New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim as a Sub-Ethnic Group

New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim asa Sub-Ethnic Group

Jonathan Ray

Jewish Social Studies, Volume 15, Number 1, Fall 2008 (NewSeries), pp. 10-31 (Article)

Published by Indiana University PressDOI: 10.1353/jss.0.0024

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New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim as a Sub-Ethnic Group

Jonathan Ray

AbstrAct

The expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492 created a new diaspora community spread throughout the early-modern Mediterranean. Scholarly understanding of the nature and initial development of Sephardi identity during the sixteenth century has been ham-pered by the enduring tendency to treat the Sephardi diaspora as part of the broader his-torical and cultural phenomenon of Jewish exile (galut). Greater attention to sub-ethnic identity as a defining element within Hispano-Jewish history and the subsequent re-course to current methodologies borrowed from the field of Diaspora Studies should lend greater insight into both early modern Jewish History and Diaspora Studies.

Key words: expulsion, Mediterranean, diaspora, community

O ne of the more curious features of the modern field of diaspora studies is the relative disinterest in, if not outright exclusion of, the Jewish diaspora experience. While ac-

knowledging the original association of the term “diaspora” with the ancient exile of the Jews from their ancestral land, most theorists see the Jewish case as being sui generis and thus of little interest to those studying migration, ethnicity, and transnationalism among modern-day diaspora communities. The general absence of Jewish history from this current debate signals a broader gap between the field of Jewish history, particularly of the pre-modern era, and the various fields of cultural studies. Recently, scholars whose interests span both Jewish and cultural studies have placed the responsibility for the rela-

Jonathan Ray, “New Approaches to the Jewish Diaspora: The Sephardim as a Sub-Ethnic Group,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society n.s. 15, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 10–31

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tive exclusion of the Jewish experience from the field of diaspora the-ory on the provincialism of Judaica scholarship. David Biale has warned that “there is no greater task than to criticize the field of Jew-ish Studies for both its antiquarianism and conservatism,” and Daniel Boyarin has argued that the field of post-exilic, pre-modern Jewish Studies is characterized by isolated scholars “pouring over dusty man-uscripts.”1 Allowing for a degree of hyperbole here, the point is well taken that those who turn their back on current trends within the academy, especially those focusing on minority or diaspora commu-nities, are missing an important opportunity. The potential benefit of interdisciplinary dialogue becomes particularly apparent when looking at the formation of the sub-ethnic diaspora of Sephardi (Ibe-rian) Jews following their exile from Spain in 1492.

The formation of a community-in-exile of Sephardi Jews and Con-versos following 1492 appears to display several of the hallmarks of modern diasporas as defined by current theorists.2 Issues of dispersion, mobility, cultural hybridity, and a continued and complex relationship with their Iberian homeland are as central to the formation of Se-phardi identities in the early modern period as they are to any modern community. Yet despite the recent explosion of interest in both Se-phardi and diaspora studies, little effort has been made to treat Se-phardi society after 1492 as a function of diaspora. Diaspora theorists have thus far paid relatively little attention to Sephardi Jews as a diaspora community, in large part due to the continued tendency to view the wider Jewish diaspora as a monolithic and undifferentiated whole. Consequently, those interested in the development of modern diasporas have ignored the rich legacy of the Sephardim and the nota-ble points of contrast with the larger phenomenon of Jewish diaspora. Likewise, Jewish historians who make frequent references to the Se-phardi emigration from Spain as a “diaspora” nonetheless have made little use of the broader scholarship on diaspora communities in their analysis.3 The reticence within the field of Jewish Studies to engage this burgeoning area of research may reflect the implicit argument of the uniqueness of the Jewish experience, and, as the wave of post-modern, post-colonial, and cultural studies (including diaspora studies) seems to have peaked, it can also be argued that little has been lost here. To be sure, valid criticisms of cultural studies and the so-called New His-toricism remain, from the use of jargon that obscures as often as it il-luminates to the tendency to replace studies of communal identities centered on the nation-state with a diaspora model that maintains its own set of cultural assumptions and biases. Nonetheless, recourse to current methodologies borrowed from the field of diaspora studies can

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help those of us within the field to take a fresh look at our own histori-cal assumptions and historiographic conventions.

