A Split Diaspora Again—A Response to Fergus Millar

Abstract

In this article the attempts made by Fergus Millar to undermine the authors' thesis concerning the ‘split diaspora’ are discarded altogether. Millar, who has elsewhere criticized the split diaspora thesis, has, the authors argue, contributed nothing that would change the view that Rabbinic lore in its different genres was not created by and did not exist in the Greek- and Latin-speaking Jewish Diaspora. On the contrary, he is found to be in agreement with the authors concerning the divide of the Jewish Diaspora in the first centuries of the Common Era into an eastern Hebrew/Aramaic and a Greek and Latin western one (with a third section in between that was more of a mixture of the two).