Starting in 586B.C. the Jewish community that was living in Judah was taken into captivity by the Babylonians. This event was known as the Babylonian Captivity or Exile. Around the year 536B.C. "Cyrus, king of Persia," (Ezra 1:1) said "Let everyone who has curvived, in whatever place he may have dwelt, be assisted by the people of that place with silver, gold, goods, and cattle, together with free offerings for the house of God in Jerusalem" (Ezra 1:4). So after fifty years of exile under the Babylonians, the Jews were free to go with gifts from the Persians back to thier homes in Judah. The scattered Jews were lost, and like the days of Moses, the Jews needed a leader from God. One of the men chosen to lead a group of Jews back to their Promised land was Ezra, a descendant of Aaron, the high priest, and scribe of the Jews at the time. After gathering a group of Jews, Ezra "led 1, 250 Jews from Babylon" (New Catholic Encyclopedia, p. 578). The other key biblical figure known for helping to lead the Jews back was Nehemiah. The Encyclopedia of Religion states that in the aggadah, a literary work of Judaism, Ezra is compared to "a second Moses" since he helped to bring the Jews home.
Even though the Jews were finally back home in the land promised to them by the Lord, they were still lost. They were not appreciating their Covenant with the Lord because they had fallen into sin. So while Ezra was largely responsible for bringing the Jews back into Judah, his main role in the Jewish community was creating a sense of unity in the Jewish community. He did this by bringing the Jews back under observence of the Mosaic Law. In fact one of Ezra's important actions was holding a celebration in which the Jews had to publicy confess their sins to the community. In this celebration the Law was read to the People. Ezra was focussed very much so upon "racial purity of the restored Jewish community" (New Catholic Encyclopedia). Ezra called upon his fellow Jews to get rid of the women which they married during the Babylonian Exile who were native to Babylonia. According to the Introduction to the book of Ezra in the New American Bible, "Ezra is sometimes accused of having been a mere legalist who gave excessice attention to the letter of the law." The Introduction goes on to say that the reason for this was that "He gave to his people a cohesion and spiritual untiy which prevented the disintegration of the small Jewish community." So Ezra realized that God was calling him to unify His People, and Ezra did this by trying to create moral purity amongst the Jews. Ezra's most important action, though, was the reconstruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. With the assistance of king Artaxerxes of Persia, Ezra was able to find enough gold and support to rebuild the center for all of the Jews--the Temple in Jerusalem.