The empirical study of Jews from the destruction of the Second Temple to the Enlightenment allows us to understand the diversity of the Judean heritage; examine the evolution of Jewish culture(s) from a temple-centered, agricultural civilization led by kings and by priests to a decentralized yet ultimately cohesive diasporic civilization led by scholars and other public figures; evaluate how the members of the Jewish nation in-exile understood and maintained their cultural distinctiveness, interconnectedness, and sense of transcendent purpose across vast expanses of time and space; gauge how culture areas of the Judean Diaspora—for instance, Bavel, Sepharad, Ashkenaz—emerged and how they shaped Jewish civilization; see that rather than merely “praying and suffering,” ordinary and extraordinary Jews in various diasporic settings selected foreign cultural material, domesticated it, and acted in order to give meaning to Jewish life, thereby preserving and (re)creating Jewish culture; and thriving, at least psychically, while entire civilizations rose and fell around them, and come face to face with a living, breathing, complex human heritage, not with hazy Biblical archetypes or deracinated, modern ones   

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