The announcement by the Persian king Cyrus following his conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE that exiled Judahites could return to their homeland should have been cause for celebration. Instead, it plunged them into animated debate. Only a small community returned and participated in the construction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem. By the end of the sixth century BCE, they faced a theological conundrum: Had the catastrophic punishment of exile, understood as marking God’s retribution for the people’s sins, come to an end? By the Hellenistic era, most Jews living in their homeland believed that life abroad signified God’s wrath and rejection. Jews living outside of their homeland, however, rejected this notion. From both sides of the diasporic line, Jews wrote letters and speeches that conveyed the sense that their positions had ancient roots in Torah traditions. In this book, Malka Z. Simkovich investigates the rhetorical strategies―such as pseudepigraphy, ventriloquy, and mirroring―that Egyptian and Judean Jews incorporated into their writings about life outside the land of Israel, charting the boundary-marking push and pull that took place within Jewish letters in the Hellenistic era. Drawing on this correspondence and other contemporaneous writings, Simkovich argues that the construction of diaspora during this period―reinforced by some and negated by others―produced a tension that lay at the core of Jewish identity in the ancient world. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of ancient Judaism and to laypersons interested in the questions of a Jewish homeland and Jewish diaspora. “An excellent and thought-provoking analysis of Hellenistic period Jewish literature.” ―Daniel L. Smith-Christopher Catholic Books Review “The dynamic of the Diaspora will, undoubtedly, continue to be debated until the Messiah comes. Until then, participants in this crucial conversation can gain much historical insight into its complexities from Simkovich’s learned and engaging Letters from Home .” ―Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern The Jewish Journal “ Let­ters from Home con­tains fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ples that out­line the ori­gins of Jew­ish self-iden­ti­ty in the home­land and the Dias­po­ra. Simkovich’s sub­tle analy­sis is rel­e­vant for Jews today.” ―Lin­da Kantor-Swerdlow Jewish Book Council “Malka Simkovich’s study of ancient letters provides us not only with a much greater understanding of the relationship of Judean and Diaspora Jewry in Antiquity, but also with a wider perspective on issues that have confronted the Jewish people in modern times.” ―Lawrence H. Schiffman Tradition “ Letters from Home was a joy to read and an excellent follow-up to Simkovich’s Discovering Second Temple Literature . Giving a deep context to these letters, Simkovich breaks down communications between these groups in a way that makes them clear to the reader today. With every letter and each chapter, a case is created and presented to the reader about what Diaspora is and how ancient Jews related to it.” ―Andrew Lillien Association of Jewish Libraries Reviews “Malka Simkovich’s Letters from Home is elegantly written, clearly structured, consistently argued, and certainly thought-provoking. It is particularly strong in its close reading of selected texts from the Hellenistic period.” ―Karel van der Toorn AJS Review “Highlight[s] the diversity, complexity, and nuances needed when approaching the topic of Diaspora in Jewish antiquity well. Graduate students and scholars will largely benefit from this book.” ―Ronald Charles Review of Biblical Literature “A brilliant study of how Second Temple letter-writers and authors constructed diaspora and shaped their own identities, which resonate with our own times as well.” ―Adele Reinhartz, author of Cast Out of the Covenant: Jews and Anti-Judaism in the Gospel of John “ Letters from Home is a brilliant and innovative exploration of ancient Jewish identity-construction that successfully overcomes the biases pervading earlier scholarship. The book’s insightful literary and rhetorical analyses show how Jewish ‘letter-writers’ from both Hellenistic-era Judea and Egypt negotiated the historical and theological meaning of the demographic dispersion of their community, while dialogically shaping their respective identities.” ―Christine Hayes, author of What’s Divine about Divine Law? Early Perspectives An examination of the boundary making and boundary breaking that took place within Jewish letters in the Hellenistic era. Dr. Malka Z. Simkovich is Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. She is the author of The Making of Jewish Universalism: From Exile to Alexandria and Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories That Shaped Early Judaism .