How many jews remained in babylon

One exile in BC saw around 1, people make the perilous journey via modern-day Lebanon and Syria to the fertile crescent of southern Iraq, where the Judeans traded, ran businesses and helped the administration of the kingdom. He knew he needed the Judeans to help revive the struggling Babylonian economy. The tablets, each inscribed in minute Akkadian script, detail trade in fruits and other commodities, taxes paid, debts owed and credits accumulated. Vukosavovic describes the tablets as completing a 2,year puzzle.

The candidates for caliph were two: 1 his cousin Ali, who married Mohammed's daughter Fatima; and 2 his first convert and father-in-law, Abu Bakr. This struggle gave rise to the creation of two Muslim sects: 1 the Shi'ites who recognized Ali as Mohammed's rightful successor ; and 2 the Sunnis, who recognized Abu Bakr as the rightful successor. The majority of the Muslims are Sunnis, followers of Abu Bakr and his successor Omar, who founded the first major Islamic dynasty, the Omayyad sometimes spelled Umayyad.

Caliph Omar recognized that the road to unity was to have a common enemy. He therefore embarked on a series of foreign wars of conquest, in which the Muslims were remarkably successful. As part of his conquests Caliph Omar invaded Jerusalem in , taking it away from the Byzantines. To see the remains of Byzantine homes from that period, you can visit today the archeological excavations below the southern end of the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem.

It was this area, in particular, that Omar turned over to 70 Jewish families following his conquest. Until then the Byzantines had forbidden the Jews from living in Jerusalem at all.

He found the Temple Mount site in ruins and covered with garbage as the Byzantines had deliberately decreed that garbage should be dumped there to humiliate the Jews. Omar had the site cleared and may have prayed at the southern end toward Mecca which could well be the first time that a small mosque was erected there, though historians are not certain. It must be made clear that up to this time, Jerusalem had no special significance to Muslims. During his lifetime already, Mohammed had changed the direction of prayer to Mecca, and the Koran does not mention Jerusalem even once!

There he meets Jebril Gabriel and goes up to heaven for a forty-day sojourn, meeting all the prophets and talking to Moses and Jesus etc. And that the center of the Temple Mount, where a huge stone protruded, must be the spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven. It still stands today and dominates the Jerusalem skyline. Note that the Dome of the Rock is not a mosque. Rather it is a shrine built around the huge rock, which Jews believe to be the same stone where Abraham took Isaac to be sacrificed, where Jacob dreamed of a ladder to heaven, and where the Holy of Holies once stood.

The Dome of the Rock together with the El Aksa mosque are the first great religious building complex in the Islamic world and pre-date the building of the great Mosque in Mecca. The Dome of the Rock was not always golden as it is today. It was covered with anodised aluminum in , and more recently, the late King Hussein of Jordan, sold one of his houses in London and gold-plated it with 80 kilos of gold.

Today, this site is the third holiest to Suni Muslims and the fourth holiest to Shi'ite Muslims, who list Karabala, after Mecca and Medina. Jews greeted it more favorably, as the Christians had been merciless to the Jews. The Muslims might humiliate them, but they would not slaughter them outright.

Indeed, when Omar defeated the Persians and took over Babylonia, he immediately re-instituted the authority of the Reish Galusa to head the Jewish community.

Thus in a bizarre twist of fate, the Reish Galusa became brother-in-law to the caliph. After the death of Bustenai, his sons by an earlier wife sought to delegitimatize his sons by the Persian princess, claiming that she never converted to Judaism. However, this was unlikely as the case of a Reish Galusa marrying a non-Jewish woman without conversion would have caused a furor and public condemnation. Indeed the Gaonim of the day ruled that all his children were legitimate Jews. During the long history of Babylonian Jewry, sometimes the Reish Galusa wielded more power, sometimes the Gaonim.

Much depended on the political climate and the personalities involved. Generally, however, the position of the Gaon was determined by scholarship, while the position of Reish Galusa was depended on lineage as the Reish Galusa was traditionally the descendant of King David. When Shlomo, the Reish Galusa , died childless in , two of his nephews Hananiah and Anan vied for the position.

Hananiah got the job and Anan went off to start his own religion. We saw it, for example, in Part 20 with Rehoboam and Jeroboam.

The sect that Anan started in some ways was similar to the Sadducees. Like the Sadducees, the Karaites didn't recognize the authority of the Oral Torah and hence they read the Written Torah literally. Their name, Karaites, comes from the Hebrew verb, kara , meaning "read.

