Every Jewish New Year, thousands of Hasidic pilgrims travel into Ukraine to gather at the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. Their destination is Uman, but behind that pilgrimage lies a much longer and more complicated journey through Jerusalem, Babylon, Persia, the Caucasus, Khazaria, medieval Europe, Poland-Lithuania, the lands of present-day Ukraine and finally the modern State of Israel.
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Every Rosh Hashanah, an unusual migration takes place into central Ukraine. Thousands of Hasidic Jewish pilgrims arrive from Israel, the United States, Europe and elsewhere to celebrate the Jewish New Year in Uman. The immediate explanation is straightforward: Uman contains the grave of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the influential Hasidic teacher who died there in 1810 and whose followers continue to regard gathering around him at Rosh Hashanah as having exceptional spiritual significance.
Yet Rabbi Nachman's grave explains only the final few metres of the journey. Behind it lies more than 2,500 years of movement through conquest, exile, conversion, migration, religious scholarship and cultural transformation. Jerusalem and Babylon are part of the story, but so are Persia, the Caucasus, Khazaria, Germany, Poland-Lithuania, the territories that became modern Ukraine and eventually Palestine and Israel.
It is tempting to draw a single line between those places and describe it as the migration of one people. The evidence does not permit anything so simple. Populations moved, but so did texts, religious ideas and languages. People converted, assimilated and intermarried. Communities disappeared in one place and emerged in another, sometimes with demonstrable connections and sometimes with connections that remain contested.
The distinction is fundamental to understanding the road from Babylon to Uman.
When Jerusalem Fell
One of the defining events in Jewish history occurred in the sixth century BCE. Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon conquered Jerusalem and, following renewed rebellion against Babylonian rule, destroyed Jerusalem and the First Temple in 586 BCE. Part of Judah's population was deported into Babylonia, beginning what became known as the Babylonian Exile.
The exile forced an extraordinary question upon the Jewish people. Could a civilisation whose religion and national identity were intimately connected with Jerusalem, its Temple and its land survive after losing all three?
The answer proved to be yes. Less than half a century later, Babylon itself fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BCE. Cyrus permitted displaced peoples to return to their ancestral territories, and some Jews returned to Jerusalem. Others remained in Mesopotamia, establishing communities whose intellectual influence would eventually extend far beyond the region.
What began as captivity gradually became something quite different. Babylon became one of the great centres of Jewish civilisation.
From Temple to Text
The Jewish world continued changing dramatically during the centuries that followed. The Second Temple was constructed in Jerusalem, Judea passed through Persian, Hellenistic and eventually Roman rule, and competing schools of Jewish religious thought developed.
Then came another catastrophe. Roman forces destroyed the Second Temple in 70 CE.
Judaism again confronted the problem of survival without its central sanctuary. Rabbinic Judaism increasingly organised religious life around Torah, synagogue, prayer, religious law and scholarship rather than the sacrificial system of the Jerusalem Temple. The Mishnah, compiled around the beginning of the third century CE, preserved and organised generations of Jewish oral legal tradition. Centuries of commentary and argument followed.
From the great rabbinical academies of Mesopotamia, including Sura and Pumbedita, emerged the work that became known as the Babylonian Talmud.
The historical irony is striking. Babylon entered Jewish memory as a place of captivity, yet the lands of the exile eventually produced one of Judaism's most influential intellectual traditions.
A Civilisation That Could Travel
The Talmud is sometimes casually described as Jewish scripture, but that description does not adequately explain what it is. It combines the Mishnah with generations of rabbinical discussion known as the Gemara, encompassing religious law, biblical interpretation, civil disputes, ethics, stories, theology and often vigorous disagreement.
That is important when individual Talmudic passages are extracted today and presented as definitive statements of what all Jews believe. The text frequently records opposing positions, arguments and minority opinions. A quotation can establish that a particular proposition appears within the Talmud without necessarily establishing that it represents the final rabbinic ruling or a universal Jewish belief.
More important to this story is what the Talmud represents historically. A kingdom requires territory. An army requires resources. A government requires institutions. But a textual civilisation can be carried in memory, manuscripts, education and religious practice.
Ideas can migrate even when populations do not travel along precisely the same route.
That principle becomes increasingly important as the story moves north from Mesopotamia towards the Caucasus and the Eurasian steppe.
