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October/November 2007
Jewish Word
Whose Diaspora Is It Anyway?
Since Israel’s founding in 1948, diaspora—a word of Greek origin used to refer to an entire people’s dispersion—has occasionally been used as something of a slur. Among the many who argue that diaspora Jews (non-Israeli Jews, that is) cannot live a fully Jewish life, perhaps the fiercest is Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua, who once told the Jerusalem Post, “Diaspora Judaism is masturbation.”
To say the least, many disagree. Steven Bayme of the American Jewish Committee says, “Yehoshua seems to have forgotten that the reason the Torah was given in the wilderness was because of its portability. Jewish tradition is eminently portable, and it’s been that way for thousands of years.” Others claim that a religious Jew outside Israel is “more Jewish” than a secular Israeli. Still others argue that living in diaspora is a clever survival strategy for Jews, since it’s impossible to wipe out a scattered people with one blow.
The Jewish diaspora has its origins with the destruction of the first and second temples: first by the Assyrians in 586 B.C.E., then by the Romans in 70 C.E. But the concept of a diaspora is as old as the story of the Garden of Eden, the first lost homeland. The idea develops further when Abraham moves to the Promised Land in Genesis, and Moses returns his long-suffering people there in Exodus.
When the Bible was first translated into Greek around 250 B.C.E., the Jewish scholar tasked with translating the Hebrew word galut (“exile”) chose diaspora. It was an inept translation, since diaspora lacked galut’s negative connotation, merely meaning “dispersion” (the root of the word means “to scatter, to sow”). Stranger still, another scholar had chosen diaspora as the translation of the word za’avah, meaning “horror,” in Deuteronomy. This choice was “decidedly a mistake,” says Leslie Brisman, an English professor and Biblical scholar at Yale, “though a fascinating one in that it seems to epitomize centuries of negative attitudes to Jews scattered among Gentiles.”
These were fateful mistranslations, though, key steps towards diaspora’s becoming the word we use in English to describe the Jewish dispersion, exile or extended journey, depending on your point of view. The Oxford English Dictionary’s documentation of the word dates back only to the late 19th century. “Its earlier use was probably connected to the early establishment of the new diasporas in Britain and the United States,” says Gabriel Sheffer of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Zionism, also emerging in the late 19th century, likely helped to popularize the word, since the Zionists would have wanted to avoid using the Biblical galut, with its implication that only the Messiah could bring about return to the Promised Land.
Not until the mid-20th century, though, did the word diaspora gain widespread use. “It’s a sexy word now,” one professor says.
Pick out any modern English dictionary and you will find mention of a capital-D Diaspora referring only to Jews, as well as a lowercase-d diaspora that can apply to any similarly dispersed group. Since the 1960s, when African American scholars argued that the dispersion of people of African descent throughout the world met all the criteria of diaspora set by the Jews, numerous other groups have claimed the word. Social scientists now classify some 80 groups as diasporas, from Acadians to Zoroastrians. A search of the LexisNexis database for diaspora turns up far more articles on Africans—Ethiopians, Namibians, Nigerians, Ugandans, Zimbabweans—than on Jews.
Many Jews initially resisted this semantic broadening; in particular, many were rankled when Palestinians began to adopt the word. When they use terms like Palestinian diaspora, Thomas Friedman wrote in a 1987 New York Times Magazine article, some Palestinians “appropriate the language of Jewish suffering.” (One reader angrily responded: “I wonder what ‘language’ Mr. Friedman would prefer to ‘Palestinian diaspora’ and ‘exiles’—‘vacationing defectors?’”) Two years later, in 1989, two readers accused the Times of “journalistic negligence” for using the word to describe Palestinians: “Diaspora is a term used for the dispersion of the Jewish people after the Babylonian exile,” they wrote, and they didn’t appreciate that the Times would “appropriate that word and misapply it to the Palestinian Arabs.”
Ultimately, the notion that the Jewish diaspora is somehow unique has lost out. Wesleyan University professor Khachig Tölölyan, who founded and edits the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, says he and many scholars agree the capital-D version ought to be retired from discourse altogether. Tölölyan, a member of the Armenian diaspora, does not permit use of the capitalized Diaspora in his journal. If he is for expanding the term’s usage, though, he does not support doing it to such a degree that the word loses all utility. His journal sometimes includes a section called “Diasporama”—clippings with absurd uses of the word. These have included discussion of an “egg cream diaspora” and of an “anatomical diaspora” resulting from a bomb victim’s severed body parts.
The word diaspora may have had its first home among the Jews, but it has since scattered to the four corners of the earth. Diaspora is no longer just a Jewish word.
—David Zax
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