[Prompt]
custom: One of the most debated issues in modern Jewish identity is that of the relationship between the Jew | Hosts: corn, herman

[Response]
Corn: Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about the Jewish diaspora, starting from the Roman expulsion, where it went next, whether parallel communities formed simultaneously, and specifically about the Syrian Jewish community's two waves. He also wants to know how the ratio between diaspora Jews and Jews in Israel has shifted over time, and what the peak worldwide Jewish population actually was. There's a lot to unpack here, but the hook that grabbed me is this: in 1900, about five percent of the world's Jews lived in the land of Israel. Today it's closer to forty-six percent. That's a complete inversion in just over a century.

Herman: The thing most people don't realize is that the global Jewish population still hasn't recovered to its pre-Holocaust peak. We hit sixteen-point-six million in 1939, on the eve of World War Two. Today we're at about fifteen-point-eight million. So we're still roughly eight hundred thousand short of where we were nearly ninety years ago. That's a demographic scar that hasn't healed.

Corn: Which makes the ratio shift even more striking — the total pie is smaller, but Israel's slice has gone from a sliver to nearly half. That's not just migration, that's fundamentally different birth rates and assimilation patterns.

Herman: So let's start with what people usually mean by the beginning of the diaspora. Most histories peg it to the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in seventy CE, and especially the Bar Kokhba revolt that ended in one thirty-five CE. After Bar Kokhba, the Romans really did try to break the Jewish connection to Jerusalem — they renamed Judea to Syria Palaestina, they expelled Jews from the Jerusalem area, and they turned the city into a Roman colony called Aelia Capitolina.

Corn: Here's the thing — and I know you'll want to jump in on this — that's not actually when the diaspora started.

Herman: It's not. Jewish communities existed outside the land of Israel for centuries before the Romans showed up. The Elephantine papyri, discovered on an island in the Nile, document a Jewish military colony in Egypt in the fifth century BCE — these were Judean soldiers serving the Persian Empire, with their own temple, their own religious practices, their own legal documents. That's half a millennium before the Roman destruction.

Corn: When we say the Roman expulsion was the beginning of organized Jewish life outside Israel, we're really talking about the beginning of the diaspora as the dominant mode of Jewish existence — the point after which the demographic and intellectual center of gravity shifted away from the land itself.

Herman: Before seventy CE, the Temple in Jerusalem was the center. After seventy CE, the center became wherever Jews were. And the immediate destinations after the Roman destruction tell you a lot about the existing networks. Jews fled to Babylon, which is modern Iraq. They went to Syria, specifically Aleppo and Damascus. They went to Alexandria in Egypt. They went to Asia Minor, what's now Turkey. And they went to Rome itself.

Corn: Babylon became the heavyweight, didn't it?

Herman: Babylon was the big one. And this is important — Babylon wasn't a new community. Jews had been there since the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE. But after seventy CE and especially after one thirty-five, it became the demographic and intellectual center of the Jewish world. This is where the Babylonian Talmud was compiled, roughly between two hundred and five hundred CE. It's the more comprehensive of the two Talmuds, and it became the foundational text of rabbinic Judaism. The academies at Sura and Pumbedita in Babylon were the Harvard and Yale of the Jewish world for centuries.

Corn: Meanwhile, what was happening back in the land of Israel? Because I think there's a misconception that after Bar Kokhba, the place was basically emptied of Jews.

Herman: That's the second big misconception. Jews never fully left. After one thirty-five, the Jewish population shifted north to the Galilee. Tiberias, Sepphoris, and later Safed became major centers. The Jerusalem Talmud was compiled in Tiberias around four hundred CE. The Aleppo Codex — which we'll get to — was written in Tiberias in the tenth century. So there was continuous Jewish life, continuous scholarship, continuous community. But the numbers were small. By the Crusader period, around ten ninety-nine, the entire Jewish population of the land was probably under five thousand.

Corn: That's a village.

Herman: It's a village spread across a whole region. And that's what makes the Syrian Jewish community so interesting as a case study, because it illustrates this whole pattern in miniature.

Corn: Let's dig into that. The prompt specifically asked about the Syrian community and its two waves.