It is my proposition that the sorts of models and questions devel-oped by those working in the field of modern diaspora studies can offer a fresh approach to the question of galut (Jewish exile) and the unique place of the Sephardim within the broader Jewish experience. This is not to deny the importance of the religious and cultural charac-teristics that Sephardim share with other Jewish groups. I merely seek to emphasize the limits of these shared characteristics and to suggest new ways of investigating the Jewish experience generally and the impact of diaspora in particular. The following article is thus intended as a pre-liminary discussion of the place of Sephardi history within the context of diaspora studies. First, I suggest that proponents of both diaspora studies and Jewish Studies stand to benefit from studying the Jewish diaspora experience through the lens of diaspora theory. Second, this approach would be greatly aided by viewing the long centuries of Jewish migration and statelessness as a series of culturally defined and tempo-rally limited micro-diasporas rather than as a monolithic whole. Finally, I offer the example of the early modern Sephardi diaspora as a model of such a micro-diaspora, arguing that the distinct and culturally cohe-sive Hispano-Jewish community that evolved after 1492 does appear to fit the model of a diaspora as understood by current theorists.4 It is my hope that such observations help to stimulate inter-disciplinary discus-sion between students of Jewish history and diaspora theory, a discus-sion that should prove beneficial to both groups.

The Importance of Diaspora Studies for Jewish Studies

Those of us interested in the concept of diaspora for Jewish history in general and Sephardi history in particular would do well to find more innovative ways in which to read Jewish communal and “transna-tional” identities in order to produce a crisper and more precise vi-sion of the varieties of Jewish experience and a more profitable relationship between our scholarship and the broader field of diaspora studies. Scholars working in various fields within Jewish Studies have already noted the problems caused by the current meth-odological stagnation with regard to discussions of the Jewish diaspora, yet none have proposed a way out of the quandary.5 I sug-gest that approaching Jewish history as a series of diaspora communi-ties with greater attention paid to sub-ethnic identity as a defining

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element in the formation of identities and communal institutions will open up new and important avenues of analysis.

The leading obstacle to a conceptual revision of the current ap-proach to the Jewish experience as a diaspora community is the pre-vailing treatment of the Jewish diaspora as galut, a highly charged term that depicts much of Jewish history as a forced exile from an an-cient homeland marked by anguish, oppression, and a perpetual longing for return.6 For the nineteenth-century pioneers of Jewish Studies, galut was a condition that encompassed the totality of Jewish experience and transcended historical eras. As Zionist ideology helped scholars to reconceive the notion of homeland in modern, po-litical terms, the longstanding image of galut still remained the de-fining characteristic and unifying image for Jewish history. For subsequent generations of Jewish writers and academics, the specter of assimilation joined (or replaced) the dangers of persecution in their concept of galut. The central concern of this latter group has often fo-cused on a loss of Jewish cultural identity rather than on a loss of reli-gious observance.7 Even today, those within the field of Jewish Studies who are interested in the phenomenon of the Jewish diaspora tend to focus on the sociological ties and tensions between the State of Israel and other contemporary Jewish communities, most notably that of the United States. The persistence of many of the ideological assumptions of this older approach that equates the Jewish diaspora with galut privi-leges the idea of longing for an ancient and semi-mythic homeland over more concrete ties developed to the lands of more recent resi-dence (such as Iberia and central Europe). This mindset has obscured the fact that Jews can experience diaspora in much the same way as other societies, as a transnational chain of minority communities linked by both a common heritage and a common experience of state-lessness. An emphasis on smaller, limited, Jewish diasporas does not reject the importance of Judaism as a cultural common ground. Rather, it calls attention to the importance of sub-ethnic factors and what might be called “secondary homelands” in the creation of Jewish iden-tities and communal boundaries, arguing that such factors may pro-vide us with greater insight into the Jewish response to exile.

The sweeping and sentimental identification of the Jewish diaspora as galut continues to be accepted and promoted by scholars within the field of Jewish Studies and without. In her recent meditation on Jewish political ideology, Ruth Wisse argues that “Jews have always constituted a nation” engaged in “political interaction with other na-tions.”8 Her efforts to recover Jewish political thought from a field (political science) that has traditionally ignored it are well taken, but

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her argument overlooks many of the contextualized developments of sub-ethnic Jewish communities like the early modern Sephardim. Her identification of Jewishness as a set of universal characteristics that collapse the more locally determined elements of time and place leads her to miss the very details that might serve as building blocks for a theory of Jewish political thinking. It is perhaps no surprise that Wisse opens the conclusion of her book with a note of caution against the weakness and structural deficiencies of Diaspora Judaism.9

