Ancient Jews in Egypt: Hanukkah, Jerusalem, and the Origins of Jewish Diaspora Identity
This blog post is based on the podcast interview with Malka Simkovich who is the author of Letters from Home, The Creation of Diaspora in Jewish Antiquity. You can purchase a copy of her book here. This blog post was generated by AI.
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How Jewish communities living far from Jerusalem challenged religious authority, preserved their traditions, and helped redefine what it meant to belong to the Jewish people.
What did it mean to be Jewish in the ancient world if you did not live in Jerusalem—or even in the land of Israel?
Today, Jewish communities exist across the globe, maintaining distinct religious and cultural traditions while participating in the societies around them. The relationship between Jewish identity, ancestral homeland, and life outside Israel remains an important subject of discussion.
But these questions are hardly new.
More than 2,000 years ago, Jewish communities in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and throughout the Mediterranean were already debating what it meant to belong to the Jewish people while living far from Jerusalem.
Some of these communities were prosperous, highly educated, and deeply committed to Jewish religious practice. Others developed institutions that challenged the assumption that Jerusalem should exercise religious authority over all Jews.
And in one particularly revealing episode, religious authorities in Jerusalem embarked on a campaign to convince Jews in Egypt to adopt a relatively new holiday: Hanukkah.
In a recent episode of The Levantini Podcast, I spoke with Professor Malka Simkovich about Jewish identity during the Second Temple period, the relationship between Jerusalem and Jewish communities in Egypt, and the ancient debates that helped shape Jewish peoplehood.
Our conversation explored an extraordinary historical world in which Jews could remain devoted to Jerusalem while developing religious lives that did not depend on living there.
The Second Temple Period Was Not Just About Jerusalem
The Second Temple period is generally associated with the restoration of Jewish religious life in Jerusalem following the Babylonian exile.
The First Temple had been destroyed by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. After Persia conquered Babylon in 539 BCE, Judean exiles were permitted to return and rebuild their religious institutions.
The Second Temple was completed around 515 BCE, beginning a new chapter in Jewish history that lasted until its destruction by Rome in 70 CE.
Yet the name Second Temple period can be misleading.
It naturally directs our attention toward Jerusalem, the Temple, and the religious leaders who administered it.
But large Jewish communities lived outside Judea throughout this era.
Many descendants of the Babylonian exiles did not return to their ancestral homeland. Others migrated to Egypt, Syria, the Greek islands, and cities throughout the eastern Mediterranean.
These communities maintained their Jewish identities across generations.
They observed the Sabbath, practiced circumcision, followed dietary traditions, and preserved their ancestral scriptures.
They also developed institutions for gathering, reading, and interpreting those scriptures.
Professor Simkovich emphasizes that early synagogues were not necessarily established primarily as places of formal prayer. They also served as centers for studying and interpreting sacred texts.
This development helped make Jewish religious life possible far beyond Jerusalem.
But it also created an important theological question.
If the Torah repeatedly emphasized the land of Israel and the centrality of Jerusalem, how could Jews justify living elsewhere?
Was the Babylonian Exile Really Over?
Following the Persian conquest of Babylon, Judeans faced a profound question: Had the exile ended?
Those who returned to Judea could point to the rebuilding of the Temple and the restoration of Jewish life in Jerusalem.
For them, returning to the land was a central part of fulfilling the promises of restoration.
But many Jews who remained outside Judea understood their circumstances differently.
They were able to practice their ancestral religion, maintain communal institutions, and live relatively peaceful lives under foreign rule.
Why should their continued residence outside the land necessarily mean that they remained in exile?
This disagreement reflected two different ways of understanding Jewish religious identity.
For some, the physical land and Temple were indispensable.
For others, the Torah itself provided a portable connection to God.
Sacred scrolls could be carried from one community to another, studied in homes and gathering places, and interpreted wherever Jews lived.
The Torah's portability made it possible to imagine a religious life that was not confined to a single geographical location.
Yet its contents continued to emphasize the importance of the ancestral land.
This tension between sacred text and sacred geography would shape Jewish history for centuries.
Why Did So Many Ancient Jews Live in Egypt?
Egypt became one of the most important centers of Jewish life outside Judea.
Jewish migration into Egypt occurred in multiple waves, including movements associated with the Babylonian threat in the sixth century BCE.
The Book of Jeremiah preserves traditions about Judeans fleeing to Egypt despite prophetic warnings against doing so.