Herman: The first wave arrived directly from Judea in the first and second centuries CE. These were Jews fleeing the Roman destruction, settling in Aleppo and Damascus. They became known as the Mustarabim — or Musta'rab — which basically means those who became like Arabs. They spoke Arabic, they adopted local customs, but they maintained their Jewish identity and practice. And they were there continuously for over a thousand years before the second wave showed up.

Corn: The second wave was fourteen ninety-two.

Herman: The Spanish Expulsion. In fourteen ninety-two, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews from Spain. The same year, by the way, they sent Columbus on his way — there's a whole historical irony there. But the expelled Spanish Jews, the Sephardim, scattered across the Mediterranean. A significant number went to the Ottoman Empire, which welcomed them — Sultan Bayezid the Second reportedly said that Ferdinand was impoverishing his own kingdom to enrich the Ottoman one.


Herman: The Ottoman Empire at that point included Syria. So Sephardic Jews arrived in Aleppo and Damascus in large numbers, and over time they became the dominant cultural influence. The Mustarabim didn't disappear, but they were gradually absorbed into the Sephardic tradition — Sephardic liturgy, Sephardic customs, Sephardic Hebrew pronunciation. That's why today, Syrian Jews are generally considered Sephardic, even though their community predates the Sephardic arrival by over a millennium.

Corn: That's the layering effect. And the Aleppo Codex is the physical artifact that ties this whole story together.

Herman: The Aleppo Codex is one of the most important manuscripts in Jewish history. It's a complete Hebrew Bible, written in Tiberias around nine thirty CE by the scribe Shlomo ben Buya'a, with the vocalization and cantillation marks added by Aaron ben Asher — he was the last and greatest of the Tiberian Masoretes, the scholars who standardized the biblical text. The codex was moved to Jerusalem, then to Egypt, and then in the fourteenth century it was brought to Aleppo — hence the name. The community there guarded it for six hundred years.

Corn: Then in nineteen forty-seven, after the UN partition vote, the synagogue where it was kept was burned during anti-Jewish riots.

Herman: The codex was hidden. By the time it resurfaced and was smuggled to Israel in nineteen fifty-eight, roughly two hundred of its original four hundred eighty-seven pages were missing. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has what remains. It's a story of continuity and loss, which is basically the Jewish diaspora in a single object.

Corn: A book that traveled through every major center of Jewish life over a thousand years. Written in Tiberias, kept in Jerusalem, moved to Cairo, ended up in Aleppo, and now back in Jerusalem. It's the diaspora's itinerary.

Herman: While we're on Syria, let me mention another thing that doesn't get enough attention. The Cairo Geniza documents. A geniza is a storage area in a synagogue where worn-out texts containing God's name are placed — you can't just throw them away. The Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo, had a geniza that accumulated documents for nearly a thousand years, from the ninth to the nineteenth century. In the eighteen nineties, a Cambridge scholar named Solomon Schechter got access to it and brought over a hundred ninety thousand fragments back to Cambridge.

Corn: A hundred ninety thousand fragments. That's not a geniza, that's an archive.

Herman: It's the single richest source we have for medieval Jewish life. Personal letters, business contracts, marriage documents, court records, shopping lists, children's homework. You can reconstruct what a Jewish merchant in eleventh-century Cairo ate for breakfast. And it shows you that the Jewish world of that period wasn't a single center — it was a network. Letters went from Cairo to Aleppo, to Baghdad, to Kairouan in Tunisia, to Cordoba in Spain, to Constantinople. It was a connected, cosmopolitan civilization spread across the Islamic world and beyond.

Corn: Which brings us to the shifting center of gravity. We've talked about Babylon as the early center. But that didn't last forever.

Herman: From roughly five hundred to a thousand CE, Babylon was dominant — the academies, the Talmud, the intellectual authority. But by the end of that period, the center was shifting west. The Islamic conquests had created a vast, relatively unified empire from Spain to Central Asia. Jews could move and trade across it. And by around nine hundred to twelve hundred CE, the center was firmly in Spain.

Corn: The so-called Golden Age.

Herman: The Golden Age of Spanish Jewry. This is the period of figures like Judah Halevi, the poet and philosopher who wrote the Kuzari, and Maimonides, who was born in Cordoba in eleven thirty-eight. Maimonides is probably the single most important Jewish thinker since the Talmudic sages — his Mishneh Torah and Guide for the Perplexed are still studied intensively. He ended up in Egypt, by the way, after the Almohad persecution in Spain. Another forced migration.

