A hundred and fifty pages into Harvard University’s April 29 report on campus antisemitism, in a description of an uncomfortable dialogue, a surprising word appears. “I would like to envision,” a student is quoted as saying, “a more diasporic Jewish life on campus.”
Diasporic? As in, less focused on Israel? And that would be a good thing? It’s understandable why a student at a university gripped by anti-Israel demonstrations might wish for less focus on the traditional home of the Jews, but it’s a new entry in the long catalog of meanings for a word whose connotations have shifted repeatedly with the centuries.
“Diaspora,” originally a Greek word meaning dispersion, is often seen nowadays as one of the more neutral terms available for the Jewish people’s condition of being spread across the globe, not concentrated in a homeland. It’s also been taken up by other far-flung ethnic and national groups to describe themselves—there are African, Armenian, Palestinian diasporas. In Jewish contexts, it’s less charged than the English word “exile” or its Hebrew equivalents, golah or the later galut—which carries a connotation of punishment for sin. (The concept is echoed in liturgy, specifically the Amidah prayer for the three great festival holidays, when Jews in biblical times would make pilgrimages to Jerusalem to bring their offerings to the Temple.)
“Diaspora” has also recently had something of a boomlet of people using the word in a positive sense, with “diasporists” setting themselves in contrast to Zionists, and several new books, such as David Kraemer’s Embracing Exile, putting more focus on the riches and long stretches of creativity and relative safety that Jewish communities in diaspora have experienced.
But it all started as negative spin, says Malka Simkovich, a scholar of the Second Temple period who is also editor-in-chief of the Jewish Publication Society. The word, she explains, is first used in the Septuagint, the translation of the Bible into Greek that was begun in the 3rd century BCE, in a passage translated from Deuteronomy about the dire outcomes that will afflict the Israelites if they break their covenant with God. The text says they will become a za’ava, a horror or a shame, to the nations that witness their distress. The translators, borrowing an image from later in the passage, translate za’ava instead as “dispersion,” creating a new word, “diaspora,” for the purpose and thus cementing the idea that the condition of living outside the land is not merely a choice or a demographic phenomenon but the tangible result of being cursed by God.
Eastern European Jewish immigrants arriving in New York. Sketch by a staff artist for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 2, 1887. (Photo credit: LOC)
“It’s a real switch,” says Simkovich, author of several books about the Second Temple period. Why did they do it? She has a theory: A delegation of rabbinic translators arrived in Alexandria, sent by the Sanhedrin to create a version of the Bible in Greek. They encountered a prosperous community of Israelites living outside the land, speaking the local language and with no apparent plans to end their exile, which played into a “theological crisis” that was brewing at home. Although the Temple had been rebuilt, supposedly marking the end of exile, more Jews (or Judeans, as they would have been called) were living outside the land than in it. “God promised two things: The Temple will be rebuilt, and everyone will come back from golah, exile,” she says. “What do you do when 50 percent of God’s promises are fulfilled?”
Born in polemic, the meaning of the word “diaspora” has fluctuated.
For the scholarly delegation to Alexandria, there was another twist of the knife. “They’re working with a passage that says specifically that the people cannot and must not go back to Egypt,” Simkovich says. “And they’re here in Egypt in the midst of a community that’s totally settled, with no intention of going back. Theologically, these people should be in a state of distress and humiliation, but they’re thriving. To translate za’ava as dispersion, then, is not so much a description of reality as a polemic against it.” Nor does it reflect the “dispersed” people’s actual feelings: “Few texts actually produced outside the Land of Israel during the Second Temple period ever express a longing for diaspora to end.”
Born in polemic, the meaning of the word “diaspora” has fluctuated. Though less theologically freighted than galut, Simkovich says, in Talmudic use it carried a heavier burden of judgment: “Galut is a divine punishment, an interiorized state of estrangement from a utopian place or an era, and you can experience it wherever you live. But diaspora is a sort of self-perpetuating sin, a choice you’re making.” In other words, if galut is the punishment for sin, diaspora is the sin itself.
This fiercely negative connotation gained traction many centuries later with the advent of Zionism, which framed all Jewish life in exile as unrelievedly negative and used the pointed term “shelilat ha-galut”—the negation of the diaspora—to describe the predicted ingathering of the exiles and the approach of geulah, redemption. Famously, the idea that human beings, not God, would decide when it was time to negate the diaspora was a source of much of the opposition to Zionism from traditionalist Jews. More recently, scholarship such as Kraemer’s has focused on the benefits Jews reaped from their enforced wanderings. He points to the Russian-American scholar Yuri Slezkine’s argument that diaspora gave the Jews all the qualities that are preconditions to modernity—a tolerance for diversity and multiplicity, a portable lifestyle based on providing services rather than farming the land, an openness to creativity. Other thinkers have suggested that diaspora makes Jews more sensitive to the needs of the stranger or the Other, or even, as critic Alfred Kazin wrote, that Jews would have “died of boredom” if confined to the Land of Israel.
More generally, Kraemer suggests, while the accepted narrative of Jewish history is a series of seemingly safe acculturations that eventually went wrong, life in a single homeland can also be precarious. “It’s easy to memorize a list of expulsions and persecutions, harder to focus on the years in between,” he says. “The expression of a hope to return to Zion, for instance in prayer, doesn’t necessarily mean you want to leave your current home, at least here and now.” American Jews are among those who have considered their wanderings over, with early Reform theology declaring that America itself was Zion, and the Conservative movement asserting in a 1988 statement of principles that land and diaspora are complementary forms of Jewish life, each with value.
Kraemer says he has encountered students who describe themselves as “diasporist,” contrasting the term with Zionist without necessarily implying anti-Zionism but indicating a different cultural perspective. A popular podcast called The Jewish Diasporist by three self-described socialists has taken up such recent topics as the World Zionist Congress elections, the exploration of “Afro-Igbo-Jewish roots” and a “diasporist retrospective” of the World Union of Jewish Students annual congress in Prague over the new year 2023/24. Kraemer notes that the term first became popular in a purely satiric context in Philip Roth’s 1993 novel Operation Shylock: A Confession, in which a character named Philip Roth becomes aware of the doings of a doppelganger (also a writer named Philip Roth) who describes himself as a “diasporist” and travels around Israel making polemical speeches.
The result may be an object lesson in the way blessings may be taken for curses, and vice versa. “At the time, it was way out there, as Roth tended to be,” Kraemer says, “but as time has gone by, people have gone back and appreciated that the concept may be more serious than might have appeared at first blush—that the experience of diaspora, with its difficulties, is nevertheless to be affirmed.”