Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies

Robin Cohen, Carolin Fischer, Robin Cohen, Carolin Fischer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351805490
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The word 'diaspora' has leapt from its previously confined use – mainly concerned with the dispersion of Jews, Greeks, Armenians and Africans away from their natal homelands – to cover the cases of many other ethnic groups, nationalities and religions. But this 'horizontal' scattering of the word to cover the mobility of many groups to many destinations, has been paralleled also by 'vertical' leaps, with the word diaspora being deployed to cover more and more phenomena and serve more and more objectives of different actors.

With sections on 'debating the concept', 'complexity', 'home and home-making', 'connections' and 'critiques', the Routledge Handbook of Diaspora Studies is likely to remain an authoritative reference for some time. Each contribution includes a targeted list of references for further reading. The editors have carefully blended established scholars of diaspora with younger scholars looking at how diasporas are constructed 'from below'. The adoption of a variety of conceptual perspectives allows for generalization, contrasts and comparisons between cases.

In this exciting and authoritative collection over 40 scholars from many countries have explored the evolving use of the concept of diaspora, its possibilities as well as its limitations. This Handbook will be indispensable for students undertaking essays, debates and dissertations in the field.

Part I Exploring and debating diaspora

1 Diaspora before it became a concept

Stéphane Dufoix

Although the concept of a diaspora has been recognized in the social sciences for about 40 years, its preconceptual history is much longer and not very well known. Despite some thorough studies devoted to either the whole period (Dufoix 2017) or only a part of it (Baumann 2000; Edwards 2001; Krings 2003; Tromp 1998; Van Unnik 1993), a few factual errors keep being transmitted from text to text, thus impeding an accurate vision of the different processes that uses of the word have undergone historically. First, diaspora is undoubtedly a Greek word (διασπορά) encompassing the idea not only of ‘dispersion’ but also of ‘distribution’ or ‘diffusion’, and, as such, does not carry a negative connotation. Second, in Greek it has never been used to describe Greek colonization in the Mediterranean. Third, it is not a translation of the Hebrew words galuth or golah, meaning ‘exile’ or ‘community in exile’. In this chapter, I address the evolution of the uses of the word from its Greek origins to the mid-1970s when it started to become an academic concept.

A religious word

The first occurrence of the noun ‘diaspora’ can be found in the Septuagint, the translation into Greek of the Hebraic Bible, in the third century BCE. Contrary to a widely held view, the 14 appearances of the word ‘diaspora’ in the Septuagint are not translated into a specific Hebrew word; the Hebrew words galuth or golah, which mean ‘exile’ or ‘banishment’, were not among the list of words translated as diaspora. In fact, the uses and meaning of diaspora in the Septuagint should be understood in a theological sense. Diaspora, then, does not indicate an historical dispersal, such as the Babylonian exile of Jews in the sixth century BCE, but describes the divine punishment – dispersal throughout the world – that would befall the Jews if they failed to respect God’s commandments. Not only does the word refer to a theological, eschatological horizon, and not an historical situation, but the dispersal, as well as the return of the dispersed, is a matter of divine, and not human, will. The Jews could be dispersed and finally reunited at the end of time because they were the ‘Chosen People’.

Certain historical events gave the threat of dispersion a form of reality from the first century CE onwards. The Roman destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem in CE 70 and its repercussions, such as the repression of the Bar-Kokhba uprising in CE 135, gradually made Jewish dispersion out of Palestine a real and terrestrial phenomenon. Consequently, the Jewish rabbis assimilated their current exile from the Holy Land (galouth) into the fulfilment of the curse in Deuteronomy. The meanings of diaspora and galouth were thus confounded, but since Judaic Rabbinism aimed to restore the superiority of the Hebrew language, the word diaspora itself was withdrawn from the Jewish lexicon. Beside this, the rise of Christianity created competition between the two religions. In the New Testament, the term diaspora referred to members of the Christian Church being exiled from the City of God and dispersed across the Earth. The condition of dispersion was understood as the very proof of their being the Chosen People. Christian writers eventually abandoned diaspora in the second century CE, limiting its use to the Jewish dispersion as an exemplary curse for their sins. As a result, the word ‘diaspora’ acquired a negative connotation.