As we saw earlier, it is impossible to live a Jewish life without the Oral Torah as so much of the Written Torah is not specific enough. Thus, where the Torah commands "and you shall write them [these words] upon the doorposts of your home," how can anyone know which words of the Torah, or indeed, if the entire Torah is to be written on the doorpost?

It is the Oral Torah that explains that this passage refers to the words of the Shema prayer, which are to be written on a parchment scroll and then affixed in a specified place and manner on the doorpost. The mezuzah! As a result of their literal reading of the Torah, the Karaites came to observe Shabbat in total darkness, unable to leave their homes all day except to go to the synagogue.

They did away with the observance of Chanukah because it is not mentioned in the Written Torah, as well as with the separation of meat and milk for the same reason. Ironically, because so many statements in the Bible cannot be explained with out the Oral Law, the Karaites had to create their own oral law as a way of translating these statements in the Bible into practical applications.

One might think that this sect would have little appeal but, this was not the case. The Karaites began to attract those Jews who wanted to dismiss the opinions of the rabbis; this turned out to be a huge draw. Sa'adiah Gaon is famed for his writings, particularly the Book of Belief and Opinions , and for his critiques of the Karaites which made mincemeat of their beliefs. In addition to being the Rosh Yeshiva The Dean of the great Yeshiva of Sura, he was one of the greatest Jewish legal and philosophical minds of the period.

His arguments stopped the spread of Karaitism which could have overwhelmed the entire Jewish world. It was so popular at one point that in the 10th century the majority of Jews in the Land of Israel may well have been Karaites. However, the Karaites never recovered from the assault of Sa'adiah Gaon on the logic of their beliefs.

Their numbers shrunk with time, though unlike the Sadducees, they never completely disappeared. During the 19th century, in the Russian Empire, the status of the Karites change until eventually they were legally considered to be a religion totally separate from Judaism. Today, there is a small number of Karaites left, living chiefly in Israel, though no one is sure how many as the Karaites forbid census-taking. Their population has been variously estimated at 7, all the way up to 40, Until recently the Karaites were reputed to be very religious people, and from the outside appear indistinguishable from Orthodox Jews, though they are forbidden to marry other Jews and marry only each other.

When the Sa'adiah Gaon died in , the period of the Gaonim of Babylon was almost over. It would officially end in with the death of Chai Gaon. By then, a great many Jews had left Babylon, following the opportunities that were opening up for them in other parts of the world conquered by Muslims, especially in Spain. The Savoraim put the "finishing touches" on the Babylonian Talmud by completing the final editing of the text.

Lewis points out that one of the earliest Islamic names for Jerusalem was Bayt al-Maqdis , clearly derived from the Hebrew phrase for the Jewish Temple, Bayt ha-Miqdash. He also mentions that an equally early Islamic tradition mentions that el Aksa means "heaven" and the claim that it meant Jerusalem was a Jewish plot to Judaize Islam.

Part of the early Christian world view was that God had destroyed the Temple and exiled the Jews because the Jews had rejected Jesus. It should be noted that when the returnees Armstrong: the "Golah" established this religion in Jerusalem, a Egyptian diaspora dating back presumably to the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in practiced Yahwism at a temple of their own located on the island of Elephantine upper Nile.

In other words, "Judaism" was not a monolithic practice and the Babylonian diaspora was not the only form in which Judah- and Israel-related traditions were continued after the destruction of the states of Israel and Judah. Of the temple in Elephantine we know futher that it was destroyed in and rebuilt in It was the temple of a Jewish military colony near the southern border of Egypt the latter having lost independence to the Persians and it continued to function in Second Temple times.

The community of Elephantine was on friendly terms with the priestly establishment in Jerusalem despite the fact that it initially practiced syncretistic forms of worship very much like the practices in Jerusalem before the destruction of that were only gradually abandoned in consultation with the Second Temple priesthood in Jerusalem.

What little we know about the history of early Second Temple Judaism from other sources is augmented from fragments of letters written on papyrus found by modern archeologists at Elephantine excavated when the Assuan dam was built in the s.

Important historical dates. Mass deportation to Babylonia and flight to Egypt. After Sheshbazzar davidic lineage governor pekhah of satrapy Persian province of Yehud Judah. Immediately tries to lay the foundations of a new temple. Between and Arrival of the next pekhah, Zerubbavel note the Babylonian theophoric name! Under his governance, the high priesthood was reestablished. The lineage of the new high priest, Jehoshua ben Jehozadak, is Zadokite, i. Nehemiah nevertheless completes the walls of Jerusalem and attempts to repopulate the city.