What is the difference between diaspora and exile

An important part of any diaspora is the discrimination against the diasporic group by the dominant social groups both in their homelands and the places where they resettle. While this discrimination might moderate over time, it does not diminish the final, crucial aspect of a diaspora: the yearning to return and recreate the lost homeland.

Maps provide varying kinds of evidence for past diasporas. They have been used since the fifteenth century to show the Biblical exodus from Egypt; similar historical reconstructions can be made for later diasporas.

It is also possible to discern the segregated communities of diasporic peoples from elusive traces on old maps.

Finally, maps have been used to visualize and make manifest the homelands for which diasporic peoples yearn. Duclos Convocation, a year-long examination of migration and homelessness titled, Diaspora: Meanings of Home. In order to provide a detailed and substantive analysis, this exhibition focuses on the two diasporas familiar to most Americans.

A similar analysis could also be made for other diasporas: Afghani, Armenian, Chinese, Greek, Indian, Irish, Scottish, and Turkish, to name just a few. Seen this way, it no longer is tempting to suppose that there is a right answer to the question of Jewish identity, that something or other actually constitutes Jewish identity.

Who is to say, after all, that there is only one way in which Jewishness can matter, or legitimately matter? Who wants to get into the business of limiting the ways in which Jewishness might matter. In philosophical language, questions about Jewish identity are not questions of metaphysics—of the constitution of Jewishness. Instead, they are in the domain of the theory of human values.

This contrasts with classical philosophical questions about "personal identity," which are easy to confuse with our concern. Those classical questions are not about significance but about constitution, for example, John Locke's time-honored view that a person is constituted by temporal stages—time-slices, as it were—linked by memory. Even if Locke is on the right track, we would still have no help with the questions of significance that are our concern.

We would not be a lick closer to understanding the character of Jewish identity. It may be tempting to suppose that a positive conception of diaspora comes into its own with modernity and Jewish Emancipation, that until modern times, Jews lived under the cloud of galut.

Gruen, in Diaspora and Homeland," challenges this presumption. The former resolves diaspora into galut and sees salvation exclusively in terms of homecoming, the reacquisition of a homeland. The latter sees Jews as "the people of the Book," the text as a "portable temple," and restoration to a homeland as superfluous.

In the end Gruen suggests that both approaches are too simple, too stark. Jewish dispersion, Gruen emphasizes did not begin with the destruction of the Temple in 70 c. What Gruen has in mind is not only the destruction of the First Temple and its attendant diaspora.

Rather he means to stress that for a host of reasons, largely including voluntary migration, Jews lived outside the Center. Indeed, there was a vibrant diaspora of some three to five million. Jerusalem was no more a home for them than it is for many diaspora Jews today.

Diaspora communities were stable and had opportunities for residents to take part in the social, economic, and political life of their adopted lands, and often even to gain citizenship. Few of these Jews ever saw Jerusalem, yet it was still their spiritual Center. Never was the sanctity of Jerusalem in question. Indeed, Jerusalem was, in Gruen's words, "the principal emblem of their faith," and "a critical piece of their identity.

And they felt great solidarity with fellow Jews, both in the homeland and abroad. If Jerusalem was critical to the Hellenistic diaspora Jews' sense of themselves, what becomes of Jewish identity when Jerusalem is no more?

Here galut arguably comes into its own as a touchstone, at least until modern times. In "Coming to Terms with Exile," my own paper in this volume, I explore a Jewish identity for which galut is one central pillar.

My contention is that even in modern times, galut cannot and should not be avoided. Rather than steering clear of the almost inbred Jewish sense of dislocation—one that we cannot quite lose even in our own Western diasporic setting— galut must be reckoned with.

But such a reckoning does not necessarily issue in a bleak outlook. An ultimately positive take on the human and Jewish conditions requires that we give substantial weight to unpleasant, stubborn facts about human and Jewish dislocation.

I distinguish two galut phenomena. First there is in the human condition that I call "normal dislocation. The second and specifically Jewish galut phenomenon is not normal; it is extraordinary. I have in mind the cataclysmic sequence of events mentioned above: the churban, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.