When Judaism and Christianity Parted Ways
During these same centuries another transformation was taking place. Christianity had emerged from the Jewish world of Roman Judea. Jesus, his earliest followers and the first Christian communities were Jewish, while Christianity inherited the Hebrew scriptures and concepts including covenant, Messiah, sacred history and sacrifice.
Over subsequent centuries, however, Christianity and rabbinic Judaism became increasingly distinct religious traditions. Christianity expanded through the Roman world and eventually became an imperial religion, while rabbinic Judaism developed its institutions and scholarship without political sovereignty.
The separation was neither immediate nor tidy. Jews and Christians continued living alongside one another, arguing over scripture and developing competing interpretations of a shared religious inheritance.
This makes claims that one tradition simply “imitated” the other difficult to establish merely from similarities in ritual. Shared practices may represent common inheritance, parallel development, later borrowing or direct competition. Determining which requires chronology and evidence, not simply resemblance.
By the early medieval period those religious worlds were meeting again much farther east, in territories that today form parts of Russia and Ukraine.
The Chosen and the Nations
Another issue carried through this history is the distinction between Jews and non-Jews. The Talmud did not invent the idea of Israel as a chosen people. That concept belongs to the much earlier covenantal tradition of the Hebrew Bible. Nor did it invent the word goy. In biblical Hebrew, goy means nation and can even be applied to Israel itself, although over time goy and goyim increasingly became terms for non-Jews.
Rabbinic Judaism inherited the covenantal distinction and developed an extensive legal framework around Jewish obligations, conversion and relations with non-Jews. Some rabbinic passages draw sharp distinctions between insiders and outsiders, while others emphasise justice, restraint, forgiveness and humanity's common descent.
It would therefore be misleading either to sanitise the Talmud as a collection solely of universal humanitarian teachings or to reduce it to a doctrine dividing humanity into immutable superior and inferior races. Conversion alone complicates such an interpretation, because a non-Jew can become Jewish.
The more interesting historical question is how a community could preserve such a powerful sense of distinction while living for centuries among other peoples. That question follows the story from Babylon into another extraordinary Jewish episode.
Between Christianity and Islam
Between approximately the seventh and tenth centuries, the Khazar Khaganate dominated a strategically important region encompassing parts of the northern Caucasus, lower Volga, Caspian and Black Sea worlds. The Khazars were a predominantly Turkic-speaking steppe people positioned between some of the great powers and trading networks of Eurasia.
Then something remarkable happened. Part of the Khazar ruling elite adopted Judaism.
The extent and precise date of the conversion remain debated, but the existence of Jewish Khazar rulers is well established in medieval sources. The enduring question is why the leadership of a Turkic empire positioned between the Christian Byzantine Empire and the Islamic world chose Judaism.
One compelling explanation is geopolitical independence. Christianity potentially pulled Khazaria towards Byzantium. Islam potentially pulled it towards the Caliphate. Judaism offered an Abrahamic monotheistic religion without requiring submission to either neighbouring religious-political sphere.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Two Hundred Years Together opens its historical narrative at precisely this point, under the heading “From the Beginnings in Khazaria.”
Drawing upon the work of Jewish historian J. D. Brutskus, Solzhenitsyn describes Jews moving from Persia through the Derbent Pass towards the lower Volga and the Khazar capital, while presenting the Khazar conversion as a means of avoiding dependence upon either Baghdad or Byzantium.
This does not settle the Khazar question. But it gives the route from Persia through the Caucasus considerably more historical substance than a speculative arrow on a map.
From Babylon to Persia, and Perhaps Beyond
Here the connection becomes particularly intriguing.
Solzhenitsyn also discusses the work of nineteenth-century Jewish Orientalist Abraham Harkavy, who argued that some Jewish communities of what later became Russia originated among Jews who had come from the Black Sea and Caucasus and whose ancestors had lived there since the Assyrian and Babylonian captivities.
But Solzhenitsyn includes an essential qualification: exact proof is absent.
That is precisely where the historical boundary should remain.
There is evidence of ancient Jewish communities around the Black Sea and Crimea. There were Jewish networks through Persia and the Caucasus. Judaism reached Khazaria and was adopted by part of its ruling elite. Historical scholars have proposed connections extending back towards populations displaced during the ancient exiles.
What we cannot do is turn those pieces into an uninterrupted genealogical chain:
Babylonian Jews → Persian Jews → Khazar Jews → Ashkenazi Jews.