Even those who have sought to reject what is popularly termed the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history” have been unable to disen-tangle their image of the Jewish diaspora from the theoretical under-pinning of the galut ideal. Thus, Yossi Shain acknowledges the unique role played by American Jews within the wider Jewish diaspora, but he nonetheless maintains that the principal division of world Jewry is between those living within the State of Israel and all others.10 Simi-larly, the views expressed by the sociologist and cultural critic Or-lando Patterson some 30 years ago continue to typify the attitude held by many diaspora scholars toward the unique position of the Jewish experience. Writing on the function of Jewish ethnicity, Pat-terson noted that, since ancient times, Jews have represented the par-adigmatic diaspora community in that they have been forced to act as economic and cultural intermediaries between discrete societies.11 His observations signal two fundamental problems with the way in which we approach the study of the Jewish diaspora. First, it reduces the Jewish experience to points of contact with or contribution to the culture of the host societies. This conceptualization of Jewish history prefigures a discourse in which Jews are either persecuted objects, the beleaguered “other” within Muslim or Christian history, or (as here) the laudable and “useful” agents of cultural preservation and transformation.12 Second, this approach maintains the image of the Jews as a monolithic group. By looking at them as cultural mediators, we miss the impact that smaller diasporas, migration, persecution, economic success, and so forth had on the internal dynamic and cul-tural makeup of particular Jewish societies.

Rather than viewing Jews as the classic exemplar of ethnic symbio-sis, perhaps it is worth asking if their unique experience as minorities or in diaspora(s) had repercussions for the formation of intra-group relations. Did Jews, who were forced to become expert cultural inter-mediaries, reproduce this model within the community itself? That is to say, did Castilian Jews see Aragonese Jews in much the same way as they saw non-Jews: as potential enemies or rivals as well as potential allies? In order to answer such questions, we need to begin to rethink

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the way in which Jews experienced diaspora and the impact that mi-gration and resettlement had on their self-perception and institu-tional development.13

Certainly, the reconceptualization of the Jewish diaspora as a se-ries of smaller, ethnically distinct, yet religiously and culturally re-lated diasporas faces obstacles beyond scholarly inertia or attachment to convention. Any challenge to the longstanding notion that posits the modern State of Israel as the universal and natural Jewish home-land in contradistinction to the vulnerable and inauthentic commu-nities of exile is provocative, and will prompt resistance from many who work in Jewish Studies. This reductive configuration of the Jew-ish experience in diaspora has served a number of political and phil-osophical agendas dealing with the relationship between Jews and the State of Israel, the relationship between Jewish history and the history of the West, and the image of Jewish Studies scholars as de-fenders of one or another aspect of the Jewish tradition.14 Further-more, most Jewish scholars who identify with their subject in a personal way are loath to apply some aspects of cultural criticism to Jewish history. For many in the field, Judaism and Jewish ethnicity are not invented or “imagined.”15 They are, a priori, essential and real.16

In some quarters, the older understanding of the Jewish diaspora as galut is now being reinscribed as a response to accusations of Jew-ish colonialism. No longer seen as culturally debilitating, the Jewish experience outside of Israel is now becoming associated with an image of diaspora that celebrates the flexibility and creativity of the transnational or stateless community. Proponents of this new under-standing of the Jewish diaspora can now argue that the true nature of the Jewish people is not to be found in the State of Israel, whose cul-tural and political tendencies they continue to label as hegemonic. The true nature of the Jewish character, it is now claimed, is only to be found in diaspora. Such an approach counters Stuart Hall’s conten-tion that Jewish experience cannot truly be read as diasporic due to the imperialist tendencies of the Jews as viewed through Israeli ex-pansion (or, indeed, existence).17 Some scholars openly recognize this glorification of the diaspora community over and against the inher-ently static and exclusionary nation-state as an idealized model, but endorse it nonetheless. Daniel Boyarin, who proposes diaspora “as a theoretical and historical model to replace national self-determina-tion” for Jews further notes that this would be “an idealized Diaspora generalized from those situations in Jewish history when Jews were both relatively free from persecution and yet constituted by strong identity—those situations, moreover, within which Promethean Jew-

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ish creativity was not antithetical, indeed was synergistic with a gen-eral cultural activity.” For Boyarin, the idealization of the diaspora experience is employed to counter “the solution of Zionism—that is, Jewish state hegemony,” which he thus argues is “the subversion of Jewish culture and not its culmination.”18

Such efforts to extol the virtues of Jewish civilization through a re-reading of its experience in diaspora notwithstanding, most theorists have been content to accept the older, unifying concept of galut as the paradigm for Jewish history. It has therefore remained common-place for them to reject the Jewish experience as that of a “true” diaspora community. James Clifford’s argument that the Jewish expe-rience “is by no means diasporic in the strict sense of the term” has been particularly influential in this regard.19 This exclusion is lamen-table for those of us interested in delineating the particular effects of diaspora on Jewish subcultures, such as the Sephardim. The current models employed by diaspora theorists focus on the creation of new, wide-ranging transnational communities that have, through the cru-cible of the diaspora experience, fashioned not only new hybrid iden-tities but also new forms of sociopolitical organization as well as cultural and religious expression. Read back on the community from which its name was originally taken, this new paradigm of “diaspora” holds interesting potential to broaden the horizons of Jewish histori-cal research. One such example is the subject of homeland. Clifford raises the question of real or perceived ties to a particular homeland, asking: “How long does it take to become ‘indigenous’?”20 For the Se-phardi community, the question of ranking homelands and cultural affiliations (for example, Iberia versus the Land of Israel, Spanish versus Jewish) has yet to receive the attention it merits. Michel de Cer-teau has drawn attention to the fact that cultural affiliation to a given homeland or region rapidly changes as one generation loses the strength of nostalgia held by its parents and grandparents. For all the considerable discussion of the importance of Iberia in the collective memory of the Sephardi Jews, very little work has been done regard-ing the way in which this memory has developed and changed from generation to generation and from one era to another.21