The prospect of living without the foci of national and religious life must have been experienced as threatening, if not destroying, the very conception of a partnership between God and Israel. The churban, by contrast with normal dislocation, constituted a cosmic jolt. My paper sketches aspects of the Rabbinic response to the cosmic jolt and explores how a tradition smitten by and obsessed with galut develops practices and an outlook to cope.

My focus is on a crucial theological aspect of the rabbinic response, specifically the super-anthropomorphizing tendency one sees so clearly in the commentary, Midrash Rabbah, on the Book of Lamentations. This tendency culminates in an anthropomorphic quantum leap, the idea that after the churban, God Himself is in exile; dislocation is cosmic.

The outcome is a religious sensibility better equipped not only for history's great catastrophes, but also for the normal travails of the human condition. The golden age of Spain—perhaps somewhat idealized in the nineteenth century—served Jewish critics of the oppressive exilic life as the basis of a much more palatable model of Jewish identity. In this context, Goldstein sees in Heine's work an inviting positive conception of diaspora as well as a critique of "the devastating consequences of an oppressive exilic life.

In the second, "Jehuda ben Halevy," the narrator-poet feels the stirrings of the ancient Babylonian exile. The final poem, "Disputation," dramatizes, as Goldstein writes, a kind of exilic "intellectual and cultural immobility. Goldstein's view, however, is that the specter of galut in these poems serves to highlight Heine's suggestion—most fully developed in the middle poem, "Jehuda ben Halevy"—of a different model, that of "an integrative diaspora that promotes interactive dialogue across borders.

One who emphasizes a positive conception of diaspora, as does Goldstein, can readily agree that throughout Jewish history there has been exile, dislocation, and homelessness. But how central to contemporary Jewish self-perception is the sense of ourselves as in exile? By contrast with, for example, my own emphasis on galut, Goldstein directs our attention to an attractive and very different way of construing Jewish identity.

His focus is Rebecca Goldstein's novel, Mazel. Galut is characterized by powerlessness, halachic constriction, dislocation, and anguish, in contrast with the diaspora's possibility of empowerment and integration.

Baumgarten reads Mazel as identifying the movement from galut to diaspora with the Emancipation movement from the shtetl to the city. But here is the twist: Mazel goes farther than the movement from shtetl to city. It is the story of four generations of Jewish women, beginning in the shtetl Shluftchev , proceeding to the city Warsaw , winding its way through Israel to New York, and ending in the suburbs Lipton, New Jersey.

This suburb, largely populated by the traditionally religious, is no more than "Shluftchev with a designer label," as Sasha, the central character, puts it. Warsaw is, as Baumgarten says, "but another stop in the long Jewish journey of homelessness. As noted above, its shortcomings are legend.

But Baumgarten emphasizes the complexity of the shtetl: It was a bounded and constricting world, but at the same time dream-like as suggested by the name Shluftchev, which roughly means "Sleepy Hollow" , possessing the "completeness of meaning of a classical work of art. The world of Warsaw was more open and as Baumgarten says, "clangorous," with subtle but blaring meanings. Another aspect of the shtetl was that it was "a world desperately trying to articulate and safeguard, in a polluted, corrupt environment, a space of sacredness even at the cost of obsessive behavior.

The ultimate destination—ultimate for now—is the suburb, a context that appropriates values of both shtetl and city. Not that the suburb represents a smooth assimilation of those values and virtues; there is no Hegelian synthesis, as it were. Indeed, Baumgarten notes that his title, "Dancing at Two Weddings," intimates both the impossibility of a synthesis and the power of the pursuit. Many of Mazel 's central characters are unable to abandon either world.

They are caught between exile and diaspora. This leads to something to which most, perhaps all, members of our research group could agree: Jewish Emancipation allowed and even encouraged the transformation of the constricting shtetl version of exile into something more creative, open, and cosmopolitan.

That much seems relatively uncontroversial. But, while agreeing with this, some would argue—there are suggestions of this in Baumgarten's paper as there are in mine—that there is in the newfound worldliness something of a new form of homelessness, of rootlessness, one that has been widely shared since the advent of modernity. As we will see below when we discuss Louise Tallen's essay on baalot teshuvah, this homelessness has taken its toll and sometimes leads to a desire to reengage with at least some of the values of the shtetl.