Corn: Then fourteen ninety-two again. The expulsion that ended the Golden Age and scattered Sephardic Jews across the Mediterranean.

Herman: Which is when the center splits. After fourteen ninety-two, you have two major poles. One is the Ottoman Empire — Salonika, Istanbul, and also Safed in the Galilee, which became a major center of Jewish mysticism in the sixteenth century. That's where Isaac Luria, the great kabbalist, developed his system. The other pole is Eastern Europe.

Corn: How did Eastern Europe become the demographic heartland? Because that's where the numbers really explode.

Herman: It starts with invitations. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Polish kings — particularly Casimir the Great in the fourteenth century — actively invited Jews to settle in Poland. The kingdom was underpopulated and underdeveloped, and Jews brought commercial skills, literacy, and international connections. Casimir granted them extensive legal protections. So Jews moved east, into Poland and later Lithuania, which formed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — at one point the largest state in Europe.

Corn: By nineteen hundred?

Herman: By nineteen hundred, about seventy-five percent of the world's ten-point-six million Jews lived in the Russian Empire and Austria-Hungary. The Pale of Settlement, which was the area of western Russia where Jews were legally permitted to live, contained the largest concentration of Jews in the world. Warsaw, Lodz, Odessa, Vilnius — these were the great Jewish cities of the era. Vilnius was called the Jerusalem of Lithuania.

Corn: In a span of about four hundred years, the center went from Spain to Eastern Europe. And the numbers in the land of Israel were still tiny.

Herman: In nineteen hundred, Ottoman Palestine had about fifty thousand Jews total. That's roughly half a percent — actually closer to five percent of world Jewry, depending on the estimate. The Jewish population of the entire land of Israel was about the same as the Jewish population of a mid-sized Eastern European city. Jerusalem had a Jewish majority by the mid-nineteenth century, but the overall numbers were small.

Corn: Then the twentieth century happens.

Herman: The twentieth century is the most dramatic demographic upheaval in Jewish history since the Roman period. In nineteen thirty-nine, the world Jewish population peaked at sixteen-point-six million. By nineteen forty-five, after the Holocaust, it was about eleven million. Six million murdered, and the demographic momentum lost — children who were never born, communities that were erased entirely.

Corn: Sixteen-point-six million. That's the number the prompt asked about. And we still haven't gotten back there.

Herman: We haven't. And the recovery has been slow and uneven. Today, in twenty twenty-six, we're at about fifteen-point-eight million globally. That's eighty-seven years after the peak, and we're still almost a million short. If you think about what the population might have been without the Holocaust — demographers estimate it could have been twenty-five to thirty million by now.

Corn: Within that smaller total, the distribution has completely changed. Walk me through the ratio shift since nineteen forty-eight.

Herman: In nineteen forty-eight, when Israel declared independence, about six hundred fifty thousand Jews lived there — roughly six percent of world Jewry. The rest, about ten million, were in the diaspora, overwhelmingly in the United States and the Soviet Union. By nineteen seventy, Israel's Jewish population had grown to about two-point-six million, roughly twenty percent of the total. By two thousand, it was four-point-nine million, about thirty-eight percent. And today, in twenty twenty-six, we're at roughly seven-point-three million Jews in Israel, out of fifteen-point-eight million total. That's about forty-six percent.

Corn: We've gone from six percent to forty-six percent in less than eighty years. That's not just migration — there's something structural happening.

Herman: It's fundamentally about birth rates and assimilation. Israel's Jewish population is growing at about one-point-seven percent annually. The diaspora, taken as a whole, has near-zero growth — some communities are shrinking. The American Jewish community, the largest in the diaspora at about six million, has a fertility rate below replacement and significant attrition through intermarriage and disaffiliation. The Russian Jewish community has collapsed through emigration and aging. The French community is shrinking, partly due to emigration to Israel. So you have one population that's growing and one that's slowly declining, and the ratio keeps shifting.

Corn: At current rates, when does Israel become the majority?

Herman: Sometime around twenty thirty to twenty thirty-five, depending on which demographic model you use. Sergio DellaPergola, who's the leading scholar on this at the Hebrew University and the Jewish People Policy Institute, has been tracking these numbers for decades. His projections show the crossover happening within the next ten to fifteen years. It could happen even faster if there's a significant wave of aliyah — say, from France or the United States — triggered by political instability or antisemitic incidents.

