In an essay in the Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora, Edrel Arie explains the dramatic effects of the fall of the second temple on Jews outside Judea.
“Diaspora communities naturally vacillate between the desire to preserve all three: their unique identity, their connection to their cultural center, and their desire to integrate into the broader cultural context in which they live. . . . The destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, by its very nature, upset the balance between these three aspirations, as the physical connection to the center became an unclear, and even irrelevant, concept. A strong center controls a defi ned network of communication, and the loss of the center has far-reaching implications for communication systems. Th e Temple constituted a clear and unequivocal center for the entire Jewish world . . . . Its status derived from both its imposing physical symbolism and its recognized functions, as well as from a long supportive tradition. When the Temple disappeared in 70 CE, an alternative center was established in the Land of Israel, a center that in due course created much of the so-called rabbinic literature. However, this center was inaccessible to the Greek Jewish Diaspora (except for those—like the apostle Paul—who made the eff ort to leave their Greek-speaking abode and come and learn in the Land of Israel)” (9-10).
Even when the “center” was able to communicate with the periphery, the messages changed. The temple had been “basically a place of ritual” but those outside the land, lacking access to the temple, were unable to keep the fullness of Torah. This didn’t, as one might guess, draw Diaspora and Palestinian into closer connection but rather drove them apart:
“This gap [between Judea and Diaspora] should have narrowed after the destruction of the Temple, but in reality the opposite occurred—many normative areas that had previously been identical became different. Th us, for example, laws relating to the holidays and prayer were transformed after the destruction because of the circumstances of the period. Due to an extensive leadership of the rabbis in the Land, Judaism after the destruction became a religion of a text, probably orally preserved by the communities. Hence, new prayers were developed, and the entire structure of the synagogue was reorganized. These innovations could not reach the Hellenistic Greek-speaking Diaspora. Another important example is the Jewish festivals, which before the destruction were constructed around the temple worship. After the destruction, the rabbis transformed the customs to new ones in the synagogue. The family customs that were text based, such as the Passover Haggadah, could therefore not reach the Hellenistic Jewry. It is specifically this area of the normative system, which was adopted in the eastern Diaspora, as in the Land of Israel, that could not reach the western Jewish Diaspora because of the communication and language barrier. After the destruction, when the leaders of the Jewish community in the Land of Israel were struggling for their future survival, the normative gap between the community in the Land of Israel and the community in the western Greek-speaking Diaspora developed into an almost ideological gap, just because the Jews in the west remained strictly biblical in their Halachic behavior” (12).
The fall of the temple, in short, transformed Judaism - not only in the immediate vicinity of the temple, but it reverberated to the margins of the Diaspora.
