Diaspora, Identity and Religion

Carolin Alfonso, Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134390359
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the last decade, concepts of diaspora and locality have gained complex new meanings in political discourse as well as in social and cultural studies. Diaspora, in particular, has acquired new meanings related to notions such as global deterritorialization, transnational migration and cultural hybridity.
The authors discuss the key concepts and theory, focus on the meaning of religion both as a factor in forming diasporic social organisations, as well as shaping and maintaining diasporic identities, and the appropriation of space and place in history. It includes up to date research of the Caribbean, Irish, Armenian, African and Greek diasporas.

1 Deconstructing and comparing diasporas

William Safran

What is a diaspora? Uses and misuses of a concept

Decades ago, academic discussion of ethnic minorities was already in full swing. Yet few, if any, writers on the subject mentioned diaspora. One looks in vain for a treatment of that phenomenon in the works of Anderson, Brass, Enloe, Gurr, Hobsbawm, Horowitz, or many other prominent scholars of ethnicity. This neglect could be attributed to the fact that diasporas were not considered a ‘comfortable’ sociological category; it was perhaps also due to the fact that diaspora communities did not want to call attention to their ambiguous collective identity, and hence did not mobilize politically to obtain the kinds of civil and political rights normally accorded to ‘indigenous’ minorities.

Today the situation is quite different. Diaspora is a concept that is being used so widely that it has become an academic growth industry – not only in political science, but also in anthropology, sociology, psychology, religious studies, history, and even literature. At a recent conference on the subject at the University of California at Berkeley, one of the papers read was by a professor of the ‘History of Consciousness’. James Clifford, a historian dear to anthropologists, argues, in a somewhat exaggerated fashion, that ‘diasporic language appears to be replacing, or at least supplementing, minority discourse’ (Clifford 1994: 311). At one time, the diaspora phenomenon was ‘undertheorized’ in large part because it was applied to a very limited number of ‘transnational’ ethnic minority groups, such as Jews, Armenians, Chinese, and Indians; today, we find the opposite: according to Robin Cohen, in his recent book on ‘comparative diasporas’, the concept has been ‘overextended’, much like diasporas themselves (Cohen 1997). Khachig Tölölyan (the editor of the journal Diaspora, which began publication in 1991) reported at a conference in Paris in 1998 that authors in his journal had used the expression ‘diaspora’ to describe 38 different groups. In short, the label has been stretched to cover almost any ethnic or religious minority that is dispersed physically from its original homeland, regardless of the conditions leading to the dispersion, and regardless of whether, and to what extent, physical, cultural, or emotional links exist between the community and the home country.

The application of the concept of diaspora to Armenians and other uprooted and expatriate communities has been quite legitimate. However, the indiscriminate extension of the label to almost any group of expatriates, or even to individual migrants, has denuded the concept of much of its historical meaning and led to a conflation of the term, which has made it difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish diasporas from other kinds of minority communities and to reduce the concept to a useless metaphor.

Diasporas, it has been said, represent ‘the leading edge of globalization’ because they are not merely minority communities; their members have moved around – that is, have emigrated from their native countries to other countries. This, of course, can be said of immigrants as such; but diasporas comprise special kinds of immigrants because they have retained a memory of, a cultural connection with, and a general orientation toward their homelands; they have institutions reflecting something of a homeland culture and/or religion; they relate in some (symbolic or practical) way to their homeland; they harbour doubts about their full acceptance by the hostland; they are committed to their survival as a distinct community; and many of them have retained a myth of return (Safran 1991; Chaliand and Rageau 1995; Cohen 1997).

The concept of diaspora originally applied to Jews, because they constituted one of the first dispersed communities, if not the first one. Moreover, the Jewish diaspora remains the archetypical one in several respects:

1. The absence of a physical homeland for nearly two millennia, and the widespread doubts within the international community in general, and its intellectual elite in particular, whether such a homeland should exist at all.
2. The lack of full acceptance of Jews by their host societies, even in some Western countries where they have achieved formal political and civic equality. Thus in officially philosemitic countries, such as Germany after World War II, a large proportion of the population harbours negative stereotypes about Jews, and this situation applies even in countries where few Jews are left, such as Poland and Austria.
3. The transfer of ‘diasporic’ features on the population of the restored homeland: its international pariah status, its global loneliness, and a growing collective paranoia associated with the feeling that ‘our national existence is threatened by enemies who surround us, just as in diaspora, Jews were in most cases threatened with expulsion or annihilation in the face of the general indifference of others’ (Rubinstein 1980).
4. The fact that diaspora seemed to be considered a ‘normal’ aspect of the Jewish condition, so that it has become part of European Christian folklore. This view has been reflected in numerous legends of the ‘wandering Jew’; and it was starkly reflected in the Nazi quatrain:

Die Juden ziehn dahin, daher,

ziehn übers Rote Meer;

Die Wellen schlagen zu;

Die Welt hat Ruh’.¹

General de Gaulle was not a Nazi, or even a conscious anti-Semite; yet the theme of the Juif errant was clearly contained in his famous press conference of November 1967 that included references to ‘the Jews wandering here and there’ and ‘provoking … waves of ill will, sometimes rising, sometimes receding, in certain countries’ (French Foreign Policy 1968: 135–6). Such an attitude was not shared by enlightened, especially secular, intellectuals, such as Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet Sartre, who wrote a severe critique of anti-Semitism, denied the Jews an existential reality; for him, the identity of Jews as such was purely reactive, based on what the majority in hostland societies thought of them (Sartre 1947).