From the third century CE onwards, Christianity gradually abandoned Greek in favour of Latin. In the Vulgate (fourth century), we generally find the noun dispersio or conjugated forms of the verb dispergere being used to translate diaspora. Yet, Greek remained the language of the eastern part, and this linguistic division entailed different uses of the Bible, with the Vulgate progressively becoming the western Bible and the Septuagint remaining that of the east. It is therefore not surprising to see authors from the eastern part of the Roman Empire using diaspora not only in the second (Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria), third (Origen) and fourth centuries CE (Athanasius, Eusebius of Caesarea, Basil of Caesarea, John Chrysostom, Gregory of Nyssa) but also later, in the fifth century (Cyril of Alexandria, Theodoret). Of the 271 mentions of diaspora in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, as many as 134 (slightly fewer than half) are attributable to only nine authors, all of whom were from the eastern half of the Roman Empire. The usage of the term can be attested until the end of the Byzantine Empire. There are several references to diaspora in the texts of Gennadius Scholarius, who became ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople in 1454, the year following the fall of the city to the Ottomans. These show a variety of meanings ranging from the ‘diffusion of the gospel in the entire world’ to that of the ‘dispersion of men’.

A new religious meaning emerges in the eighteenth century with the rise in Germany and diffusion abroad of the Protestant Moravian Church, also known as the Unity of Brethren. From its base in Herrnhut (Saxony), members of this Church were sent to countries in Europe – the other German states, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, France and Great Britain – where they influenced early Methodists, as well as the United States, where the conversion of the natives became one of their principal tasks. In the mid-eighteenth century, another aspect of the evangelizing mission, officially known since the mid-nineteenth century by the (capitalized) name ‘Diaspora’, developed in parallel, and its reach was limited to the European continent. It implied missionaries keeping in touch with various evangelical missions in other countries (Schweinitz 1859: 66–8). In this case, ‘Diaspora’ is not the name of the dispersion but the official name of the link, for in the Moravian Brothers’ lexicon, the ‘Diaspora mission’ signifies both the maintenance of the link and the statistical addition of all members living abroad in the ‘continental province’. This mission and its name spread beyond the limits of the Unity of Brethren to become a policy of support for Protestant minorities. In 1843, this policy was institutionalized, with the creation in Frankfurt of an organization named Evangelische Verein der Gustav-Adolf-Stiftung (Evangelical Association of the Gustav-Adolf Foundation), usually called Gustav-Adolf-Werk (GAW), which set itself the goal of organizing assistance for these minorities (Röhrig 1999). The reference to the religious concept of Diaspora, considered here as a dispersed geographical condition calling for the maintenance of a link between the dispersed communities, is constant. In 1838, this conceptualization of the ‘Protestant Diaspora’ as a minority in Catholic countries was taken up and inverted by German Catholics through the intermediary of the Ludwig Missionary Association (Ludwigsmissionsverein) and, particularly, following the creation of the Boniface Association (Bonifatiusverein) in 1849 (Röhrig 1993).

The Jewish debate

While diaspora is undoubtedly linked to Zionism, the association is more complex than commonly believed. Zionism emerges geographically in the diaspora, but it finds its political specificity in the refusal of the diaspora (shlilat ha-galuth) as a condition to create a state within the borders of which Jews could feel safe. The publication of Herzl’s Der Judenstaat (Herzl 1917) in 1896 and the holding of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 both mark the beginnings of a new political programme that insists on the necessity to hasten the creation of a haven for the Jews. This contradicts the main religious principle that only God can organize the return of the Jews to the Holy Land at the end of time. On the one hand, diaspora (galuth) is the sign of the Jewish election. On the other hand, it is nothing but the weakening of the community and the risk of being exterminated.

The rise of Zionism entailed a great debate about the future of the Jews and about the solutions to be found. An active role was played by two Jewish figures, the Russian historian Simon Dubnow and the Russian thinker Asher Ginsberg, better known under the pen name of Ahad Ha’am. Dubnow defended the idea of a Jewish autonomism in which the preservation of the diaspora could be linked with the citizenship of Jews in the countries in which they lived. The most emblematic presentation of this perspective is to be found in an 1898 article (Dubnow 1958: 109):

The Jews as inhabitants of Europe since ancient times demand equal political and civic rights; as members of a historic nationality united by a common culture, they demand as much autonomy as is appropriate for any nationality that strives to develop freely. If these two demands are satisfied, the patriotism of the Jews in all the different countries will be beyond doubt. The Jew who lives a life of peace and quiet in his fatherland, can well be an English, French or German patriot and can, at the same time, be a true and devoted son of the Jewish nationality, which, though dispersed, is held together by national ties.

