The ‘Secret’ of the Jewish People’s Success: Eternal Migration

Among other things, the Gaza War has led to an increase in the number of Israelis moving overseas. So what else is new? Jews moving from one place to another has been going on for the past 3,500 years.

It seems strange that the start of the Jewish nation should be conveyed in a Torah portion with the banal title Lekh Lekha: “Start walking.” In fact, this is the key not only to the Jewish People’s longevity, but also in large part to its huge success in so many walks of life.
Abram’s departure from Ur Casdim to walk all the way to Canaan constitutes the archetype of Jewish movement – setting a pattern that has been repeated throughout the ages. Indeed, once he reached Canaan he didn’t stay put, trekking down to Egypt and then back to Canaan. His grandson Jacob also left home to find a wife far away, only returning home after twenty years.

One need not overly detail Moses’s story: escaping from Egypt to Midian, then back to Egypt, and finally the exodus leading to forty years of wandering in the desert with the newly formed Israelite nation. These biblical migrations were transformative experiences – something that would be repeated numerous times in the following three thousand plus years of movement in and out of the Holy Land: in the 6th century BCE from Israel to Babylon and back; the ensuing years witnessed mass voluntary migrations to Egypt and other parts of the Middle East (as far as Rome and Spain); and so on through the next two millennia, with Jews finding a temporary “home” in dozens of places around the world, frequently moving from one to another in a century or two.

To be sure, lots of this moving about was to escape oppression – but just as many Jews moved for the purpose of personal betterment, whether economic or otherwise. The greatest sage of this medieval period, Maimonides, migrated several times to different countries: from Cordoba, Spain to Fez, Morocco, then to Palestine (Acre, Jerusalem, and Hebron), and finally to Cairo, Egypt. By the modern era, not only were Jews to be found almost everywhere, but their dispersion had led to the development of several “sub-cultures”: Ashkenazi (Europe), with sub-sub-groups (Litvak and Galician); Sephardi (Spain and environs), and Edot Ha’Mizrakh (whose very name – the “eastern communities” – represents a high level of cultural differentiation). Not to mention smaller diaspora communities: Ethiopian Jewry, Bnei Menashe (India), etc.

It is here that we find the secret(s) of Jewish success – involving two central elements. First, dispersion. We all learn “not to put your eggs in one basket.” Over the centuries, the Jews certainly haven’t. As a (macabre) thought experiment, imagine for a moment all of world Jewry living in Europe in the 1940s. Better not to think about it – not only because such a situation would have been even more calamitous than it actually was, but because Jewish history wouldn’t have let such a demographic concentration come about. Indeed, there was almost a never a period in history where all Jews suffered persecution or danger everywhere at the same time. Many Jewish “eggs” would be broken, but others remained simultaneously intact in their geographic shell.

If such constant migration ensured Jewish physical survival, it also led to cultural efflorescence through what I call “adapted adoption.” Wherever they went, Jews were influenced by the general culture. A few examples (among many) will suffice here. The Ten Commandments are highly similar to those laws found in the Code of Hammurabi (where Abram came from); names of the “Hebrew” calendar months are Babylonian (either deities, or natural seasonal events); even the fur-capped “Shtreimel” worn by the ultra-Orthodox on Jewish holidays was taken from the 16th century Polish aristocracy.

Very few foreign practices were swallowed wholesale by Jews; rather, they were filtered through their own religio-cultural lens. Yet there is no denying the inclusion and metamorphosis of Gentile customs into the Jewish way of life. To return once more to Maimonides: his ultra-rational and even “scientific” approach to Judaism was Aristotelian through and through.

The modern world has come around to understanding that both elements – dispersion through migration and mutual intellectual fertilization – are the key to survival and flourishing. On the one hand, birds, salmon, whales migrate thousands of miles to stay alive. Indeed, humanity only started to become true homo sapiens (speech, culture etc.) when migrating out of Africa some 70,000 years ago.

On the other hand, countries with the greatest mix of peoples tend to be the most successful. Notwithstanding Trump’s anti-immigration and economic isolationism policies, it was mass migration that always made America great; indeed, last year 46 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants! (https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/report/new-american-fortune-500-2024/)

Perhaps the most famous Jewish example of this: virtually all the great movie studios in the early 20th century were set up by Jewish immigrants (indeed, they established “Hollywood”). That also explains why immigrant-heavy Israel has become the “Startup Nation.”
So what does all this mean for Israel and Zionism? For one, we shouldn’t get too uptight about Israelis leaving the country – just as we ought not to be overly proud of even greater numbers of Jews who have made aliyah to Israel over the years. In both directions, that’s simply the “Jewish” way of living.

Perhaps, then, Lekh Lekha doesn’t mean merely “start walking” but rather the more productive “get going.” Abra(ha)m certainly would have agreed.