Early Modern Diasporas

A European History

Mathilde Monge, Natalia Muchnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000572148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book is the first encompassing history of diasporas in Europe between 1500 and 1800.

Huguenots, Sephardim, British Catholics, Mennonites, Moriscos, Moravian Brethren, Quakers, Ashkenazim… what do these populations who roamed Europe in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have in common? Despite an extensive historiography of diasporas, publications have tended to focus on the history of a single diaspora. Each of these groups was part of a community whose connections crossed political and cultural as well as religious borders. Each built dynamic networks through which information, people, and goods circulated. United by a memory of persecution, by an attachment to a homeland—be it real or dreamed—and by economic ties, those groups were nevertheless very diverse. As minorities, they maintained complex relationships with authorities, local inhabitants, and other diasporic populations. This book investigates the tensions they experienced. Between unity and heterogeneity, between mobility and locality, between marginalisation and assimilation, it attempts to reconcile global- and micro-historical approaches.

The authors provide a comparative view as well as elaborate case studies for scholars, students, and the public who are interested in learning about how the social sciences and history contribute to our understanding of integration, migrations, and religious coexistence.

1The Tribulations of an “Umbrella Term”

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003194231-2

“Diaspora” has become a catch-all word in the social sciences, giving rise to a rapidly growing interdisciplinary historiography over the last twenty years. Yet its banalisation—along with concepts such as “identity,” “community,” and “group”—has seemingly emptied it of any real meaning. Initially limited to a few so-called “traditional” diasporas (notably Jews, Greeks, Armenians), this label is now applied to a growing number of populations in situations of exile, whether they be defined by ethnic, religious, cultural, or even professional criteria,¹ causing endless debate throughout the social sciences.

What is a diaspora?

Despite the heuristic interest and universalism of a word that hardly varies across languages, there is no strict or consensual definition of diasporas.² Any form of dispersion thus seems to qualify as such. Moreover, use of the term has spread within several emerging disciplines such as cultural studies, global history, and transnational history,³ where, after Khachig Tölölyan, these populations are among the chief objects of study.⁴

Diasporas are emblems of transnationalism because they embody the question of borders, which is at heart of any adequate definition of the Others of the nation-state. The latter always imagines and represents itself as a land, a territory, a place that functions as the site of homogeneity, equilibrium, integration… In such a territory, differences are assimilated, destroyed, or assigned to ghettoes, to enclaves demarcated by boundaries so sharp that they enable the nation to acknowledge the apparently singular and clearly fenced-off differences within itself, while simultaneously reaffirming the privileged homogeneity of the rest…

The subtitle of the flagship journal of diaspora studies, founded in 1991, is illustrative: Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. What’s more, today the word diaspora is invested with political meaning for those involved. The Jewish or Greek models, which led to the creation of a state (contemporary Greece proclaimed independence in 1822–1830, Israel in 1948), and where the prospect of return forms part of a “diasporic identity,” have powerfully connoted the term. The ritual phrase, “Next year in Jerusalem,” closes the Seder, the Jewish Passover meal. For nearly a century, a hope of return similarly drove the many Huguenots who left France after the Revocation, as much as the Spanish Jews and Moriscos, expelled in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.⁵ In the modern era, and in contrast to what we call early modern diasporas, being a people in diaspora implicitly implies the existence of a homeland that must be recovered or even liberated. Individuals’ use of the word has legitimised this claim, where the idea of diaspora is, paradoxically, associated with the—modern—idea of nation. The diasporic lexicon is thus today particularly mobilised in asserting rights relative to land, political autonomy, national specificity, or in justifying the creation of a state. For certain states, particularly those that have experienced strong emigration (Haiti, Morocco, Ireland, etc.), the notion is used to encourage exiles to invest politically and economically in their country of origin. In doing so, new objects of study are created, expanding a historiography whose tendency towards inflation has continued unabated for several decades. Due to current interest, this expansion primarily concerns modern diasporas, endlessly broadening the criteria qualifying a diaspora and progressively marginalising the previously decisive religious dimension.

Moreover, this word, which was not in fact used in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries— with the notable exception of Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf,⁶ founder of the Moravian Brethren—denotes different objects and social practices. We use diaspora to refer to the phenomenon of dispersion, to a population spread over one or more territories, but also to the organisation of an ethnic, religious, or “national” community (a term equally complex to define) in a number of countries. Diaspora can also indicate exiles’ places of settlement, or even any non-territorial space of exchange. According to Stéphane Dufoix:

Progressively detached from its Greek and Jewish singularities, then limited to a few so-called “classic” populations (Indian, Chinese, Armenian, Irish), it [the term diaspora] has become potentially applicable to a growing number of populations, which become as many manifestations of the generic concept. Finally, the term has passed into the common language of the media, where, in the context of debates on multiculturalism and globalisation, it has a strong positive value. The congruence between the diffusive power of media discourse, the objectifying force of scientific discourse, and the mobilising force of political identity discourse makes the process of “diasporisation” (understood here as the performative construction, through language, into a “diaspora” worthy of the name) terribly effective.⁷

It therefore seems difficult to qualify a diaspora, to grasp the “essence” of this phenomenon independently of its singular incarnations. For a long time, the Jewish diaspora was seen as the “ideal type,” to which the very etymology of the word was associated, though it is of Greek origin. Yet, we cannot consider the latter an archetype, from which one might draw certain properties to identify other groups. Moreover, early proponents of diaspora studies, such as Robin Cohen, tried to establish a typology of diasporas (“victim diasporas,” “labour” and “imperial diasporas,” “trade” and “business diasporas”), only to find that most fell into several categories, thereby undermining the validity of the classification.⁸