Corn: Within our lifetimes, probably, for the first time since the Roman period, the majority of the world's Jews will live in the land of Israel.

Herman: That's historically unprecedented. For roughly nineteen hundred years after the Roman expulsion, the diaspora was overwhelmingly dominant. In nineteen hundred, the split was ninety-five percent diaspora, five percent in the land. To go from that to a near fifty-fifty split — and soon a Jewish majority in Israel — is a transformation that has no parallel in Jewish history.

Corn: Which is why the ideological debates around this are so intense. The negation of the diaspora — the idea that Jewish life outside Israel is somehow incomplete or illegitimate — that was a fringe position for most of Zionist history. But if Israel becomes the demographic center, does it become mainstream?

Herman: That's the question that sits underneath all of this. The early Zionist thinkers — people like Ahad Ha'am and later David Ben-Gurion — had different views on this. Ahad Ha'am envisioned Israel as a spiritual and cultural center, not necessarily the place where all Jews would live. Ben-Gurion was more hardline — he believed the diaspora would eventually wither away through assimilation or persecution, and Israel would become the sole Jewish center. That hasn't happened. The diaspora, particularly in America, has proven remarkably resilient. But the demographic math is shifting in Ben-Gurion's direction.

Corn: Let me push back on that slightly. The American Jewish community is shrinking in relative terms, but six million Jews is still six million Jews. That's not a small community. And American Jews have built institutions — universities, federations, museums, political organizations — that have real power.

Herman: The question isn't whether the diaspora will disappear — it won't. The question is about relative weight. For most of the last century, the largest Jewish community in the world was in the United States, and it set the terms of Jewish institutional life. The Conference of Presidents, the major federations, the fundraising apparatus — all dominated by American Jews. When Israel approaches demographic parity, does that balance of power shift? Does Israel become the primary voice of world Jewry by default, simply because it's the largest community?

Corn: That's not just a political question. It's a religious one. The Syrian community we were talking about — they have their own liturgy, their own customs, their own musical traditions. The Sephardic world has its own halachic authorities. If the center of gravity shifts to Israel, where the Chief Rabbinate is an entirely different system — state-controlled, politically appointed — what happens to those diaspora traditions?

Herman: There's already tension around this. The Israeli Rabbinate doesn't recognize non-Orthodox conversions performed in the diaspora. It has a monopoly on marriage and divorce for Jews in Israel. For diaspora Jews who aren't Orthodox — which is the majority of American Jews — this creates a real estrangement. The demographic shift toward Israel could intensify that, because Israeli Judaism and diaspora Judaism have been evolving in very different directions.

Corn: It's like two branches of the same tree that have been growing apart for decades, and now one branch is getting much heavier than the other.

Herman: The Syrian Jewish community is an interesting microcosm of this. The Syrian community in Brooklyn — which is the largest Syrian Jewish community outside Israel — is famously tight-knit, very traditional, with low intermarriage rates. They've preserved a lot of their distinctive customs. But they also maintain strong ties to Israel and to the Syrian community there. So they're navigating this tension between diaspora distinctiveness and Israeli centrality in their own way.

Corn: Let me pull us back to some of the other misconceptions we flagged, because I think they're worth naming explicitly. The first one is that the diaspora was a single linear migration — Jews left Israel after seventy CE and spread out in sequence. But that's not right.

Herman: It's completely wrong. The diaspora was a network of parallel communities that rose and fell in prominence. Babylon, Alexandria, Rome, Carthage, Antioch — these all had significant Jewish populations by the first century CE, and they all grew after the Roman destruction, but they were contemporaneous, not sequential. Then Spain rose, then Eastern Europe rose, then America rose. Different centers at different times, overlapping and interconnected.

Corn: The second misconception is that there were no Jews in the land of Israel between the Roman expulsion and Zionism. We've already addressed this — the Galilee communities, the Jerusalem Talmud, Safed in the sixteenth century. The population was small but never zero.

Herman: The third is that the Syrian Jewish community is entirely Sephardic. The Mustarabim predate the Sephardim by over a thousand years. They were there first, and they were gradually absorbed. That's the layering we talked about.