Over time, Jewish communities expanded across Egypt, including the major Hellenistic city of Alexandria.
By the second century BCE, Egypt was home to a substantial Jewish population.
Professor Simkovich suggests that the community may have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, although precise demographic figures are unavailable.
These were not necessarily Jews who had abandoned their ancestral traditions.
On the contrary, Jewish communities in Egypt produced an extraordinary body of religious literature, biblical interpretation, prayers, and philosophical writing.
Many maintained Sabbath observance, circumcision, dietary restrictions, and other distinctive practices.
They also remained deeply interested in events in Jerusalem.
Their distance from the Temple did not mean indifference toward it.
Egyptian Jews could regard Jerusalem as spiritually important while questioning whether its religious authorities should determine every aspect of Jewish life abroad.
That tension becomes especially visible in the history of Hanukkah.
How Hanukkah Became a Holiday Beyond Jerusalem
Today, Hanukkah is celebrated by Jewish communities around the world.
But in the second century BCE, the festival commemorated events that had occurred specifically in Judea.
The Maccabean revolt against Seleucid rule culminated in the recovery and rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 164 BCE.
For Jews living in Judea, these events had immediate political and religious significance.
But what about Jews in Egypt?
They had not necessarily participated in the rebellion or experienced its consequences directly.
Why should they adopt a new annual festival commemorating a military and religious victory in another region?
Professor Simkovich argues that this question helps explain an extraordinary campaign preserved in the opening chapters of 2 Maccabees.
Jerusalem authorities wanted Egyptian Jews to celebrate the festival.
And they used letters to persuade them.
The correspondence reveals that the spread of Hanukkah was not necessarily automatic.
It required arguments, communication, and appeals to shared religious identity.
In other words, Hanukkah's development as a widely observed Jewish festival was connected to a much larger debate about the relationship between Jerusalem and Jewish communities living elsewhere.
The Letters in 2 Maccabees: An Ancient Campaign for Hanukkah
The opening of 2 Maccabees preserves two letters addressed to Jews in Egypt.
In the chronology discussed during our interview, the first letter is dated to 124 BCE and refers to earlier correspondence from 143 BCE.
A second letter is associated with the closing years of the second century BCE.
These dates place the correspondence decades after the rededication of the Temple in 164 BCE.
The significance is striking.
If Jerusalem authorities were still encouraging Egyptian Jews to observe the festival generations after the Maccabean victory, that suggests the holiday's wider acceptance was a process rather than an immediate development.
Malka interprets the letters as evidence of an effort to establish Jerusalem's religious authority beyond Judea.
The appeal was not simply: celebrate our victory.
It was also: recognize the continuing religious significance of Jerusalem and the Temple for Jews everywhere.
Egypt was a particularly important audience.
Its Jewish communities were numerous, influential, and deeply involved in the intellectual and cultural life of the Hellenistic world.
Persuading them to adopt the festival could help establish Hanukkah as a shared Jewish observance beyond Judea.
But the later correspondence suggests that a straightforward appeal to the Maccabean victory was not sufficient.
A broader theological argument was needed.
Why the Hanukkah Letters Invoke Jeremiah, Nehemiah, and Solomon
One of the most fascinating aspects of the later letter is its use of earlier biblical figures and traditions.
Rather than focusing exclusively on the Maccabean revolt, the letter recounts stories of divine intervention associated with Jerusalem and the Temple.
Malka highlights a tradition involving the prophet Jeremiah and sacred materials preserved from the First Temple.
According to the story, materials associated with the Temple were hidden before or during the Babylonian destruction.
Later, in the time of Nehemiah, priests recovered them as part of the restoration of worship.
The narrative describes a miraculous event associated with the renewal of sacrifice.
The letter also reaches further back into Israel's sacred history, invoking earlier traditions associated with Solomon and Moses.
The effect is to establish continuity.
The Maccabean victory is presented not as an isolated historical event, but as the latest expression of God's longstanding protection of Jerusalem's sacred institutions.
This matters because the letter is addressed to Jews living in Egypt.
Jeremiah was an especially meaningful figure in that context.
Biblical traditions portray him warning Judeans against fleeing to Egypt and against abandoning their obligations to God.
By invoking Jeremiah, the writers could connect their contemporary appeal to an older debate about Jewish life outside the land.
The underlying message was that Jerusalem's sacred history remained relevant to Egyptian Jews, regardless of where they lived.
Professor Malka interprets this as an effort to reinforce the religious authority of Jerusalem's institutions.