The evidence does not establish that.
But neither does the absence of such proof make Khazaria irrelevant.
Kiev: Where the Roads Meet
The next part of Solzhenitsyn's account is particularly important to our journey because it complicates the usual either-or debate over Khazar and Ashkenazi origins.
He describes Jews reaching medieval Kiev through different routes. His sources identify Jewish-Khazar elements associated with Crimea and the Khazar world while also recording western, or Ashkenazi, Jews arriving through east-west commerce and possibly as a consequence of persecution in Europe during the First Crusade.
That suggests a more productive question than asking whether the Jews of Eastern Europe were either Ashkenazi or Khazar.
Could different Jewish populations have converged in the territories that later became part of modern Ukraine?
That possibility is entirely compatible with the broader historical pattern. Communities migrate, merge, adopt languages, intermarry and absorb newcomers. A population can consequently contain ancestry from several routes without any one of those routes explaining the entire population.
Medieval Kiev also became a point of direct Jewish-Christian encounter. Solzhenitsyn describes Jews living in Kiev around the time Prince Vladimir adopted Byzantine Christianity for the Rus' in 988. He records subsequent religious debate between Christians and Jews and connects this intellectual encounter with Metropolitan Hilarion's influential Sermon on Law and Grace.
Here again, the map is carrying more than people.
It is carrying competing ideas.
Where Did the Khazars Go?
Khazar power declined dramatically during the tenth century. Changing economic conditions and military campaigns, particularly those associated with the Rus' ruler Sviatoslav, weakened the Khaganate until it disappeared as a major political power.
Its population, of course, did not evaporate.
Some presumably remained where they were, while others migrated or were absorbed into neighbouring peoples. Some Jewish Khazars may similarly have entered other Jewish communities. What cannot presently be demonstrated is a single mass migration in which Khazaria collapsed and its Jewish inhabitants simply became the Ashkenazi population of Eastern Europe.
This is where the strongest version of the Khazar hypothesis outruns the evidence.
The existence of Jewish Khazars is history. The possibility of some Khazar contribution to later Jewish populations is reasonable. The proposition that Ashkenazi Jews are principally descendants of Khazar converts is a much larger claim and remains disputed.
There is, however, another historical witness to what happened farther west.
It is language.
The Yiddish Clue
For centuries Yiddish was the everyday language of millions of Ashkenazi Jews across Central and Eastern Europe. Its structure is particularly important because Yiddish is fundamentally Germanic rather than Turkic.
Its grammar and much of its vocabulary developed from medieval German varieties. It incorporated a substantial Hebrew and Aramaic component, particularly in religious and communal vocabulary, and as Yiddish-speaking populations expanded eastwards it acquired increasingly significant Slavic influences.
The language therefore preserves several layers of history within itself: Germanic foundations, Hebrew and Aramaic religious inheritance and Eastern European linguistic contact.
This presents a significant difficulty for the strongest version of the Khazar hypothesis. If the Ashkenazi population had overwhelmingly descended from a Turkic-speaking Khazar population, the absence of a correspondingly dominant Turkic foundation in Yiddish requires explanation.
But it does not demonstrate that no Khazar ancestry entered Ashkenazi populations. Smaller groups can merge into larger populations and adopt the language of the surrounding community remarkably quickly.
Once again, the evidence points towards mixture rather than a single road.
Jewish Europe Moves East
From medieval Central Europe, enormous Jewish communities eventually developed farther east. Poland and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became one of the great centres of Jewish civilisation, encompassing substantial territories that today lie within Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine.
Solzhenitsyn's historical account describes Poland as the location where the largest Jewish community of the region developed between approximately the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. He then records substantial movement of Polish and Czech Jews from the sixteenth century onward into eastern territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, including lands corresponding to present-day Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.
By now the Jewish civilisation occupying this territory was culturally complex. Its religious texts preserved Hebrew and Aramaic traditions extending back towards antiquity. Its everyday language was increasingly Yiddish. Its surroundings included Polish, Lithuanian and Ruthenian-speaking populations, with Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian linguistic identities developing through the region's subsequent history.
And its experience was not simply one of cultural flourishing.
1648: The Khmelnytsky Uprising in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky led a major Cossack uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The conflict unfolded largely across the Commonwealth's Ruthenian territories, encompassing substantial areas of what is now Ukraine.
