Jewish Diaspora

The works included in this bibliography describe Jewish diaspora from various analytical and disciplinary perspectives and touch on a wide range of historical contexts. The attempt to map the literature about the Jewish diaspora from such a comprehensive perspective begs the question of whether the subject matter of this bibliography should be the Jewish diaspora, or a plurality of Jewish diasporas. It is perhaps counterintuitive to pick the former possibility, for two reasons. One is that the singular term somehow still implies the discredited notion that Jewish diaspora began as a result of a single, catastrophic event (thus equating diaspora with exile). The other is that, consistent with the recognition that Jews have found, left, and lost countless homes, we have become accustomed, for example, to speaking more particularly of “the Sephardi diaspora.” Nevertheless perceiving the Jewish diaspora as one unified whole is evaluating its critical scope in its entirety. This language of wholeness implies neither uniformity nor univocity, but rather internal dynamics of changing centers and peripheries throughout long histories and vast geographies. In tension with homogenized nationalism, this language of unity does not authenticate the homeland or nation-state of Israel either as the “origin” or as the “end” of Jewish diaspora (Safran 1991 and Raz-Krakotzkin 2017, both cited under Theories of Diaspora). The literature surveyed below rather enables to critically conceive modern Israel as a diasporic locale in and of itself. Modern Israel is rethought as diaspora by identifying, on the one hand, imperialist modes of transnationalism embedded in the genealogy as well as in contemporary uses of the term “diaspora” that, in turn, support the official discourse of Israeli nationalism (Baumann 2000 and Tölölyan 1996, both cited under Theories of Diaspora); and, on the other hand, by conceiving Israel as a site of Jewish displacement. This later trend conceives Israeli statism not as the resolution of Europe’s Jewish Question but rather as the dislocation of the Question to another precarious zone of violent encounter (Mufti 2007, cited under Jewish Diaspora and Colonialism). And it analyzes processes that cast Mizrahi or Sephardi Jews as a population uprooted from the precolonial borderless terrains that encompass the region now known as the Middle East (Alcalay 1993, cited under Jews and Coterritorials; Shohat 2006, cited under Jewish Diaspora and Colonialism). Significantly, the “unified diaspora” approach makes it possible to evade the progressive logics of “diversity” and “multiplicity” that obscure a different order of relation to alterity and self-distinction: that of the Jewish tradition. It is through traditional logics of difference (not all of which, of course, are uniquely Jewish) that the Jewish diaspora challenges colonial dichotomies of West/East and Modern/Ancient (Hall 1990, cited under Theories of Diaspora), enabling processes of globalization beyond the teleology of modernity and the supremacy of the West (e.g., Abu-Lughod 1989, cited under World-System: Larger Context). Instead of historical chronology, Jewish tradition makes possible memory and narration of a different temporal order. The thematic circulation of mourning in Jewish memory restores a sense of cultural continuity across ruptures and displacements from various homelands. This continuity, nevertheless, is neither linear nor progressive but rather echoes back and forth between multiple temporal layers of the past and present (Boyarin 1991, cited under Ashkenaz). As the memory of place of origin often weaves together a multiplicity of origins and places, this non-linear memory produces in turn a dispersed, decentralized spatial network that does not adhere to the contiguous territoriality of modern nation-state and colonialism. Taken as a whole, the Jewish diaspora encompasses, for instance, a dynamic, changing relation between the traditions Sepharad and Ashkenaz, a relation that far exceeds the rigid fixity in both structural positionality and geographical space (and time) that characterizes the colonial constructs of East and West (Said 1978, cited under World-System: Larger Context). It is also through these traditional logics of difference that Jewish communities in the diaspora interact with coterritorials (e.g., Weinreich 1967) or with other diasporic cultures in sustainable albeit at time conflicted relations (e.g., Goldschmidt 2006, cited under Jews and Other Diasporas), independent of the exclusionary violence of the nation-state. The Jewish diaspora as a site of simultaneous sustainability and vulnerability (Boyarin and Boyarin 2002, cited under Theories of Diaspora) evokes another question: To what extent do modes of loss and displacement captured in the word exile (or the Hebrew galut) inform, enrich, or diminish the critical substance of the Jewish diaspora? Traumatic memory may reduce the fluidity of the time and space of diaspora to a re-centralized and exclusive notion of the Jewish homeland (e.g., Boyarin 2015, cited under Ancient Diasporas). At the same time, mourning the loss of exile may provide an existential foundation for relationalities that could reformulate the notion of Jewish collectivity and decolonize current national and racist orders. This, in particular, through attending to the continuation between modern political processes that cast Jews as well as Palestinians as displaced subjects (e.g., Mufti 1998, cited under Jewish Diaspora and Colonialism; Raz-Krakotzkin 2011, cited under Jews and Other Diasporas). At times, at any extent, the traumatic charge of exile can serve as a measure that helps to regulate the levels of abstraction applied when mediating between the concrete experiences of the Jewish diaspora and its framing as an analytical and critical framework (e.g., Tölölyan 1996).