It would have been impossible for the descendants of the small Elephantine community, far removed from its roots in Jerusalem, to have survived if it had not admitted proselytes who became fully-fledged Jews by religion in accordance with the precepts of the Torah. James Parkes has pointed out that 'in the historical narrative of the Old Testament there is little reference to the conversion of non-Israelites. On the other hand, the successive editions of the legal codes recognised that a "stranger" could be joined to the community of lsrael; birth was not the only means of entry.'(1) He goes on to explain that the 'exclusive connection between the God of Israel, the Children of Israel, and the soil of Israel, was broken by two developments. The first was the universalism of the great prophets and their vision of the time when many nations would gather together for worship in Jerusalem; and the second was the dispersion of a large section of the Children of Israel themselves into foreign lands. Both developments encouraged a missionary attitude to the foreign environment of Judaism. The natural theatre for such activities was the diaspora.'

Before the arrival of militant and aggressive religions, Jews were inclined to be missionaries, eager to spread a knowledge of the Torah and to enlist recruits to the Jewish way of life. It was the rise and domination first of Christianity and then of Islam which effectively put an end to this activity and turned the Jewish people, in self-defence, into an inward-looking community.

Proselytism in the Roman period, according to Salo Baron, 'must have been a tremendous force in Jewish life. Although there were no professional missionaries, uninterrupted religious propaganda seems to have gone on throughout the dispersion'(2) - a dispersion that began long before the fall of Jerusalem. How else, except as a result of conversion on a massive scale, is it possible to explain the size of the Diaspora at this time when it far outnumbered the Jewish population of Palestine? It is estimated that there were 8 million Jews in the world in the first century while the population of Palestine was approximately two and a half million including some half million Samaritans, Greeks and Nabateans.(3)

(1)The Foundations of Judaism and Christianity, p. 109.
(2) S. W. Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, vol. 1, p. 172.
(3) ibid., p. 168.