Temple and Diaspora

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.