This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon deported the population of Jerusalem in two major waves. The first came after the siege of 597 BCE, when around seven thousand people were taken from the city. The second and larger deportation followed his destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in 587 BCE, when he also exiled the successors of King Zedekiah.
The community Nebuchadnezzar scattered did not dissolve once it reached Babylon. Deprived of the Temple that had stood at the center of its worship for centuries, it built new institutions to carry religious life forward without an altar or a priesthood at hand, among them the synagogue, a place of gathering and prayer that could exist anywhere its people settled. Those institutions took root during the exile and outlasted it, continuing long after the deportations that first produced them.
What this changed for Judaism's spread was the tradition's first sustained experience of organized religious life outside its own land, built under the pressure of two waves of forced deportation rather than by any prior design. The synagogue that took shape in Babylon gave Judaism a form it could carry into every later exile, long after the deportations of 597 and 587 BCE that produced it had themselves passed into history.