For Jewish communities living throughout these lands, the uprising and the wider wars that followed were catastrophic. Numerous communities were destroyed and many thousands of people were killed, although historical estimates of the death toll vary considerably. The upheaval became one of the defining traumas of early modern Eastern European Jewish history.
The uprising also transformed the region politically. It resulted in the emergence of the Cossack Hetmanate and began a prolonged struggle involving the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Muscovy and other regional powers.
Using Ukraine as a modern geographical reference is useful for today's reader, but describing the territory simply as Ukraine in 1648 risks implying the existence of the modern Ukrainian state. In this period, the Ruthenian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and subsequently the Cossack Hetmanate, provide greater political precision.
A little more than a century later, another episode of mass violence struck the city at the centre of our story.
In 1768, during the Koliivshchyna uprising, Haidamak forces captured Uman and massacred large numbers of Jewish and Polish inhabitants. Again, estimates differ, but the event became an important part of Uman's Jewish historical memory.
Only four years later, Rabbi Nachman was born into the Eastern European Jewish world that had survived those upheavals.
Hasidism Rises in the Lands of Present-Day Ukraine
Rabbi Nachman was the great-grandson of Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, traditionally regarded as the foundational figure of Hasidism. During the eighteenth century, Hasidism transformed significant parts of Eastern European Jewish religious life.
It did not replace the Talmudic tradition. Instead, it developed within it while placing new emphasis upon spiritual devotion, mystical experience, prayer, joy and the relationship between followers and charismatic religious teachers known as tzaddikim or rebbes.
The historical layering by this point is remarkable. An eighteenth-century Jew living in the lands that today form western and central Ukraine might speak Yiddish in everyday life, pray and read scripture in Hebrew, encounter Aramaic in the Talmud, live among predominantly Slavic-speaking populations and belong to a religious tradition whose intellectual inheritance stretched back through Europe towards the academies of ancient Mesopotamia.
Then one particular Hasidic teacher made Uman his final home.
Why Uman?
Rabbi Nachman moved to Uman during the last period of his life. The city's murdered Jewish population held particular significance for him, and he wished to be buried there. He died of tuberculosis in 1810, aged just 38.
His grave subsequently became the spiritual centre of the Breslov Hasidic movement.
Unlike many Hasidic movements, Breslov did not develop a continuing dynasty of rebbes replacing its founder. Rabbi Nachman therefore remained its central spiritual teacher after death.
He had also placed exceptional importance upon Rosh Hashanah. Followers gathered around him during the festival while he lived, and after his death his leading disciple, Nathan of Breslov, helped perpetuate the tradition of gathering at Nachman's grave.
The pilgrimage survived the Russian Empire, revolution, Soviet religious suppression, the Holocaust, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of independent Ukraine.
It has even survived war.
The Challenge of Assimilation
Yet physical survival was only one dimension of Jewish continuity. Modern Europe presented a very different challenge: what happened when Jews were increasingly permitted to enter the societies around them?
This is where Two Hundred Years Together becomes particularly useful. Solzhenitsyn records the nineteenth-century debate among Russian Jews over whether emancipation would inevitably lead to assimilation. Jewish intellectuals could embrace Russian language and culture while attempting simultaneously to preserve Jewish historical consciousness. One formulation he records captures the tension perfectly: “Be a man on the street and a Jew at home.”
That tension would become one of the great questions of modern Jewish identity.
Religion alone no longer explained Jewishness. A Jew could become secular while continuing to identify culturally or nationally as Jewish. Yiddish could decline while Jewish identity remained. Intermarriage could blur ancestral boundaries. Political movements could offer entirely different futures.
One answer was assimilation.
Another was revolution.
Another was Zionism.
From Russian Jewry to Zionism
The late nineteenth century was an age of nationalism throughout Europe. Germans, Italians, Poles, Slavs and others increasingly conceived themselves as nations entitled to political expression.
Jewish nationalism developed within that same environment.
The First Zionist Congress took place in 1897, the same year in which the Jewish socialist Bund was founded. Solzhenitsyn's account illustrates just how politically diverse Russian Jewish society had become. Zionists, Bundists, socialists, assimilationists and religious traditionalists offered competing answers to the same fundamental question: what future should Jews pursue in the modern world?
Theodor Herzl supplied the most consequential answer. If antisemitism could not ultimately be solved through assimilation, Jews required political sovereignty of their own.
