(Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora

Diaspora 6:3 1997 (Dis)placing the Jews: Historicizing the Idea of Diaspora Jon Stratton C u run University of Technology This article explores the idea of diaspora from the point of view of the Jewish experience. This is not because I want to take the Jewish diaspora as in some way typical; indeed, quite the reverse is the case. I want to argue for a historical understanding of diaspora, one which recognizes that the changes in the historical context of what we generally call diasporas affect the meaning and experience of being in diaspora. Distinguishing the variety of western Jewish diasporic experience from that of other groups of people who experience themselves as diasporic will help us to theorize the meaning of "diaspora" as it is more generally applied. Theorizing Diaspora Undoubtedly, diaspora is more and more being used as a descriptive , and rather under-theorized, term for the massive population movements that are one aspect of the development of global capitalism. Before elaborating her own theorization of the term, Avtar Brah writes that in the context of a proliferation of new border crossings, the language of "borders" and of "diaspora" acquires a new currency. A variety ofnew scholarlyjournals have one or other of these terms in their titles. Yet, surprisingly, there have been relatively few attempts made to theorise these terms (179). She is right. Moreover, James Clifford notes, "the language of diaspora is increasingly invoked by displaced peoples who feel (maintain , revive, invent) a connection with a prior home" (255). As he indicates, this use of the term "diaspora" is a recent phenomenon. Khachig Tölölyan, who has provided a detailed discussion of this development, distinguishes between the traditional application of the term to what he describes as the three "classical" diasporas the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian - and the new usage, which he dates from around the late 1960s, in which the term has been 301 Diaspora 6:3 1997 generalized to cover those previously described as "exile groups, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth" ("Rethinking" 3). Tólólyan argues for the importance of a variety of diverse and apparently quite unconnected factors in this discursive shift. He names twelve, from "accelerated immigration to the industrialized world," and "the degree ofexisting institutional organization in the national homeland, and the extent to which those organizations accompany the immigrants" to "racial difference," "the affirmation of a collective subject," and a specific set of changes in "the American University" (20-7). However, none ofthese important specific factors enables us to understand why there has been a general discursive shift, an impulse to reimagine a wide variety of types and experiences of population movements as being similar enough to have the same terminology applied to them. Perhaps Tölölyan's best insight here comes when he notes that "in the past three decades, just as the nation-state has begun to encounter limits to its supremacy and perhaps even to lose some of its sovereignty, diasporas have emerged in scholarly and intellectual discourse as 'the exemplary communities of the transnational moment' or as 'the exemplary condition of late modernity'" ("Rethinking " 3-4).! Here, a recognition of the changing circumstance, and experience, of the modern nation-state is connected with a refiguring ofmany ofthe groups who compose the state's citizens, and perhaps its nation. Later in this article I will delineate some of the features which we can theorize as specifying"diaspora" as a modern, and now postmodern, phenomenon. To both these classifications, their links to the psychic experience ofthe nation-state are crucial. Though the generalized application of the term "diaspora" took place around the 1960s, the intellectual steps that led to it took place earlier, in the second halfofthe nineteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The earliest found usage ofit having a "transferred sense," as the Dictionary puts it, is given as 1876. It is this transferred sense that characterizes the use of "diaspora" as modern and postmodern. The next use is dated to 1881 in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, where it is reapplied to describe the exodus of Eastern European Jews from the Pale of Settlement, that area of Poland...