How much is the diaspora an important part of Jewish culture?

Almost 2/3 of the world's Jewish population were killed by the Romans, and the dispersion of the Jews who remained meant that Jews would be the minority in virtually every place ... The diaspora has become an integral part of modern Judaism and gained of course a political component around WW II and the Holocaust. read more

The largest, most significant, and culturally most creative Jewish Diaspora in early Jewish history flourished in Alexandria, where, in the 1st century bc, 40 percent of the population was Jewish. Around the 1st century ad, an estimated 5,000,000 Jews lived outside Palestine, about four-fifths of them within the Roman Empire, but they looked to Palestine as the centre of their religious and cultural life. read more