Palestine increasingly became the focus of that project.
Solzhenitsyn's discussion of Herzl records the transformation explicitly: the solution to Jewish statelessness, in Herzl's thinking, became the creation of a sovereign Jewish state.
The historical movement that had spent centuries adapting to diaspora now contained a movement dedicated to reversing it.
From Eastern Europe to Palestine
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, successive waves of Jewish migration brought people from the Russian Empire and Eastern Europe into Ottoman Palestine. They joined Jewish communities already living there and migrants arriving from elsewhere.
The process accelerated during the twentieth century. Antisemitism, pogroms, revolutionary upheaval and eventually the Holocaust transformed both the scale and urgency of Jewish migration.
But the movement towards Palestine should not be mistaken for unanimous Jewish agreement. Zionism competed with assimilation, socialism, religious anti-Zionism and other conceptions of Jewish life. Even decades after Israel's establishment, arguments continued over whether Jewish civilisation ultimately belonged in a sovereign homeland or could continue indefinitely in diaspora.
Solzhenitsyn's later chapters preserve that debate. Some of the Jewish writers he cites regarded Israel as essential to Jewish survival, while others defended the diaspora as an extraordinarily durable form of civilisation.
The ancient question had returned in modern form.
Must a civilisation possess territory to survive?
1948: Israel
In 1948, the State of Israel was established.
For the first time since antiquity, Jewish political sovereignty again existed in the historic land of Israel. Jewish migration subsequently brought populations not merely from Europe but from the Middle East, North Africa, the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
Modern Israel therefore cannot accurately be understood simply as the endpoint of an Eastern European migration. It brought together Jewish populations whose histories had unfolded across very different regions for centuries.
Something else remarkable happened.
Hebrew returned as an everyday national language.
A language that had survived for centuries principally through scripture, prayer and scholarship became the working language of government, schools, newspapers, families and a modern state.
The relationship between territory, language and identity had changed again.
What Survived the Journey?
Across this history, almost every conventional marker of civilisation changed.
Political sovereignty disappeared and returned. Geographic centres moved. Languages changed. Populations mixed. Religious practices developed. Empires rose around Jewish communities and subsequently disappeared.
Yet Jewish identity survived.
Solzhenitsyn's later discussion of assimilation and diaspora exposes the difficulty of explaining why. Soviet Jewish families could absorb Russian language and culture while retaining some Jewish self-awareness even when religious observance weakened dramatically. Later Jewish writers debated whether assimilation would ultimately dissolve diaspora Jewry or whether diaspora itself was one of the mechanisms that had made Jewish civilisation so extraordinarily difficult to extinguish.
Perhaps the answer is that no single element carried Jewish continuity.
It was not simply blood because conversion and intermarriage occurred.
It was not simply language because Jewish populations repeatedly changed everyday languages.
It was not simply territory because Jewish civilisation survived almost two millennia without political sovereignty in Jerusalem.
And it was not simply religious observance because secular Jewish identities emerged without immediately dissolving Jewish national or cultural consciousness.
What travelled most successfully may have been something broader: a portable civilisation consisting of texts, law, ritual, family, education, institutions, stories and collective memory.
The Journey in Time
Seen across more than 2,500 years, the movement looks something like this. The arrows do not represent one uninterrupted genealogical migration. At different points they describe forced migration, settlement, religious transmission, conversion, language, political movements and the migration of actual populations.
c. 586 BCE | Jerusalem → Babylon: Nebuchadnezzar II destroys Jerusalem and the First Temple and deports part of Judah's population into Babylonia.
539 BCE onward | Babylon → Persian Mesopotamia: Cyrus the Great conquers Babylon and permits displaced peoples to return. Some Jews return to Jerusalem, while others remain and develop enduring communities in Mesopotamia.
c. 515 BCE–70 CE | Jerusalem → Second Temple Judaism: Jewish religious life again centres upon Jerusalem while Jewish communities simultaneously exist throughout the Mediterranean and Near East.
1st century CE onward | Judea → Christianity: Christianity emerges from Second Temple Judaism before developing into a separate religion and spreading through the Roman world.
