Diasporas

Chapter 1. What Is a Diaspora?

4 chapter 1 What Is a Diaspora? “Diaspora” is a Greek word, derived from the verb diaspeiro, which was used as early as the fifth century b.c. by Sophocles, Herodotus, and Thucydides. The modern usage of “diaspora” stems from its appearanceasaneologisminthetranslationoftheHebrewBibleinto Greek by the legendary seventy Jewish scholars in Alexandria in the third century b.c. In the so-called Septuagint Bible, “diaspora” is usedtwelvetimes.Butitdoesn’trefertothehistoricdispersionofthe Jews who were taken as captives to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem in 586 b.c., or to any other human historical event. Contrarytowhathasoftenbeenclaimed,“diaspora”wasnotusedto translate the Hebrew terms galut, galah, and golah. These were renderedintheSeptuagintbyseveralGreekwords :apoikia(emigration), paroikia (settlement abroad), metoikia (emigration) or metoikesia (transportation),aikhmalosia(wartimecaptivity),orapokalupsis(revelation ).Instead,“diaspora”alwaysmeantthethreatofdispersionfacing the Hebrews if they failed to obey God’s will, and it applied almost exclusively to divine acts. God is the one who scatters the sin- ners or will gather them together in the future. Relying on works by otherhistoriansofreligionsuchasWillemCorneliusvanUnnikand Johannes Tromp, Martin Baumann shows that it was only in later Jewishtraditionthatthemeaningof“diaspora”changedtodesignate both the scattered people and the locale of their dispersion.1 In the Christian tradition, the New Testament (where “diaspora ” appears three times) presents the church as a dispersed community of pilgrims waiting to return to the City of God. The eschatological waiting connected with “diaspora” tends to disappear in thefourthcentury,onlytoresurfaceduringtheReformationandthe Counter-Reformation, when it describes Protestant minorities in Catholic countries, or the reverse. To understand the growing popularity of the term during the second half of the twentieth century, it is essential to examine two examples that are strongly both linked and opposed: the “Jewish diaspora” and the “black diaspora.” THE JEWISH AND BLACK/AFRICAN DIASPORAS The Jewish Diaspora Considering the Jewish experience of dispersion means taking into account all of Jewish history, which is marked by constant swings between the centrality of the land of Israel—where no sovereign Jewish power existed between 586 b.c. and 1948—and the growth of one or more centers outside it. The French sociologist Shmuel Trigano counts no fewer than nine “geopolitical structures,” or “geons,” of world Judaism.2 Whathecalls“theunfinishedspace”correspondstotheperiodof geographical instability (1250–586 b.c.) when the territory was initially divided among tribes until the founding of the Davidic kingWhat Is a Diaspora? / 5 dom, then split into northern and southern kingdoms, and finally saw the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Assyrian kingNebuchadnezzar.“Thebipolarworld”(586–332b.c.)marked abreakintheunityofthepeoplebetweentheIsraeliandBabylonian hubs. Most of the Jews had been deported (galut) to Babylon, and some chose not to leave when it became possible to return home. ThisbipolaritysurvivedtheconquestofIsraelbyAlexander,butthe Babylonian center lost some of its influence in the “Judeo-Western system” (332 b.c.–a.d. 224). Though not politically independent, Jews were present in the land of Israel even after the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans ina.d. 70, which is usually given as the start of the Jewish “diaspora.” The Jews left Israel only after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the fourth century, because of persecution suffered under Byzantine rule. Anewgeon,“theshatteredworld”(a.d. 224–630),sawtheBabylonian hub develop as the first Jewish center outside of Israel. Arab expansion starting in the seventh century gave the Jewish world a common geopolitical framework. In this “sea of oneness” (a.d. 630– 1250), Babylon was joined by a new hub on the Iberian Peninsula, the site of a Jewish golden age in artistic, scientific, intellectual, and political domains. During this period, the distinction was first drawn between the Iberian Jewish communities, the Sephardim— from S’farad, meaning “Spain” in medieval Hebrew—and those who traveled from Israel through Italy to settle in Italy, France, and theRhinelandandwereknownastheAshkenazim,fromAshk’naz, the Hebrew term for the Germanic countries. Fleeing anti-Semitic persecutions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Ashkenazim would turn tolerant Poland into “the star of the North” (1250–1492). Meanwhile, the Catholic Reconquest and the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century ended the Arab presence in 6 / What Is a Diaspora? Europe and in the Baghdad Caliphate, bringing the Jewish Iberian and Babylonian hubs to an end. The expulsion of the Sephardim from Spain in 1492 and their dispersal to the Ottoman Empire, the cities of northern Europe, Galilee, and the Americas transformed the Jewish world into a “compass card” (1492–1700) marked by the establishment of many small centers...