Expert: Rabbi Barry Dov Lerner - 10/31/2004

Question
What is the Diaspora? my background info: 26 college student, taking Jewish Tradition

Answer
Dear Leslie,

Thanks for writing. "Disapora" is a term used for the times and geography for those who are not living in Israel, from ancient times through the present.

You can always consult the jewishencyclopedia.com on-line, and the libraries have the Encyclopedia Judaica - EJ -which has a superb first volume Index.

Otherwise we don't do the actual research for school study because of space and time limitations.

Consider this selection from the EJ to help you

"The Concept
The Hebrew term galut expresses the Jewish conception of the condition and feelings of a nation uprooted from its homeland and subject to alien rule. The term is essentially applied to the history and the historical consciousness of the Jewish people from the destruction of the Second Temple to the creation of the State of Israel. The residence of a great number of members of a nation, even the majority, outside their homeland is not definable as galut so long as the homeland remains in that nation's possession.
Only the loss of a political-ethnic center and the feeling of uprootedness turns Diaspora (Dispersion) into galut (Exile). The feeling of exile does not always necessarily accompany the condition of exile. It is unique to the history of the Jewish people that this feeling has powerfully colored the emotions of the individual as well as the national consciousness. The sense of exile was expressed by the feeling of alienation in the countries of Diaspora, the yearning for the national and political past, and persistent questioning of the causes, meaning, and purpose of the exile. Jewish mystics perceived a defectiveness in the Divine Order which they connected with alienation in this world—"the exile of the Divine Presence."
The Diaspora Pattern
The process of Jewish dispersion in various countries during different periods was due to the combination of national catastrophes, military defeats, destructions, persecutions, and expulsions, as well as to normal social and economic processes—migration to new places of settlement and transition to new means of livelihood. The expression "Egyptian Exile" for the period before the Exodus is merely a homiletic conception of later date; but there is no doubt that Jewish dispersion had already begun in a normal way a long time before the concept of exile developed. The conquests of the Arabs between 632 and 719 changed the pattern of the Diaspora by uniting large parts of the Jewry of the Roman Empire with that of the Persian Kingdom. The Muslim armies extirpated the Jews from the Arabian peninsula, with the exception of those in Yemen and Wadi al-Qara, but created favorable conditions of development for the exiles in the remainder of the lands of Islam. In the Christian world, this period is marked by the progress of the Jewish dispersion in Gaul and later in Germany and Britain. From the 11th century, the Jewry of the West (see Germany) managed to maintain itself under increasingly difficult conditions and even spread to central Germany. The changes in the territorial supremacies of Christianity and Islam as a result of the Crusades and the Reconquest in Spain, as well as the expulsions in the Christian countries, brought changes in the configuration of the Jewish Diaspora from one period to another.
By processes of both expulsion and attraction, the Jews penetrated the expanses of Poland-Lithuania during the 15th century. The migration eastward was halted by the total prohibition imposed on the admission of Jews by the grand duchy of Moscow (see Russia). After 1497 there were no professing Jews (except for the underground of forced converts—anusim) left in all of the lands bordering the Atlantic including England. During the 17th century, however, the Jews returned and penetrated to the Netherlands and England. The Jewish population in the Ottoman Empire had increased in numbers after the Spanish Expulsion. The largest Jewish concentrations during the 16th to 18th centuries were to be found in the Ottoman Empire and the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. The persecutions of 1648–49 (see Bogdan Chmielnicki) started off the migration of Jews in Eastern Europe toward the West, a process which continued and intensified throughout the modern era.
At the close of the 18th century, the partitions of Poland as well as the French Revolution led to a Jewish expansion toward the western provinces of Russia, the northeastern provinces of Austria, the Kingdom of Prussia and the French territories. Economic, social, cultural, and political developments made Ashkenazi European Jewry the most important in the Diaspora, both numerically and in dynamism, throughout the 19th century and the first 30 years of the 20th. As formerly, liberalist or restrictive trends in this period also determined the pattern of Jewish dispersion in the world. It was only in 1917 that the revolution in Russia abolished the Pale of Settlement and removed the last barriers to the settlement of Jews throughout the territory of the great Eurasian power.
In America individual Sephardi Jews had already begun to arrive during the 16th century. However, the emigration of considerable groups of Jews there was only to begin during the mid-19th century when many left Germany; the transfer of masses of Jews from Eastern Europe to the new world, especially the United States, only began during the last quarter of the 19th century. The flow of mass emigration to the United States and later also to Canada and the South American countries, coupled with the impetus of Zionism and trends of modern nationalism, have contributed to the shift to new centers of gravity. The catastrophe of the persecutions in Germany from 1933, the conquests of the Nazis until 1939, and the decimation of European Jewry in the Holocaust from 1939 until 1945, have created the present situation (the 1970s) when the numerical majority in the Jewish Diaspora is to be found on the American continent, while Erez Israel has the third largest Jewish concentration in the world (Soviet Russia is the second). In Erez Israel, the independent Jewish politico-national center has been revived. As in the Second Temple era, through the State of Israel, the Jewish nation has regained the basic pattern of a Diaspora with a state as its center (see Diaspora). . . .

Best wishes for further study

Rabbi Dov