70–c. 600 CE | Temple Judaism → Rabbinic Judaism: Following Rome's destruction of the Second Temple, Jewish religious life increasingly reorganises around Torah, synagogue, prayer and rabbinic scholarship.
c. 3rd–6th centuries CE | Babylonia → Talmud: The Mesopotamian rabbinical academies flourish and the Babylonian Talmud develops into one of the foundational intellectual works of rabbinic Judaism.
Late antiquity–early Middle Ages | Persia → Caucasus and Black Sea: Jewish communities and trading networks exist across Persia, the Caucasus, Crimea and surrounding regions. Some historians have proposed population connections extending back towards the ancient exiles, although continuous descent cannot be demonstrated.
c. 7th–10th centuries | Caucasus/Volga → Khazaria: The Turkic Khazar state dominates an important Eurasian crossroads. Part of its ruling elite adopts Judaism, probably during the eighth or ninth century.
c. 10th century | Khazaria → fragmentation: Khazar political power collapses. Its populations remain, migrate and assimilate. The ultimate fate of specifically Jewish Khazars is incompletely documented.
c. 10th–12th centuries | Khazar/Crimean world + Western Europe → Kiev: Sources discussed by Solzhenitsyn describe both Jewish-Khazar elements and western Ashkenazi Jews appearing in medieval Kiev, suggesting potentially overlapping Jewish populations rather than one exclusive origin.
c. 10th–15th centuries | German-speaking Europe → Ashkenazi civilisation: Distinctive Ashkenazi Jewish communities develop strongly in the Rhineland and elsewhere in Central Europe.
c. 10th–15th centuries | German-speaking Europe → Yiddish: Yiddish develops on a predominantly Germanic linguistic foundation, incorporating substantial Hebrew and Aramaic vocabulary and later Slavic influences.
c. 13th–18th centuries | Central Europe → Poland-Lithuania: One of the world's largest Jewish populations develops within Poland and subsequently the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
16th century onward | Poland and Central Europe → eastern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Significant Jewish migration moves farther east into territories of the Commonwealth corresponding substantially to parts of present-day Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania, contributing to the enormous Jewish civilisation that develops across these lands.
1648 onward | Ruthenian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: The Khmelnytsky uprising brings catastrophic violence to many Jewish communities amid a Cossack rebellion against Polish-Lithuanian rule. The conflict contributes to the emergence of the Cossack Hetmanate.
1768 | Uman: Jewish and Polish inhabitants are massacred during the Koliivshchyna uprising. Uman at this time lay within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in territory now part of Ukraine.
c. 1740s–1800 | Lands of present-day Ukraine → Hasidism: The Baal Shem Tov and subsequent teachers transform Eastern European Jewish religious life as Hasidism spreads through Yiddish-speaking communities.
1810 | Uman → Breslov: Rabbi Nachman dies and is buried in Uman. His grave becomes the focal point of the Breslov Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage.
19th century | Eastern Europe → competing Jewish futures: Emancipation, secularisation and modern nationalism produce competing movements including assimilationism, socialism, Bundism and Zionism.
1897 | Europe → political Zionism: The First Zionist Congress gives organised political expression to the project of establishing a Jewish national home.
Late 19th century–1948 | Eastern Europe and elsewhere → Palestine: Successive waves of Jewish migration contribute to the expanding Jewish population of Ottoman and later British Mandatory Palestine.
1939–1945 | European Jewish civilisation shattered: Nazi Germany and its collaborators murder approximately six million Jews in the Holocaust, devastating the centuries-old Jewish civilisation of Eastern Europe.
1948 | Palestine → State of Israel: Israel declares independence. Jewish immigration subsequently brings communities from Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and elsewhere into the new state.
Late 20th century | Soviet Union → Israel and the West: Soviet Jewish emigration expands, particularly from the 1970s onward, carrying another major Jewish population out of territories where Jewish communities had lived for centuries. Solzhenitsyn identifies this mass emigration as a major historical boundary in the Russian-Jewish story.
Late 20th century–present | Israel and Diaspora → Uman: With Soviet restrictions gone, the Breslov Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage expands dramatically. Thousands of Jews, including many Israelis, travel back into independent Ukraine each year to visit Rabbi Nachman's grave.
Three Maps, Not One
Reduced to one line, the journey appears deceptively simple:
Jerusalem → Babylon → Persia → Caucasus → Khazaria → Kiev → Central Europe → Poland-Lithuania → lands of present-day Ukraine → Uman → Palestine → Israel.
But there are really three maps laid over one another.
