Does history repeat itself?

There are many reasons to study history.

There’s the pure joy of learning for its own sake, Torah lishmah. There’s the chance to learn more about the story of our people, and more grandly about the human condition. There’s the spell of a good story — and if you’re the historian, as opposed to the rest of us mere readers, you get to be the detective and unearth the truth.

And there’s also the insight that one historical era can give us into our own time. It wouldn’t be exact — think of it is a warped, age-darkened mirror — because no one time is a precise re-enactment of another one, but it can be useful.

Malka Z. Simkovich of Teaneck is a highly accomplished historian — her website, www.malkasimkovich.com, lists an impressive number of books she published and honors she’s earned — who specializes in the Second Temple period.

She’s now also the editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society and a visiting professor of Jewish literature at Yeshiva university.

She’ll be talking about that period for JPS and a number of Teaneck shuls on Sunday, August 16, at the Jewish Center of Teaneck. (See box.)

It’s a fascinating time, she said, not only a bridge between the biblical and rabbinic periods but a time of deep change, growth, and resilience.

“But it’s an often very overlooked period that doesn’t have a place in most Jewish day school curricula, even across most denominations,” Dr. Simkovich said. That’s probably because both the biblical and rabbinic periods are so inherently compelling “that we skip from one to the other, and we tend to lose about four or five centuries in between. But those centuries are key to understanding modern Judaism.

“When we don’t think about this period, we tend to turn the last figures in the Bible — Nehemiah and Daniel — into proto rabbinic figures. But that’s just not what we find in the text.

“It’s about 500 years — about the difference between us and Shakespeare. It was such a different time.”

When exactly was that time? “The Second Temple era begins in 515 BCE,” Dr. Simkovich said. “Most Jews are living under Persian rule. The Persian era ends in around 323 BCE with the rise of Alexander the Great, so the second half of the Second Temple era, from 323 BCE until 79 CE, is first Greek, and then Roman. We call it the Hellenistic world.

“I try to get across that people were incredibly diverse and creative, with a great deal of richness of thinking and encounters with different cultures. And I like to highlight that there really isn’t any evidence that Jews perceived a tension between their own identities and the outside world.

“We in America wouldn’t understand the question: Are you a Jew or are you an American? You might say, ‘Well, my Jewish identity maybe takes precedence, and maybe it’s more true to who I am in my inner being. But of course I’m an American!’

“The same would have been true for Greek Jews. Greek-speaking Jews embraced Hellenism, they observed Shabbat, and they kept kosher. This isn’t a hypothesis. We have a lot of really strong evidence for it.” Most Jews live in the land of Israel, but many others lived outside it.

There was a range of religious behavior in that period, as there is in ours.

“There were Jews who lived outside the land of Israel who were deeply pious and connected to their heritage and read their scriptures — and they also embraced many aspects of the Hellenistic world,” Dr. Simkovich said. The biggest such community was in Alexandria. “They went to the theater and they learned philosophy.

“And there were also Jews in Judea who were totally assimilated. Your level of piety did not necessarily correlate with where you lived, just like today.”

Those communities sometimes ended in tragedy, but that’s another story. “I try to highlight the many centuries of success and integration and experimentation and confidence and really more than anything the optimism that a lot of these Jews had. Maybe it was naïve optimism — but nevertheless optimism that they could benefit from living as active citizens in their host empire and also remain true to their ancestral traditions.”

So how did they do it?

“The question that Jews faced in the early Second Temple era was how to stay together and how to maintain a sense of connection across geographic dispersion,” Dr. Simkovich said. “Obviously, there’s no social media, there’s no TikTok, there’s no email — but they take advantage of the modern technology that they do have.

“And what they do have is roads.

“The Persians build a lot of highways, they developed a sophisticated mail system, and they sent letters. The Jews borrowed this technology, they communicated with one another, and this very intentional effort to maintain contact and relationships across a huge swath of the Persian Empire makes all the difference. These Jews are talking to each other about practice, about biblical interpretation, about the role of the land of Israel. And we have some of these letters.”

She talked about one, part of a cache of documents found on the Egyptian island of Elephantine in 1908. “The air there is so dry that these papyri survived the millennia,” Dr. Simkovich said. “Apparently there was a Judean military garrison stationed on the island at the end of 5th century BCE. They worked for the Persian government, and they were sent there to fight the Egyptians — this was a time when the Persians and the Egyptians were clashing.

