Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity

Introduction

Introduction This volume represents and extends the work of a fall 1997 University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) residential research group on Jewish identity in the diaspora. The group was multidisciplinary; members represented anthropology, art history, comparative literature, cultural studies, German, history, philosophy, political theory, and sociology . General agreement within the group was rare, even on the nature of our topic. The disagreements, however, proved to be a source of great stimulation . This introduction will be something of a roadmap of the terrain covered by our papers. Our topic was Jewish identity, which one can hardly mention without reference to diaspora. Jews, whatever else they have been, have been wandering . Early in our discussions, however, it emerged that the term exile rather than the more modern diaspora better translates galut, the traditional Hebrew expression for the Jews’ perennial condition. The distinction between diaspora and exile proved controversial, difficult to analyze, but focal to our discussions.1 The original galut, as Arnold Eisen points out in his seminal work, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming, was the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.2 Turning from mythology to history , the paradigmatic galut is the dispersion of Israel after the destruction of the second Temple in 70 c.e. The destruction of the first Temple—in 587 b.c.e.—and the subsequent Babylonian exile was calamitous, of course, but that exile lasted only half a century. As Eisen notes, at that time exile could still seem unusual, an exception to the order of things. With the events of 70 c.e. and the subsequent defeat of Bar Kochba in 135, galut became not an exception, but the rule for Jewish life. To be in galut is to be in the wrong place; it is to be dislocated, like a limb 1 out of socket. Indeed, it is tempting to suppose that exile suggests, in Erich Gruen’s words, “a bitter and doleful image, offering a bleak vision that issues either in despair or in a remote reverie of restoration.”3 Or, as Bluma Goldstein puts it, it is “a condition of forced homelessness and an anguished longing to return to the homeland.”4 However, whether a view of Jewish identity that emphasizes exile, galut, is necessarily so negative is controversial .5 What is not controversial is that the term exile, as opposed to diaspora, suggests anguish, forced homelessness, and the sense of things being not as they should be. Diaspora, on the other hand, although it suggests absence from some center —political or religious or cultural—does not connote anything so hauntingly negative. Indeed, it is possible to view diaspora in a positive light. Gruen discusses the view that Jews and Judaism requires no “territorial sanctuary or legitimation”; as “the people of the Book, their homeland resides in the text.” Diaspora would then impose no special burden. It might even facilitate the spread of the word. Let us turn from the diaspora/exile distinction to the concept of identity proper. If the former is controversial and resistant to analysis, the latter is even more so. As for the controversy, this volume presents the reader with a wide variety of perspectives on Jewish identity. This raises a general question about this controversy, about the multiplicity of views. Are these genuinely competing answers to a single question, about the nature of Jewish identity? Is there such a phenomenon, Jewish identity, about which different theorists proffer competing accounts? Another possibility exists. We might see the “competing accounts” to be expressions of alternative Jewish identities. Such a possibility is suggested by the fact that questions about Jewish identity—like questions about other ethnic, religious, or cultural identities—seem to be largely concerned with the meaning or significance of one’s Jewishness. Seen this way, it no longer is tempting to suppose that there is a right answer to the question of Jewish identity, that something or other actually constitutes Jewish identity. Who is to say, after all, that there is only one way in which Jewishness can matter, or legitimately matter? Who wants to get into the business of limiting the ways in which Jewishness might matter? In philosophical language, questions about Jewish identity are not questions of metaphysics—of the constitution of Jewishness. Instead, they are in the domain of the theory of human values. This contrasts with classical philosophical questions about “personal identity,” which are easy to confuse with our concern. Those classical...