In the field of diaspora studies and the social sciences in general, two sometimes conflicting uses of the term simultaneously exist. In light of what they consider to be a loss of meaning, many scholars, such as the geographer Yves Lacoste, believe that “the term diaspora should be reserved…for phenomena of mass exodus, for those whose causes were initially less the search for better living conditions than an absolute necessity, under the effect of constraints that were mostly political in nature.”⁹ This “centric” use of the term has not, however, garnered unanimous acceptance, with others using it in a more open fashion. Take, for example, Rogers Brubaker, who highlights the trap of essentialising diasporas, in both the academic and public arenas. He proposes instead to abandon any attempt at a strict definition, and rather to “treat diaspora not as a bounded entity, but as an idiom, stance or claim.”¹⁰ This “hybrid” and “a-centric” definition, notably developed in studies on the Black diaspora in the Americas, challenges, in particular, the notions of community and ethnic groups, insisting instead on the variability of configurations.¹¹

The fact remains, however, that diasporas of the past and today are generally characterised by massive migrations, usually initiated by a triggering event, perceived as a trauma, and situated at the heart of diasporic history-memory. This is the case of several populations of the early modern period, referred to as refugees by their contemporaries. Indubitably, as with all migrations, there are multiple causes for departure, combining economic, religious, social, and political dimensions and individual and collective scales. The perceptions of those directly involved indubitably differed from that garnered from the sometimes rare, sometimes proportionally abundant historical documents. Moreover, their exact numbers are difficult to know with precision. The Judeo-Iberians, later known as the Sephardic Jews, thus left the Iberian Peninsula in several waves beginning with their expulsion ordered by the Catholic Monarchs in 1492. More than 150,000 individuals departed, some of whom went to Portugal, from where they were once again banished in 1496–1497 (Fig. 1). The Huguenots, reformed (Calvinist) French, began to flee France in the sixteenth century, especially after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which saw between 150,000 and 160,000 people leave between 1685 and 1700.¹² In exile, they mingled with the Walloons, reformed French-speakers who had departed from the Southern Netherlands due to Spanish repression against the rebels. They also interacted with the protestant Waldensians of Val Cluson following the Waldensian wars and the re-Catholicisation of the Duchy of Savoy in the seventeenth century (Fig. 2).

More than 250,000 Moriscos, Iberian Christians of Muslim origin, left Spain between 1609 and 1614 (most of them in 1609–1610),¹³ but others left as early as the sixteenth century. Some British Catholics also emigrated when Scotland and England converted to Protestantism and the English conquered Ireland, from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. It was, however, above all the many Jacobites, supporters of the Catholic sovereign James II (1685–1688), who, along with the king, went into exile after the Glorious Revolution (1688–1689), numbering some 50,000 in Europe.¹⁴ For their part, the Mennonites, Anabaptists mainly from Switzerland and the Netherlands, were driven away by persecution starting in the mid-sixteenth century, and formed a protean diaspora beginning in the seventeenth century (Fig. 4). At their peak around 1650, there were as many as 65,000 baptised members in the Netherlands (including the Dutch-speaking parts of the Holy Roman Empire), 3,500 in the north of the Holy Roman Empire and around the Baltic Sea, and 500 in Switzerland.¹⁵

These early modern diasporas maintained strong links with their lands of origin, and were traversed by flows of ideas and knowledge, objects, and people. Moreover, because they built on multiple settlements, urban for the most part and temporary for many, and through circulations, the territories of these diasporas were mobile—forming a multi-faceted reticular weave. They were, to paraphrase Alain Tarrius, “circulatory territories, productions of collective memories and ever wider exchange practices, where specific ethical and economic values create a culture and differentiate from sedentary populations.”¹⁶ Faced with spatial discontinuities, these populations exhibited a form of cultural and/or, in early modern times, religious cohesion, which distinguished them from their host societies. Finally, their feeling of a common destiny, tinged with messianism, sets them apart from modern diasporas. This bond was not a given; it solidified over time. It is in part this persistence, this capacity to withstand distance for several generations, that distinguishes such diasporas from other migrations and minorities of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Such tenacity manifests in the elaboration of a shared history and memory and an investment in unifying elements (language, architecture, etc.).

That said, the groups contemplated in this work do not have all of these characteristics, and it is perhaps for this reason they have not often been analysed through a diasporic lens. Take, for example, the Moravians, relatively marginalised in diaspora studies compared to the Huguenots, though they have spawned a substantial literature, particularly within Atlantic history and pietist studies. Yet they are, in fact, the only ones to use the word diaspora to describe themselves, and to make this one of the pillars of their community.¹⁷ Though diaspora for them is not that which we project onto early modern diasporas—namely a scattered community in the form of religious minorities. Rather, in an ecumenical perspective, it was “the maintenance of common ties and ideas with enlightened members of other Churches,” who were dispersed and need not be persuaded to change their confession.¹⁸ Other groups could also be considered diasporas in light of their mass expulsion, their degree of dispersion, the maintenance of a collective identity, the ethnicisation of their bond, the traumatic memor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Translators
• Introduction
• 1 The Tribulations of an “Umbrella Term”
• 2 Shared Memory, Culture, and Religion
• 3 Migration and Social Ties
• 4 Diasporic Metropolises
• 5 Temporalities and Diasporic Segments
• 6 Diasporas and Political Authorities
• 7 Aggregation, Segregation, Neighbouring
• 8 Minorities in the City
• 9 Inter-diasporic Relationships
• Conclusion
• Figures and Maps
• Notes and Credits to the Figures and Maps
• Bibliography
• Index