The notion of ‘diaspora’, used first in the classical world, has acquired renewed importance in the late twentieth century. Once the term applied principally to Jews and less commonly to Greeks, Armenians and Africans. Now at least thirty ethnic groups declare that they are a diaspora, or are so deemed by others. Why these sudden proclamations? Frightened by the extent of international migration and their inability to construct a stable, pluralist, social order many states have turned away from the idea of assimilating or integrating their ethnic minorities. For their part, minorities no longer desire to abandon their pasts. Many retain or have acquired dual citizenship, while the consequences of globalisation have meant that ties with a homeland can be preserved or even reinvented. How have diasporas changed? What consequences arise for the nation-state? ∗ Until a few years ago most characterisations of diasporas emphasized their catastrophic origins and uncomfortable outcomes. The idea that ‘diaspora’ implied forcible dispersion was found in Deuteronomy (28: 25), with the addition of a thunderous Old Testament warning that a ‘scattering to other lands’ constituted the punishment for a people who had forsaken the righteous paths and abandoned the old ways. So closely, indeed, had ‘diaspora’ become associated with this unpropitious Jewish tradition that the origins of the word have virtually been lost. In fact, the term ‘diaspora’ is found in the Greek translation of the Bible and originates in the words ‘to sow widely’. For the Greeks, the expression was used to describe the colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean in the Archaic period (800–600 BC). Although there was some displacement of the ancient Greeks to Asia Minor as a result of poverty, over-population and inter-state war, ‘diaspora’ essentially had a positive connotation. Expansion through plunder, military conquest, colonization and migration were the predominant features of the Greek diaspora. The opposing notions of a ‘victim diaspora’ and a diaspora of active colonization were resolved by over two thousand years of special pleading – based, to be sure, on many adverse experiences – on behalf of the first interpretation. However, Jewish diasporic experiences were much more diverse and more complex than the negative tradition allows and such an interpretation was imposed as well as internalized, advanced as well as contested. One way or another, it is impossible to understand notions of ‘diaspora’ without first coming to grips with some central aspects of the Jewish experience. Even for those who find in the changed meanings of the contemporary concept a new and exciting way of understanding cultural difference, identity politics and the proclaimed ‘dissolution’ of the nation-state, the origins and implications of the term have to be assimilated and understood before they can be transcended. 1 How then do we interrogate the Jewish tradition of diaspora?
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