The first is the movement of people. It includes exile, migration, conversion, intermarriage, persecution, resettlement and assimilation.
The second is the movement of language. Hebrew and Aramaic carried religious and scholarly traditions. Yiddish developed in medieval Europe and travelled eastwards, absorbing Slavic influences. Russian, Polish, Ukrainian and other languages entered Jewish secular life. Modern Hebrew eventually became the everyday language of Israel.
The third is the movement of ideas. Biblical tradition travelled from ancient Israel. Rabbinic scholarship flourished in Babylon. Judaism crossed Persia and the Caucasus. Medieval Jewish scholarship developed throughout Europe. Hasidism emerged in Eastern Europe. Zionism transformed an ancient attachment to the Land of Israel into a modern political movement.
Those three maps intersect repeatedly.
They are not identical.
From Babylon to Uman, and Israel
And that brings the journey back to where we began.
A twenty-first-century Israeli can speak modern Hebrew in a Jewish state established in 1948, study religious arguments written largely in Aramaic more than a thousand years earlier in Mesopotamia, inherit traditions developed among Yiddish-speaking Jews in Eastern Europe, board an aircraft in Tel Aviv and travel into Ukraine to pray beside the grave of an eighteenth-century Hasidic teacher.
The historical path behind that journey cannot be reduced to a single bloodline. Nor can it be adequately explained by a single language or territory. Babylonian scholarship travelled without requiring every Jew to leave Babylon. Judaism reached Khazaria without making every Khazar Jewish. Ashkenazi communities developed in Central Europe before expanding dramatically eastwards. Different Jewish populations encountered one another in the lands surrounding Kiev and the Black Sea. Yiddish travelled into the lands that now form Ukraine, Hasidism emerged there, Zionism redirected part of European Jewry towards Palestine, and Israel eventually restored Jewish political sovereignty.
Yet the journey did not finish in Israel.
Every Rosh Hashanah, thousands leave that Jewish state and travel back across the historical map to Uman.
The direction of travel itself tells us something.
Empires disappeared. Borders moved. Languages changed. Populations migrated, converted, assimilated and intermarried. Jerusalem fell, Babylon fell, Persia fell, Khazaria disappeared, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth vanished, Imperial Russia collapsed and the Soviet Union followed it.
Yet the memory travelled.
Perhaps that is the most remarkable feature of the entire 2,500-year journey from Jerusalem to Babylon, from Babylon through the great Jewish diaspora, through the contested crossroads of Khazaria and Kiev, into the Yiddish civilisation of Eastern Europe, through Uman and eventually to Israel.
When almost everything surrounding a civilisation can change, what ultimately makes that civilisation continuous: ancestry, language, territory, religion, law, or the collective memory carried from one generation to the next?
Addendum: A Note on Ukraine and the 1648 Uprising
The 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising took place largely across territory that today forms part of Ukraine. At the time, however, much of the region involved consisted of Ruthenian lands within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and the conflict subsequently contributed to the emergence of the Cossack Hetmanate.
The name Ukraine has much older origins than the modern state. Forms of Ukraina appear in medieval East Slavic sources, including the Kyiv Chronicle under the year 1187. The word has traditionally been associated with krai, a term carrying meanings connected with an edge, boundary, territory or region. It has consequently often been translated or interpreted as “borderland”, “frontier” or “lands on the edge.” Scholars have debated the precise linguistic interpretation and whether particular medieval uses meant a frontier specifically or a defined territory or region. What is clear is that its medieval appearance should not be confused with the existence of a modern sovereign state called Ukraine.
Following the collapse of the Russian Empire, the name acquired a modern political meaning. The Ukrainian People's Republic was proclaimed in November 1917. A Soviet Ukrainian republic subsequently emerged during the revolutionary conflicts, and in 1922 Soviet Ukraine became one of the founding republics of the USSR. It was later formally known as the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
On 24 August 1991, as the Soviet Union was disintegrating, the Ukrainian parliament declared independence. The decision was overwhelmingly endorsed by referendum on 1 December 1991, establishing the present sovereign state of Ukraine.
Accordingly, references in this feature to “present-day Ukraine” are geographical. For the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising, describing the setting as the Ruthenian lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in territory that is now Ukraine, is more historically precise.
This distinction matters in a story spanning more than 2,500 years. The land remained while empires, borders and political names repeatedly changed around it.