What Makes 2 Maccabees Such an Important Historical Source?
The books of Maccabees offer different perspectives on the events surrounding the Hasmonean revolt.
First Maccabees provides a historical narrative emphasizing political and military developments.
Second Maccabees offers a more explicitly theological interpretation of the conflict.
The surviving text is presented as an abridgment of a larger work attributed to Jason of Cyrene, a Jewish author associated with the Greek-speaking world of North Africa.
The original larger work has not survived.
Second Maccabees is particularly interesting because it expresses strong opposition to certain forms of Greek cultural and religious influence while employing sophisticated Greek literary techniques.
It also uses the terms Ioudaismos and Hellenismos, commonly rendered as Judaism and Hellenism, in a sharply contrasting way.
Malka emphasizes that this opposition should not be taken as a straightforward description of how all ancient Jews understood their identities.
Many Jews were deeply engaged with Greek language, literature, and philosophy while remaining committed to their ancestral religion.
The apparent opposition between Judaism and Hellenism was therefore more complicated than a simple choice between two incompatible cultures.
This complexity is especially evident in Jewish communities in Egypt.
Did Ancient Jews Build Temples Outside Jerusalem?
Perhaps the most surprising subject in our conversation was the existence of Jewish temples in Egypt.
If Jerusalem was the central sanctuary of Jewish religious life, why would Jewish communities construct temples elsewhere?
Two examples are particularly important.
The first is the Jewish temple at Elephantine, an island in southern Egypt.
Documentary evidence from the fifth century BCE reveals a Judean community with its own temple and religious institutions.
The Elephantine papyri preserve correspondence involving the community and authorities in Judea and the wider Persian administration.
These documents provide an extraordinary window into the religious and political relationships of Jews living outside their ancestral homeland.
The second example is the temple associated with Onias in Egypt during the second century BCE.
According to traditions preserved by Josephus, Onias, connected to Jerusalem's priestly establishment, fled political conflict and received permission from the Ptolemaic ruler to establish a temple in Egypt.
The temple's relationship to Jerusalem remains a fascinating question.
Malka suggests that these sanctuaries may have functioned as satellite temples rather than deliberate replacements for the Jerusalem Temple.
In the case of Onias's temple, Josephus describes differences in the building's design while noting similarities in its sacred vessels.
Malka interprets this as a possible attempt to honor Jerusalem's religious traditions without claiming to supersede the original sanctuary.
That interpretation is not certain, but it helps explain how Egyptian Jews might have participated in worship at a local temple while continuing to regard Jerusalem as sacred.
Later rabbinic traditions were much less accepting of such sanctuaries.
They generally insisted that sacrificial worship belonged exclusively in Jerusalem.
The disagreement illustrates how Jewish religious norms and institutional authority developed over time.
Were Egyptian Jews Loyal to Jerusalem?
The existence of Jewish temples in Egypt might suggest that Egyptian communities were attempting to separate themselves from Jerusalem.
But Malka argues against that simple interpretation.
Egyptian Jews maintained significant religious and emotional connections to the Jerusalem Temple.
They supported it financially and participated in broader networks of Jewish communal life.
They also engaged seriously with their ancestral scriptures and religious traditions.
Their willingness to establish local institutions did not necessarily indicate a rejection of Jerusalem.
Instead, it reflected a different understanding of how Jewish identity could operate across geographical boundaries.
The distinction is important.
A community could recognize the religious significance of Jerusalem without accepting every claim of authority made by leaders based there.
This was not necessarily a choice between loyalty and disloyalty.
It was a debate about the nature of religious authority within a people dispersed across multiple political territories.
Jewish Identity in the Greek and Roman Worlds
Jewish communities in the ancient Mediterranean participated extensively in the cultures around them.
They used Greek, studied philosophy, produced literature, and contributed to the economic and intellectual life of their cities.
Some participated in aspects of Hellenistic public culture while maintaining religious boundaries around worship, dietary practices, and other obligations.
Professor Malka emphasizes that these identities were not necessarily contradictory.
A Jew living in Alexandria could be deeply engaged in Egyptian and Greek cultural life while remaining committed to Jewish religious traditions.
This becomes particularly clear in the writings of Philo of Alexandria and Josephus.
Their discussions of homeland, ancestry, and belonging offer evidence of how ancient Jews thought about their relationships to the places where they lived and the land of their ancestors.
For many Jews, attachment to the ancestral homeland did not require withdrawal from the surrounding society.