What has made the Jewish diaspora unique is, above all, the fact that it was (in most cases) externally imposed, institutionalized, and ideologically and theologically sanctioned. Jews, according to the normative (Orthodox) Jewish view, were expelled ‘because of [their] sins’ – i.e., the refusal to follow Jewish religious and ethical precepts; according to the Christian view, Jews were consigned to exile and to eternal wandering because of deicide and the refusal to accept the ‘true’ faith. But the theological aspect has, it seems, now also been misappropriated and applied to the early Christians (cf. Baumann 1997). Thus the apostle Paul, in expatriating himself to Asia Minor and Greece in order to spread the gospel, created a group of proselytes who, in becoming a religious minority, have been considered ipso facto a diaspora – not because they had been dispersed from anywhere, but rather, because they were the successful objects of a message that had been disseminated.

It is true that, in embracing a new faith, the early Christians had become a minority in relation to the heathen and were thus alienated from the rest of society (at least until Christianity became the official majority religion). Alienation through conversion has affected other groups as well, as, for example, the Bosnian Slavs, the ethnic Greeks, and the Bulgarians (Pomaks) who were converted to Islam. As a result of the population exchanges after World War II, the Greeks and Turks in question were diasporized; but it is doubtful whether that status can be said to apply to the Bosnian Muslims, who, after all, remained in place.

If we leave aside religiously ‘minoritized’ communities and focus on expatriated ones, we conclude that there are now many more dispersed communities than existed before. In the past half century, tens of millions of people have been leaving their native countries for a variety of political and economic reasons; they may be political refugees, expellees, displaced persons, or voluntary emigrants; but unlike traditional immigrants, most of whom have left their homelands with the full intention to assimilate into the hostland culture, members of diasporas appear to be hedging their bets: they do not wish to cut themselves off completely from their homelands, and they prefer to live, as it were, ‘in two worlds’. In terms of the above-mentioned characteristics, the term diaspora can be applied, not only to the Jewish and Armenian paradigmatic types, but, inter alia, also to Kurdish, Palestinian, Chinese, Indian, Greek, Sikh, Turkish, West Indian, Cuban, Tibetan, Kosovar Albanian, Croatian, and Serbian expatriate communities.

The extension of the label to some other expatriate categoric groups is more problematic. It is hardly legitimate to use it to refer to the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs) in the United States or the English civil servants in India. Diasporas do not have to be ‘ethnic’; there are religious diasporas, such as the Huguenots, Hutterites, and Tibetan Buddhists; and ideological diasporas, such as Spanish anti-fascists and eastern European anti-Communists, and even German and Austrian Nazis who have settled in South America. Is it legitimate, however, to regard as diasporas American executive officers of multinational corporations who have settled with their families in various European countries? The answer is not simple; yet it would be questionable to extend the term to an ethnic group that, rather than being oppressed or alienated within the hostland, dominates its culture, economy, politics, and society.

The label diaspora has come to be used rather freely, because multiple identities are now more acceptable than they were before. Former convictions about the superiority of certain national cultures have become weakened; the claims once made for France’s mission civilisatrice, for the Nazi belief that ‘am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen’, the dogma concerning the ideological superiority of the homo sovieticus or the unmatched qualities of American democracy – all these have been undermined, in part because of the shortcomings of the societies in question, and in part because democratic and other positive values found in hostlands are now increasingly also found in the minorities’ homelands. As a consequence, members of minority communities are less apologetic about retaining their homeland culture. Such retention is in any case easier now than it has ever been before. National boundaries have become more permeable, a development that has enabled minority communities to receive infusions of culture from abroad (Taylor 1994). Many countries have abandoned the notion that political loyalty to the state requires an exclusive adherence to a unidimensional national culture. In recent years, an increasing number of societies, in welcoming immigrants, have embraced pluralism in one way or another, and their views of citizenship have become less restrictive than they had been earlier. Finally, the globalization of economic and other transactions has led to a general diffusion of literatures, languages, and lifestyles, a process that has, in turn, contributed to a homogenization of cultures. In the face of these developments, the retention of minority cultures, facilitated by a connection with an anterior ‘homeland’, provides a modicum of uniqueness, authenticity, and autonomy for the community in question, which has contributed to the maintenance of diasporas.