“They were fighting for territory, and the Judeans were loyal to the Persian Empire because the Persians practiced freedom of religion and freedom of mobility. So these Judeans were not slaves. They were serving in the army, patriotically, and they were stationed in Elephantine.

“We have scribal copies of letters that they sent to Jerusalem.”

In other words, although this was a time well before the concept even of carbon paper, “They would dispatch a letter to Jerusalem, but they’d write a second letter” — a copy — “for their own records. They learned that from the Persians, who were really good record-keepers.”

“We know that from the Book of Esther, because Esther writes documents and so does Mordechai. Then the king issues an edict, and then a second edict repealing the first one. We also know about it from the Book of Daniel, where there are some really interesting allusions to this letter-centered, edict-centered society. We see references there to the king’s letters, and they had runners to take them throughout the empire.”

The letter that Dr. Simkovich talked about was written in 419 BCE; the “Judeans in Elephantine sent it to the Judean authorities in Jerusalem. It’s corrupt, meaning that it requires some reconstruction, so there’s a little bit of controversy about the exact original wording, but there is broad consensus that it’s asking for guidance about how to observe Passover.

“What’s really interesting for me is that they’re reaching out for a relationship with the Jewish authorities who are administrators of the Jerusalem Temple. Why are these Jews in Elephantine reaching out for some kind of permission or guidance?

“What makes it even more interesting is that we have archaeological evidence that the Judeans in Elephantine built their own temple. Today we might think of that as evidence of Jewish divisiveness or sectarianism, but I would say that it’s not actually a sign of defecting from the Jerusalem Temple. Instead, it’s a sign of homage, because it was a satellite temple, that connected them to the Temple in Jerusalem. It was not and did not try to be an independent center of anything.”

There was another temple, the Temple of Onias, with its own fascinating history, in a place called Leontopolis, in Egypt, Dr. Simkovich said.

But she returned more broadly to the Jewish world in the Second Temple period, when, she said, “the majority of Jews who were not corrupt in practice, not ignorant, not unaware, did not go to the Temple, but they did go to synagogues.

“A lot of us, especially in the Orthodox community, assumed that synagogues are a rabbinical innovation that did not crop until the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE, when the rabbis have to save Judaism by inventing a synagogue-centered society, but that’s not true,” she continued. “It’s not true at all.

“Synagogues were around for centuries before 70 CE, and that means that when the Temple does tragically fall, which is a catastrophe, there already is an infrastructure. There already is a system in place so the Jews could be resilient in its absence, and they could survive.”

Synagogues then were not like synagogues now, she continued. “They were not places of normative prayer. You would pray spontaneously, and common prayers were starting to emerge. But the synagogue was mostly for Torah recitation, so you would go to the synagogue to hear the Torah recited, and you would also often hear a professional translator, a meturgeman, render the Hebrew into Greek or Aramaic.”

Meanwhile, the Temple — the one in Jerusalem, or the satellites tentatively established elsewhere in the Jewish world, and subject to the authority of the leaders in Jerusalem — were places where sacrifices — of everything, including animals, in Jerusalem, and of lesser offerings in the satellites — were performed.

“Then, when we move into the rabbinic period, the rabbis establish normative prayer, and by the third or fourth centuries CE, synagogues are a place for normative prayer, so the functions of the synagogues shift. But they play a very important role for Jews in the land of Israel and beyond, even during the Second Temple era.”

What she wants to talk about in Teaneck, what fascinates her, Dr. Simkovich said, is that the Jews who live both in and outside the land of Israel, despite “hints of dissonance… want connection.

“They want relationship. They want the Jewish people to be cohesive. They want to maintain what we would call a common form of Judaism, with shared practices. At the same time, there are certain areas of disagreement that remain unresolved, and one of those has to do with the role of the Jerusalem Temple for Jews who live outside Judea. The priests and Jews who lived in the vicinity of Jerusalem were okay with the existence of other temples, but as long as it was crystal clear that those were not real temples.”

Although the specifics of the relationship between the Jews of Judea and the rest of the Jewish world are different now than they are today, “so much of it is so contemporary, and that is why I love the Second Temple era,” Dr. Simkovich said. “All the ways that we talk past each other.

