has a definite historical value, and contains many valuable details about Jewish life in the Diaspora.
Though the synagogue was the main seat of religious life in the Diaspora, there was still a desire for the sacrificial worship, and for a long time the rabbis looked with favor upon the establishment of Onias. But when the tendency to found a new ritual there showed itself, they denied its holiness.
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