Corn: The fourth, which we haven't really dug into, is that the Jewish population peak was in the modern era pre-Holocaust. People sometimes assume the peak was in antiquity, or that the population has been growing steadily. But sixteen-point-six million in nineteen thirty-nine — that was the high-water mark, and we're still below it.

Herman: Which is remarkable when you think about it. The Jewish people lost a third of its population in the Holocaust, and eighty-seven years later, the demographic recovery is still incomplete. Meanwhile, the world population has roughly tripled in that same period. So Jews have gone from being about half a percent of the world population to about two-tenths of a percent.

Corn: That's a bleak statistic.

Herman: But the counterpoint is that Jewish life has never been more institutionally secure — at least in Israel and the major diaspora centers — than it is today. The State of Israel exists. Jewish studies programs exist at major universities. Jewish museums, cultural centers, publishing houses. The material conditions are vastly better than they were in the Pale of Settlement or medieval Spain. The question is what happens to the culture and the identity when the demographic base is shrinking in the diaspora and growing in Israel.

Corn: Let's talk about what listeners can actually do with this information. If someone wants to dig deeper into these numbers, where should they look?

Herman: The Jewish Virtual Library has excellent population tables that go back decades, and they're freely available online. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics publishes annual reports with detailed demographic breakdowns. And Sergio DellaPergola's work — he publishes regularly through the Jewish People Policy Institute and in academic journals. His annual world Jewish population reports are the gold standard for this data.

Corn: For the historical side — the Cairo Geniza, the Aleppo Codex, the Syrian community?

Herman: The Cambridge University Library has digitized a huge portion of the Cairo Geniza fragments — you can browse them online, which is astonishing. For the Aleppo Codex, the Israel Museum has a detailed exhibition, and there's a book by Matti Friedman called The Aleppo Codex that reads like a detective story. For the Syrian Jewish community, there's a documentary called The Syrian Jewish Community: Our Journey Through History that's worth tracking down.

Corn: If someone wants to trace their own family history within this larger migration story?

Herman: Jewish genealogical research has exploded in the last decade. JewishGen dot org is the main portal — they have databases of passenger lists, census records, Holocaust records, burial societies. For Sephardic genealogy, there's the Sephardic Genealogical Society. And DNA testing has opened up entirely new avenues — though that raises its own complicated questions about what Jewish identity actually means.

Corn: Which is the tension at the heart of all of this, isn't it? We've been talking about demographics and migration patterns and percentages, but underneath it is a question about what it means to be Jewish in the first place. Is it religion? Is it ethnicity? Is it connection to a specific land? Is it membership in a people that has survived dispersion for two thousand years?

Herman: The demographic data doesn't answer that question — it just sharpens it. When Israel becomes the demographic center, does that change the answer? Or does it just change who gets to define the question?

Corn: That's where I think we should leave this. The numbers tell a clear story — the center of gravity is shifting, and it's shifting fast. But what that shift means for Jewish identity, for the relationship between Israel and the diaspora, for religious authority and cultural preservation — that's still being written.

Herman: It's being written by the choices people make. Every Jew who decides to stay in the diaspora, every Jew who decides to move to Israel, every family that chooses how to raise their children — they're all part of this demographic story. The macro trends are made of millions of micro decisions.

Corn: The open question for listeners: As Israel approaches demographic parity with the diaspora, how do you think the balance of power in Jewish institutional life will shift? And what does it mean for Jews who choose to remain in the diaspora — will their communities maintain their influence, or will Israel become the undisputed center of Jewish religious and cultural authority?

Herman: If this episode sparked questions about your own family's place in this two-thousand-year migration story, check the show notes — we'll link to Jewish genealogical resources and diaspora community archives.

Corn: Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.

Hilbert: In the nineteen twenties, beekeepers on the Vanuatu island of Tanna discovered that honey produced during the flowering season of the native coral tree caused temporary disorientation and a distinctive stumbling gait in anyone who consumed more than a tablespoon — local elders attributed it to the tree's flowers absorbing volcanic minerals, but the actual cause was never identified, and the honey was banned from village feasts for over forty years.

Corn:...right.

Herman: Banned honey with a stumbling side effect.

Corn: This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer Hilbert Flumingtop. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you listen — it genuinely helps. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com for show notes and resources. We'll be back soon.