“I love to talk about the word diaspora because the word was invented in the ancient world by Judean Jews and it was used by Judean Jews.”

Not a single text has been found written by diaspora Jews where they apply that term to themselves,” Dr. Sinkovich said. Diaspora Jews didn’t call themselves diaspora Jews.

“Today in Israel, where I am right now, there’s diaspora talk everywhere. There’s the Ministry of the Diaspora. The Jerusalem Post, jpost.com, has a diaspora section. Maybe I’m hypersensitive about this, but I resist being put in a box” — just to be clear, she’s speaking metaphorically — “with a Jew from Singapore, where I might have more in common with Jews in Jerusalem. Why should I be put into this box? It’s a kind of monolithic negative space that’s in contrast to Israeli life.

“I think that Jews in the so-called diaspora in the 1st century BCE felt the same way. They felt a connection to Judea. There’s a lot of paternalism. There’s a lot of evidence of Judean — not Jewish, but Judean — exceptionalism.

“We have incredible letters written by Jews in Jerusalem at the end of the 2nd century BCE to Jews in Egypt, asking them to observe a holiday that will become known as Chanukah. But if you think about Chanukah from the perspective of an Alexandrian Jew, even an observant one, it makes no sense to observe it.

“It’s the only holiday that doesn’t happen to all the Jews. So why would you keep it, even if you’re happy that Jews gained independence and sovereignty? These letters say that every Jew should be in equal relationship to the Jerusalem Temple. They say that you have the same claim to this land that we do. And that, by the way, you should be here.

“These letters are pretty explicit in saying that they want all Jews to return. So again, the contemporary resonance is so interesting.”

After she talked about the echoes of ancient history in our modern times, Dr. Simkovich talked about her own story, which is deeply rooted in our troubled times.

How did she come to head the Jewish Publication Society? Serendipitously and very happily, Dr. Simkovich said, but she might not have even thought of it had her life not taken the turn it did.

She, her husband, and their children lived in Chicago, and “I was the chair of Jewish studies at a Catholic graduate school called Catholic Theological Union,” Dr. Simkovich said. It was a tenured position, and she taught and did research. It was the life she had planned to lead.

Then October 7 happened. Hamas invaded Israel, brutalized, tortured, raped, and killed about 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 and held them hostage on that Simchat Torah in 2023.

“I had a pro-Hamas colleague who praised October 7 on Twitter,” Dr. Simkovich said.

“I brought screenshots of the tweets to the dean, and the school’s response essentially was that I needed to keep my head down. They wanted me to meet with this colleague, and they very generously offered to pay for a mediator, and I said, I’m not. I’m not.

“This isn’t a dispute between a Jew and Muslim — she is Muslim. I basically said to the school, ‘You have to meet with her individually, because she’s violating the faculty code of conduct. This is hate speech.’

“I asked for confidentiality. But in that meeting, they said my name. They said, ‘Malka insisted we meet with you. So they got CAIR involved.” That’s the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“CAIR demanded a meeting with the president of CTA. In that meeting, they called me an Islamophobe, and many other very bad things. Then I essentially was put on notice for my Islamophobia. CAIR found articles that I’d written that to their mind were Islamophobic because they were Zionist.

“So I was called into a meeting with the president and asked to disaffiliate from the school.

“It was very painful.”

Meanwhile, the tweet the other faculty member had posted — she was the only Muslim on the Catholic school’s faculty, just as Dr. Simkovich had been its only Jew — said “something like the genocidal settler colonial state with the blood of millions on its hands has finally gotten its due,” Dr. Simkovich said.

So now the Catholic Theological Union is Judenfrei, but Dr. Simkovich landed on her feet, and the Jewish Publication Society has benefitted from it. Now she’s able to continue her research as she reads, edits, and directs other writers. Although learning how to balance all that is not a negligible task, being at JPS “is wonderful and fulfilling and meaningful,” she said.

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Who: Dr. Malka Simkovich

What: Will talk about “Staying Together in a Dispersed World: Israel-Diaspora Relations in Ancient Times”

When: On Sunday, August 16, at 8 p.m.

Where: At the Jewish Center of Teaneck; it’ll also be on Zoom

How much: Free with reservation, at www.bergenbyachad.com

Sponsored by: the Jewish Publication Society, Bergen B’Yachad, and the Jewish Center of Teaneck.