Nor did participation in that society necessarily weaken their Jewish identity.
The relationship was complex, but it was not inherently incompatible.
The Ancient Origins of Jewish Peoplehood
Our conversation concluded with a broader discussion of Jewish peoplehood.
How did communities separated by enormous distances continue to understand themselves as members of the same people?
Part of the answer lay in shared religious practices.
The Sabbath, circumcision, dietary laws, sacred texts, and communal institutions provided continuity across generations.
But another important element was the ongoing relationship to the ancestral homeland.
Jews living in Egypt or elsewhere could identify with Jerusalem even when they had never personally visited it.
They could contribute to their local societies while retaining a sense of connection to Jews living in other regions.
Malka drew parallels between these ancient experiences and the identities of Jews living in modern countries.
The comparison is not exact: ancient empires, religious institutions, and political identities differed substantially from modern nation-states.
Nevertheless, the historical material challenges the assumption that participation in a host society and attachment to an ancestral homeland must be mutually exclusive.
Ancient Jewish communities developed ways to express both.
Their debates about religious authority, cultural participation, and belonging helped shape the long history of Jewish communal identity.
Why This History Matters Today
The story of ancient Jews in Egypt complicates many familiar assumptions about the Second Temple period.
Jewish life was not confined to Jerusalem.
Religious observance did not depend entirely on proximity to the Temple.
And Jewish communities outside Judea were not necessarily less committed to their ancestral traditions than those living within the land.
The letters preserved in 2 Maccabees show Jerusalem authorities working to strengthen connections across the Jewish world.
The temples at Elephantine and associated with Onias reveal that religious life outside Jerusalem could develop institutions of its own.
And the writings of Jewish thinkers in the Greek and Roman worlds demonstrate how deeply Jewish identity could coexist with participation in broader cultures.
Together, these sources reveal an ancient Jewish world that was geographically dispersed, intellectually diverse, and connected by a shared sense of history and peoplehood.
Perhaps the most important lesson is that the questions confronting Jewish communities today have remarkably deep historical roots.
How does a people remain connected across borders? What role does an ancestral homeland play in collective identity? And how can religious and cultural continuity survive across generations?
Ancient Jews were already wrestling with these questions more than two millennia ago.
Their answers were not always identical.
But the ongoing conversation helped create a durable form of Jewish identity that extended far beyond Jerusalem.
This article is based on a conversation on The Levantini Podcast about Jewish communities in Egypt, the origins of Hanukkah, religious authority during the Second Temple period, and the historical development of Jewish peoplehood.
Frequently Asked Questions
Did Jews live in Egypt during the Second Temple period?
Yes. Egypt was home to substantial Jewish communities during the Second Temple period, including communities in Alexandria and Elephantine. They maintained Jewish religious practices while participating in Egyptian and Greek-speaking society.
Why were Egyptian Jews encouraged to celebrate Hanukkah?
The letters preserved at the beginning of 2 Maccabees encouraged Jews in Egypt to observe a festival commemorating the rededication of the Jerusalem Temple. Professor Malka interprets these letters as part of an effort to strengthen Jerusalem's religious authority and its connections with Jews living outside Judea.
What are the letters at the beginning of 2 Maccabees?
They are two letters addressed to Jewish communities in Egypt, associated with the late second century BCE. They appeal to shared religious traditions and the sacred history of Jerusalem to encourage festival observance.
Did ancient Jews have temples outside Jerusalem?
Yes. Documentary and literary sources attest to Jewish temples in Egypt, including the sanctuary at Elephantine and the temple associated with Onias. Their precise relationship to the Jerusalem Temple remains a subject of historical interpretation.
What was the Elephantine Jewish temple?
The Elephantine temple was a sanctuary used by a Judean community living on an island in southern Egypt during the Persian period. Aramaic papyri preserve information about the community's religious practices, political relationships, and attempts to maintain its sanctuary.
What is the difference between 1 Maccabees and 2 Maccabees?
First Maccabees emphasizes the political and military history of the Hasmonean revolt. Second Maccabees presents a more overtly theological account and survives as an abridgment of a larger Greek-language work associated with Jason of Cyrene.
How did Jews maintain their identity outside Israel?
Ancient Jewish communities maintained shared practices such as Sabbath observance, circumcision, dietary customs, and the study of sacred texts. Their continued connection to Jerusalem and their ancestral history also helped sustain a sense of Jewish peoplehood.
