The Israelite commander Barak depicted in a mosaic in an ancient Huqoq synagogue in northern Israel. Photo: Jim Haberman

I recently read that the public will soon have access to an ancient Galilean synagogue excavated at Huqoq, 12.5 kilometers northwest of Tiberius, Israel.

The fifth century synagogue includes a finely detailed mosaic floor that clearly displays figural art of animals and Biblical scenes, such as Samson carrying the gate of Gaza on his shoulders, as well as a complete Helios-zodiac cycle.

The Huqoq synagogue was built when the Roman Empire was under Christian rule, a 300-year period that was oppressive to Jews. The archeologists expected to document a diminished Jewish presence in the Holy Land. Yet they found the opposite. This village was flourishing and prospering, a point that also applies to several other synagogue sites found in Galilee and elsewhere in the region. Clearly, Jews could and did build monumental, richly decorated congregational halls of prayer and worship while living under Christian domination.

In fact, more than 100 ancient synagogue sites have been uncovered in the Holy Land to date, and more are found every year. For example, on Aug. 3, newly discovered ruins of an ancient Golan synagogue  were described in The Jerusalem Post.

Yet the common understanding, in both the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, even today, is that Jewish sovereignty ended after the Roman capture of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and that the Jewish people were scattered to all points of the globe, only to return to their ancestral home after 2,000 years of wandering.

In a 2018 article about where home is for the Jews, David Weinfeld asked whether too much time had elapsed after 2,000 years for the Jewish return to Israel to count as a return.

The truth is that while it is common to speak of 20 centuries of Jewish exile, the Jews never left the Land of Israel. This is the main point of a wonderfully illustrated book, Twenty Centuries of Jewish Life in the Holy Land: The Forgotten Generations.  

Edited by the Israeli archeologist Dan Bahat, and first published in 1975, the book provides evidence of a “continuity of Jewish presence and performance in the Land of Israel … even if a large part of the nation was driven from one exile to another, many stayed on, reinforced from time to time by returning exiles.”

The claim that the Jews were exiled from the Holy Land in 70 CE is not supported by archeology, nor by demographics. In fact, the Jewish population of the Holy Land was large enough to revolt against Byzantine rule in the fourth century — and the same applied to the Gallus Revolt, and again in the seventh century, to the Heraclius Revolt.

In a 2014 column on the blog site Vridar, Neil Godfrey refers to “The Myth of Judean Exile 70 CE.” Where does the myth come from? Godfrey credits Christian leaders and the concept of “the wandering Jew,” punished for rejecting Christ. Perhaps the Jewish people themselves are also to blame, by emphasizing a return to Zion after 2,000 years of exile, the romantic narrative associated with the modern Zionist movement?

A few weeks ago, Ronald S. Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said Israel is losing the information war. He is right. We live in a post-truth world in which the spread of lies and misinformation, including that there is no connection between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel, is enhanced many-fold by social media. However, when will we Jews learn our own history?

In 70 CE, Judea was not independent. It was a Roman province. Its sovereignty was lost to Rome 100 years earlier due to infighting among the Jews during the Hasmonean dynasty. Nevertheless, in spite of more than one disastrous revolt against the Romans, 300 years of Roman-Christian rule, Muslim invaders, Crusaders, natural disasters, and efforts to restrict Jewish immigration, Jews continued to inhabit the Land of Israel continuously until modern times.

Jacob Sivak, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.