The costs of Emancipation are illuminated from another direction by art historian Catherine M. Soussloff in "Portraiture and Assimilation in Vienna. This was so in colonial and federal America as well as in central Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But to deny Jewish content to such portraits—and Soussloff's work is pioneering here in its identification of Jewish content—is to abstract these portraits from their historical and social contexts. It is also, argues Soussloff, to fly in the face of both recent work in museum studies and a historical interpretation of art. Soussloff's contextualism views portraiture as a transaction between the artist, those who sit for the portrait, and the audience.

A crucial component, stressed by Soussloff, is the placement of the work of art. The portraits in question, free as they are of overt Jewish content, were viewed in the parlors and living rooms of emancipated American and European Jews. The portraits thus represent an ideal of assimilation, "unmarked," as Soussloff says, "by dress, no longer residents of the ghetto. That Emancipation engendered assimilation is, of course, a commonplace. And that portraits of assimilated Jews abstract from the ethnic and religious dimensions is no surprise.

Soussloff's provocative point is that the same assimilationist tendency is at work in the interpretation of the art. Writers about portraiture have participated in what Soussloff calls the ethics of assimilation. They view the portrait as if it were simply an image, something contained in the picture frame. Soussloff's emphasis is not simply the visual product, but on portraiture itself, and she sees this as occurring "along an axis perpendicular to the image's frame. The papers thus far have explored Jewish identity in ancient or modern Western diasporas.

As noted, one important agreement between the essays is that there is no single account of Jewish identity, no uniquely privileged Jewish identity. The lesson is brought home with force by Daniel J. Schroeter explores the meanings and effects of modernity for the Arab world generally—not only with respect to Jews. For example, the development of the modern nation-state in the Arab world was quite a different affair than that in Europe. In the former, the nation-state is somewhat artificial.

The earlier rise of Islam as both a political and religious entity meant that, by contrast with the Catholic Church in Europe, "the Muslim community, the umma, never had to define itself in relation to the state.

These political movements attempted to establish a civil society, but the enormous influence of the Muslim past meant that secularism never took hold as it did in Europe. Accordingly, even with the rise of the Arab nation-state, the hold of religion and the cohesiveness of religious minorities remained strong.

Unlike Europe, Arab lands never developed a secular common ground. Jewish assimilation thus was not a major threat to Jewish identity and survival. The lack of a secular common ground is also related to the lack of a pressing need felt for religious reform. Thus one does not find any analogue to Reform Judaism in the East. But where there is no Reform, there is also no Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy here does not refer to a rigorous commitment to traditional religious practice, but rather to the movement that arose in Europe to counter Reform.

In the East one does not find the tension that existed in Europe between the demands of traditional Jewish religious practiceand technological innovation and secular education. The rabbis could be more relaxed about modernity; it was considerably less threatening. Similarly, Zionism was not needed to fill the gap left by the move from shtetl to city, the meaning-gap left by the rejection of the old ways. Zionism thus arose not as an all-embracing new modern Jewish identity but as one thread, sometimes an important one, among many; a new aspect of a more smoothly and slowly evolving Jewish identity.

In Europe, modernization dismantled the virtually self-governing Jewish kehillah [community], and granted citizenship to Jews. This in turn had a dramatic impact on Jewish identity. Jews largely continued to maintain strong attachments to local community and local religious practices. Schroeter's essay raises important implications for the concept of diaspora. Consider Moroccan Jews living in Israel. The category "Moroccan Jew" is not one that Jews applied to themselves in Morocco. Given the linking of the modern Arab nation with Islam, it was implausible for Jews living in Morocco to identify themselves as Moroccan.

They were Jews whose home was Morocco; Home was another matter. Indeed, their situation is in some ways similar to that of the more comfortably assimilated Hellenistic Jews described by Erich Gruen. Password Please enter your Password. Forgot password? Don't have an account? Sign in via your Institution. You could not be signed in, please check and try again.

Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Subjects: Religion. All rights reserved.