For Ahad Ha’am, dispersion had spoiled the Jewish nation. It therefore needed to rejuvenate itself, less through the intermediary of religion than through that of Jewish culture. It was this latter that would be reborn in Palestine, in the context of a ‘Jewish colony’, which would, in time, become ‘the centre of the nation’ (Ha’am 1962: 78). This vision opposed religious orthodoxy by according a pre-eminent place to culture in the maintenance of unity; it opposed political Zionism by privileging the role of the nation over that of the state; it opposed assimilation by emphasizing the national existence of the Jews; and finally, it opposed the maintenance of Jews in a single diaspora by stressing the necessity of regenerating a national culture threatened by impoverishment. Ahad Ha’am’s response to Dubnow’s affirmation of the diaspora was that the latter corresponded to the ‘position of a lamb among wolves’ (Ha’am 1959: 270).

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 opened a new era. As a Zionist state, it soon insisted on the need for every Jew to practise aliyah (‘going up’ to the homeland), and early Israeli governments were tough on Jewish organizations that upheld the right of Jews not to return, as did the American Jewish Committee (Feldestein 2006). This state of tension between Israel and the Jewish diaspora lasted until the late 1960s. The situation in the Middle East, as much as Israel’s victory, considered ‘miraculous’, in the Six Day War in 1967, led to a different type of relationship between Israel and Jews around the world. After 1967, a singular relationship of

Table 1.1 The four meanings of diaspora

Exile	Community
Eschatological horizon	Trans-state link
Historical and political horizon	Centre-periphery link

recognition emerged between these two entities, which bestowed a new meaning on the word diaspora and which was manifested in Hebrew through the adoption of the term tfutsoth – literally meaning dispersion – in place of galuth. Consequently, a form of link was established with a given state that did not imply possessing the nationality of that state: it was a type of belonging that was not a legally constituted status and that went beyond the exclusively juridical link that tied an expatriate – a citizen of one country living on the territory of another – to a state that recognized him or her as such and whose legitimacy the person in question also recognized.

The complexity of the meanings of diaspora in Jewish history can be organized according to two axes: the first separates conceptions founded on exile from those founded on community. In the first case, galuth calls for a return that must occur in time, be it eschatological in the case of Judaic Rabbinism or political in the case of Zionism; in the second, galuth is separated from the question of a return and calls for the constitution of links in space, either without a state in the case of diasporism, as Dubnow for instance proclaimed it, or with a state (or a centre according to Ahad Ha’am) as we can see in the recognition of tfutsoth. Four different meanings of diaspora thus coexisted, whose emergence is not simultaneous but historically stratified (see Table 1.1).

The first scholarly uses

From the first decades of the twentieth century onwards, several general processes characterize the evolution of diaspora: first, secularization, that is, the extension to nonreligious meanings; second, trivialization, namely the widening of the spectrum of relevant cases; and third, but only later, formalization, or the establishment of criteria that allow the shift to occur from a definite to an indefinite category with its subtypes.

Simon Dubnow’s 1931 ‘Diaspora’ entry in the Encyclopaedia of the social sciences marked a fundamental milestone in extending the term to other populations and to the academic world. The first paragraph (Dubnow 1931: 126) is rather eloquent:

Diaspora is a Greek term for a nation or part of a nation separated from its own state or territory and dispersed among other nations but preserving its own national culture. In a sense, Magna Graecia constituted a Greek diaspora in the ancient Roman Empire, and a typical case of diaspora is presented by the Armenians, many of whom have voluntarily lived outside their small national territory for centuries.

For the first time, diaspora is understood as a category with different instances. That this entry was included in an important publication allowed for its further use. The American sociologist Robert E. Park took it up a few years later, applying it to the members of different Asian groups living far from their countries, but adding a geographical dimension: ‘there are, at the present time, between 16,000,000 and 17,000,000 people of Asiatic origin living in the diaspora, if I may use that term to designate not merely the condition but the place of dispersion of peoples’ (Park 1939: 28). American sociologist Rose Hum Lee, who trained in the sociologi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Diaspora studies: an introduction
• PART I Exploring and debating diaspora
• PART II Complex diasporas
• PART III Home and home-making
• PART IV Connecting diaspora
• PART V Critiques and applied diaspora studies
• Index