Diaspora membership is a matter both of status and identity, and identity is relational, contextual, and time-bound. In many cases, moreover, individual notions of diaspora and homeland are figurative. Nevertheless, certain distinctions must be made. If the ‘Irish’ identity of a third- or fourth-generation American is little more than an after-dinner self-labelling (the sort of hyphenated self-identification often made by a person to make her/himself look more interesting), it is not a genuine diaspora identity. Being in a diaspora implies a tension between being in one place physically – the place where one lives and works – and thinking regularly of another place far away. In one of his famous Hebrew poems, Yehuda Halevi, the medieval Spanish-Jewish philosopher, has the following lament:

My heart is in the East, and I in the uttermost West – How can I find savor in food? How shall it be sweet to me?

How shall I render my vows and my bonds, while yet Zion lies beneath the fetter of Edom, and I in Arab chains?

A light thing would it seem to me to leave all the good things of Spain – Seeing how precious in my eyes to behold the dust of the desolate sanctuary.

Yehuda Halevi (1086–1145)

It is interesting to compare Yehuda Halevi’s notions of homeland with those of Benjamin Disraeli and Heinrich Heine. Disraeli evoked visions of the Holy Land, which he romanticized (in Alroy and other novels) and compared favourably with England, while he was a believing Anglican and a consummate English patriot who did not consider himself as living in diaspora. Was Heine in diaspora? Where was his homeland? Germany, the country of his birth and upbringing, was his cultural and emotional homeland; France was his political homeland, to which he (in part voluntarily and in part under constraint) expatriated and which became his exile and his ‘mattress grave’; and in his later years, as he reconnected with his Jewish roots, he considered the Holy Land his ancestral homeland. Yet he remained profoundly German; although he identified ideologically with the French republic, he continued to write in his native language, and the German scene remained his principal subject matter.

In short, the members of a diaspora may or may not have adjusted to life in the hostland, but they have a spiritual, emotional, and/or cultural home that is outside the hostland. Whether that home is necessarily the ‘original’ homeland is a matter of controversy. It may, in fact, not be the ancestral homeland at all but rather the place where one was born and raised but that was originally a hostland, that is, a diaspora. Thus, the homeland of a West Indian resident of London may be Jamaica rather than Africa; the homeland of a Sikh resident in New York born and raised in Rajasthan may be that province rather than the Punjab; the homeland of an Armenian-American resident of California may be Lebanon rather than Armenia; and the homeland of a Jew in the United States may be Russia or Romania rather than the Land of Israel. Jews who immigrated to America between the 1880s and 1920s sang nostalgically about the shtetlakh where they had grown up.² Vilnius was the homeland from which Jews were uprooted during the Holocaust, and about which they sang in the ghettos and concentration camps.³ It does not seem to be crucial whether that homeland was a comfortable or welcoming one. During and even after the Holocaust, Jews who had come to the United States from Germany in the 1930s and installed themselves in Washington Heights, a German-Jewish neighbourhood in New York facetiously labelled ‘the Fourth Reich’, often referred to the place where they originated as ‘bei uns daheim’.

Did the Soviet Jews who were resettled in Birobidzhan regard themselves as living in a new (artificially constructed) ‘homeland’ or, rather, in a diaspora in relation to Moscow, Odessa, or Minsk? To Soviet (and post-Soviet) Jews who have ‘returned’ to Israel, Russia, the ‘hostland’ where they were born and where they grew up, may remain the object of ‘homeland’ nostalgia. They remember with a certain fondness the Russian forests, the beauty of Saint Petersburg, and aspects of the Russian (though not Soviet) way of life. Similarly, the pieds-noirs who have been ‘repatriated’ to France, their political homeland, often think nostalgically of their cities and ambiance in North Africa, which had been their home for many years and in which their families were rooted. This is especially true of Jewish rapatriés, who found that the Jacobin ideology of France had little tolerance for the kinship-based community that had defined their identity in Algeria; and it is equally true of many Moroccan Jews who ‘returned’ to Israel, their ancestral homeland, and who continue to celebrate the diaspora festival Maimuna in Jerusalem.

The identification of a place of residence as a homeland or a diaspora does not necessarily depend on whether the movement from one place to another was voluntary or involuntary. Thus it is not clear whether the ethnic Germans who were expelled from Silesia and the Sudetenland after World War II and more or less forcibly returned to Germany are now living in a diaspora or in their homeland. For although Germany is indeed the ancestral homeland, Silesia has been de- Germanized and hence ‘verfremdet’ in becoming a part of Poland. Yet the Silesian village remained for many expellees the place in which they grew up and the focus of their emotional orientations – in short, their true ‘home’. It is no accident that the designation used for these expellees was ‘Heimatvertriebene’. However, whereas in the 1950s and 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1: Deconstructing and comparing diasporas
• Part I: Politics, history and locality
• Part II: Diasporic aspects of religion