The Blogs: Explaining Why American Jews Are Not Emigrating to Israel in Large Numbers | Richard Diamond

Remembering the Lessons of Babylon

After October 7, after the campus chants, after the harassment and the synagogue security details, many Israelis ask a question that increasingly carries the weight of an accusation: why aren’t American Jews coming home?

The numbers make the question sharper. American aliyah ran a few thousand per year before October 7 and has risen modestly since, but nothing resembling the migrations from Iraq, Yemen, the former Soviet Union, or even France. Against an American Jewish population of roughly seven and a half million, the rate is statistically negligible.

The standard explanations — comfort, language, careers, family — are all true and all insufficient. The deeper answer requires looking back further than the question usually does. It requires looking at Babylon.

The Pattern Israelis Underestimate

When Cyrus issued his edict in 538 BCE, allowing the exiled Jews of Babylon to return to Judea, only a minority went. The community that stayed — prosperous, integrated, deeply rooted — went on to produce the Babylonian Talmud, the Geonic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, and roughly a millennium of Jewish intellectual centrality occurring outside the Land. They did not leave when invited. They left, eventually, when forced — in the 1940s and 1950s, after twenty-five hundred years.

This pattern repeats with a consistency that should sober anyone who builds aliyah policy on the assumption that Jews come when called. Spanish Jewry stayed seven centuries until expelled in 1492. Rhineland Jewry stayed centuries until destroyed in the Crusades and later expulsions. Eastern European Jewry stayed roughly a millennium until largely murdered, then pushed out by Soviet hostility. Mizrahi communities stayed one to two millennia until evicted between 1948 and 1979.

The pattern is uncomfortable but clear. Every Diaspora that has ended has ended involuntarily. The duration of comfort before involuntary ending has varied from decades to two and a half millennia. The terminus has not varied.

American Jewry, on this reading, is not anomalous. It is in the Babylonian phase — the long stretch of rootedness, prosperity, and intellectual productivity that defines a Diaspora before it ends. Whether that phase lasts fifty more years or five hundred cannot be predicted. What can be observed is that comfort itself is no exemption. Comfort is what the pattern is made of.

What American Jewry Has Built

But the deeper Babylonian parallel is structural rather than statistical, and it is the part that most Israelis have not absorbed.

Babylonian Jewry built a way of being Jewish that suited minority conditions: pluralistic, argumentative, voluntarist, and able to hold internal disagreement without religious civil war. The Talmud preserved minority opinions alongside majority ones. The academies of Sura, Pumbedita, and Nehardea operated in parallel without hierarchical resolution. Eilu v’eilu — “these and these are the words of the living God” — was a working principle, not a slogan.

American Jewry has built something structurally similar in four centuries. Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist, Modern Orthodox, Haredi, Renewal, and the vast unaffiliated category cooperate through federations, JCRCs, advocacy organizations, and a thousand voluntary institutions. The friction is real but it does not metastasize into religious-political combat — because no one has a state to capture. Religious authority without coercive power must earn acceptance, which produces pluralism whether participants prefer it or not.

This is not a soft cultural achievement. It is the same structural adaptation Babylon made, and it is one of the genuine contributions American Jewry will leave to Jewish history. It is also, not incidentally, why American Jews experience a level of inter-denominational civility that Israeli Jews do not. The civility is not a matter of American manners. It is a matter of structural condition. When religious authority cannot be enforced by the state, denominations argue rather than legislate.

The Asymmetry Israelis Need to Hear

Here is where the Babylonian analogy sharpens into something Israeli readers in particular need to face.

When Iraqi or Yemeni Jews arrived in Israel in 1950, their religious life translated. They were Orthodox or traditional in ways the new state’s religious establishment recognized. The categories matched.

The American Jew considering aliyah faces a different country. Roughly thirty-seven percent of American Jews identify as Reform, around seventeen percent as Conservative, and a large additional segment as unaffiliated or “Just Jewish.” Together this constitutes a clear majority of American Jewry. They arrive in a country whose Chief Rabbinate does not recognize their rabbis, their conversions, their marriages, or — in many cases — the Jewish status of their spouses and children.

The 2017 collapse of the Kotel agreement, in which the Israeli government walked away from a negotiated arrangement for egalitarian prayer under Haredi political pressure, made this concrete. American Reform and Conservative leaders treated it as a betrayal because it was one. The very religious life that the majority of affiliated American Jews have built — the Babylonian-style pluralistic Judaism that is one of the genuine intellectual and institutional achievements of the modern Jewish world — is treated by the Israeli religious establishment as not quite Judaism.

So the question Israelis pose — “why aren’t they coming home?” — contains an assumption that has not been examined. It assumes Israel as currently constituted is the kind of home the historical pattern presupposes. For the majority of American Jews, it isn’t. Aliyah would mean accepting religious demotion as the price of entry. Most are not willing to pay that price for a danger they do not yet feel.

The Lesson Runs Both Ways

The lesson of Babylon for American Jews is sobering. The comfort is real, the comfort is not an exemption, and Diasporas end on schedules they do not choose. American Jews who assume their community is structurally different from every prior Diaspora are betting against the strongest pattern in Jewish history.

But the lesson of Babylon for Israel is different and equally serious. The Babylonian community produced the document on which all subsequent rabbinic Judaism rested — including the Judaism of the eventual returnees. The Land-based Jewish polity has, throughout Jewish history, depended on the intellectual and religious work of the Diaspora it sometimes disdained. Israel today depends on American Jewish political support, philanthropy, and demographic weight in ways that are not seriously disputed.

If Israel wants the rest of the Babylonian pattern — the eventual return of the Diaspora when the Diaspora ends — it needs to be a country the returning Diaspora can actually return to. That means a religious settlement that recognizes the Judaism the majority of American Jews have actually built. Not as a concession. As an acknowledgment of what Jewish history has repeatedly demonstrated: the Diaspora is not a deviation from Judaism. It has often been where Judaism did its most generative work.

American Jews are not coming in large numbers because they are not yet forced to. When the time comes that they are — and the historical pattern suggests it will, however distant that day — the Israel they find will determine whether the return resembles Babylon’s or whether it produces something more painful. That outcome is, for now, in Israeli hands.

Richard Diamond is a retired technology executive, lifelong student of Jewish philosophy, and frequent writer on the intersection of theology, ethics, and public life. He brings decades of leadership experience, historical insight, and personal commitment to Israel’s future to his thoughtful explorations of contemporary Jewish challenges.