Amotz Asa-El, The Jewish March of Folly (Part III)

The thesis of the third section is summarized in the first full paragraph on page 260:

לו חיו רוב היהודים בארצם, ואילולא הזמינו מנהיגיהם את רומא למשול בהם, ישו לא היה נרצח, חסידיו לא היו יוצאים לכבוש את העולם, הדת היהודית לא היתה הופכת לאובססיה של דת אחרת, והפזורה היהודית לא היתה זמינה למתקפה של האמונה המתחרה. במקום כל אלו, הנצרות שהיקום היהודי הוליד הפכה לדת הרשמית של רומא; הדת היהודית היתה לצרימה התיאולוגית שלה; והיקום היהודי נחשף למתקפה חברתית, משפטית, כלכלית ופיזית שנמשכה מאות שנים וגבתה אלפי קרבנות. בגלל הגיאוגרפיה שלהם הפכו היהודים לפיתוי ולתסכול של דת חדשה, ולקרבנות של הממשלות, הצבאות והאספסוף שדורות של בישופים, חשמנים, כמרים ונזירים הסיתו נגד העם היהודי.

Here is a translation:

Had most of the Jews lived in their own country, and had their leaders not invited Rome to rule them, Jesus would not have been murdered, his followers would not have gone out to conquer the world, the Jewish religion would not have become an obsession of another religion, and the Jewish Diaspora would not have been available to be attacked by the competing faith. Instead, the Christianity that the Jewish "universe" gave birth to became the official religion of Rome; the Jewish religion was its theological scourge; and the Jewish "universe" became exposed to a social, legal, economic, and physical attack that lasted for hundreds of years and took thousands of victims. Because of their geography, the Jews became the temptation and frustration of a new religion, and became the victims of the governments, of the armies and of the mobs that generations of bishops, cardinals, priests and monks incited against the Jewish people.

 Note: Asa-El uses "universe" as a metaphor for the Diaspora. The big bang that created it was the Babylonian conquest of the Kingdom of Judah.

I beg to differ.

The Diaspora gave us strategic depth 

 Conditions for Jews in the Diaspora were not intolerable everywhere and all the time. When things were bad in one place they were good somewhere else, and those Jews who could, migrated from where things were bad to where things were good. So, as local conditions changed, the center of gravity of Jewish life migrated from Mesopotamia to Iberia from Iberia to Poland, and from Poland to North America. Until the rise of modern nation-states, the dispersed Jewish communities were autonomous. It was the rise of modern nationalism, with its insistence on ethnic uniformity, that made a Jewish nation-state necessary for Jewish survival, and that the establishment of that nation-state was facilitated by the strategic depth provided by the Diaspora.

The Samaritans are a counterexample. We dispersed. The Samaritans remained behind. There are 14 million of us. There are one thousand of them.

We would have been persecuted anyway 

 

Even if Judea had remained autonomous, Christianity might have arisen. Herod Antipas had John the Baptist killed. There is no reason to suppose that a Jewish king of Judea wouldn't have had Jesus killed.

Even if Christianity hadn't arisen and become the official state religion of the Roman Empire, some other monotheistic religion would have. In the third century, most enlightened Romans had come to believe that there is only One True God. The only issue was who: is it the God of the Jews and the Christians, Sol Invictus the sun god, or Mithra the god of heaven? In the end, Christianity won. Absent Christianity, some other monotheistic religion would have won. It is the nature of dominant monotheistic religions to not tolerate competition.