Custom part 2

Contrary to popular opinion, the Romans did NOT exile the Jews from the Land of Israel. Yes, thousands were taken away into slavery; but the bulk of the population remained. However, there was great persecution. When Rome turned to Christianity, the persecution increased greatly, as it now had a theological basis as well as the old Roman desire for world domination. Most of the Jews eventually fled from before this persecution. There was an existing, thriving Jewish community in Babylon (Iraq) since the 6th century BCE. Unlike the Roman Empire, attitude  toward Jews was, for the most part, not only tolerant, but actually positive. The Babylonian Jews even  had a sort of king, called the Exilarch (Reish Galuta) who was given a great deal of official authority over the more or less autonomous Jewish population. To be sure, there were periods of persecution, but these were few and far between. Many of the Jews of the Holy Land fled to Babylon, expanding and enriching the indigenous Jewish population.
As I mentioned in my previous post, after the completion of the Mishnah in the early third century, the rabbis of Israel and Babylon studied this work, commenting and drawing conclusions for Jewish practice; both in the areas of law and custom. Many of the rabbis of the Holy Land did emigrate to Babylon, but many stayed. Those who stayed had to meet and study in secret, as the Byzantine Romans put down any expression of Judaism in the most brutal ways. As a result, the comments on the Mishnah, known as the Gemmara, were, in the Holy Land very brief. After about a century and a half, it ceased altogether. In Babylon, not only did the rabbis meet openly, but there were biannual meetings of the scholars from all over the country, to study together and "compare notes".While it was generally acknowledged that the Israeli rabbis were greater, the rabbis of Babylon were able to delve into their studies far more. The composition of the Babylonian Talmud took place over a period of at least three hundred years, with many historians believing it was more like six hundred years. Being a more complete work, it was eventually (about the year 900) accepted by the entire Jewish world as more authoritative. In the area of custom, while the Jerusalem Talmud puts far more emphasis on it that the Babylonian, the post Talmudic Israeli community and its rabbis even went so far as to establish that a custom could outweigh a law, based on an obscure passage in the Jerusalem Talmud..The Babylonian rabbis opposed this view strongly. There was even a period of about a century when the Jews of Israel and Babylon were observing holidays on different dates! All agreed about the law, but the Israeli community argued that their custom overrode the law. Eventually, the Babylonian view prevailed.
Now, when the Jews fled the Holy land, and many went to Babylon, many others fled to Europe. Large numbers fled to the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), while many others fled to Italy. Charlemagne invited Italian Jews to move into his empire in France and Germany.The former community is known as Sepharadic, the latter Ashkenazic, from the Medieval names for Spain and Germany respectively. Although both populations originated in the Holy Land, for various geopolitical reasons, the Ashkenazic community had easier access to the Israeli scholars, maintaining the practices of the Jerusalem Talmud for many centuries, while the Sepharadic community had easier access to Babylon, and, at an early era, had gone over to Babylonian practices. When it became accepted that we follow the Babylonian Talmud, the Sepharadim had no problem; they had been doing that for centuries! For the Ashkenazic community, there was now a fundamental crisis. Their common law was the Jerusalem Talmud; their statutory law was now the Babylonian Talmud. I shall examine in my next article how this influenced the remarkable birth of a new approach to practice, study, and general perception of Judaism in the Ashkenazic community, and what happened when the inevitable "cross pollination" between the communities occurred.