It is also important to recognize that scholars of Jewish history are themselves complicit in the continued exclusion of temporally discrete Jewish diasporas from current models. Historians working on the for-mation of the wider Jewish diaspora in the ancient world have begun to make use of the language and theoretical framework of modern diaspora studies in their work.22 Yet even within this fertile subfield of Jewish Studies, in which many now deal extensively with the concept of

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diaspora Judaism in a relatively focused historical context, a tendency persists to treat Jews as a relatively unified cultural entity. Attempts to approach the question of Jewish diaspora through the investigation of ethnically constructed communities, such as the Jews of Iberian heri-tage, remain rare.23 In a discussion of the relative indifference toward the Jewish experience among current diaspora theorists, Denise Mc-Coskey notes that it is important “to admit a degree of sameness and allow that critical examination of the Jewish diaspora can illuminate study of the other diasporas and vice versa.”24 Although I agree with McCoskey’s assessment here, I would caution that the larger the canvas on which we work, the more difficult it is to argue points of cultural cohesiveness and shared identity. If we are to emphasize the common-alities between the Jewish and other diasporas, it is perhaps better to look at the experience of sub-ethnically defined Jewish communities in a geographically and temporally limited sphere.

1492 and the Emergence of Sephardi Diaspora

Thus far I have suggested that a more profitable method of under-standing the Jewish diaspora is through the study of smaller diaspo-ras of Jewish groups that are defined by tighter ethnic or geographic identities. I would like to offer the example of the diaspora of Se-phardi Jews and Conversos from the Iberian Peninsula in the century following their expulsion as a model for this sort of approach to the sub-ethnic Jewish community.25

To assess the nature and limits of a recognizable Sephardi diaspora community, it may be helpful to reconsider the state of Hispano-Jew-ish identity on the eve of 1492. The high level of economic success, social status, and intellectual productivity that characterized Iberian Jewry during the Middle Ages has understandably earned it the des-ignation of a Jewish Golden Age.26 Yet it is somewhat misleading to imagine a pan-peninsular Jewish community during the medieval pe-riod. Although there existed among Jews a generally accepted associ-ation between the Latin Hispania and the Hebrew Sepharad, both were used more as a loose geographical designation than as a statement of communal character.27 Like its Latin equivalent, the exact boundar-ies indicated by the term Sepharad and those who qualified to be called Sephardi remained ill-defined throughout the Middle Ages. At no point did a Sephardi community exist that operated in a politi-cally cohesive manner, nor was there anything that might be de-scribed as a Sephardi consciousness. For Iberian Jews as well as for

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their Christian counterparts, social, political, and even cultural iden-tity rarely transcended one’s city or region. Thus the Jews of Iberia did not possess a “national” character prior to their expulsion in 1492. Rather, they were treated by the institutions of their host soci-ety, secular as well as religious, as Jews and as residents of a given lo-cale. They were “Jews of Seville” or “Jews of Barcelona,” only occasionally Jews of a larger region (such as Aragon or Castile-Leon). Likewise, the Hebrew term ha-Sephardi as an appellative among the Iberian exiles, though common, was not used with any particular pre-cision or consistency in the first generation. Because these Jews were just as likely to style themselves (or be dubbed by their new neigh-bors) as “the Saragossan” or “the Toledan,” evidence of its usage can-not be taken as proof of a discrete and culturally cohesive diaspora community.28 Thus, in any Mediterranean city of the early sixteenth century with a large Jewish settlement, congregational communities of Jews could be found from Toledo or Cordoba, or of broader geo-graphic regions (Andalusia, Aragon), but not of Sephardim per se.29

One of most salient characteristics of modern diaspora communi-ties is that the phenomenon of exile helps to produce a new and unify-ing identity that had hitherto not existed among their members prior to emigration from their homeland.30 Despite the existence of cultural, religious, or racial identities that they shared prior to migration, it is the process of migration, resettlement, and the reconstitution of their “nation” among a network of minority communities that creates a new sociocultural synthesis. In this sense the creation of the early modern Sephardi society falls squarely within the current discourse of diaspora theory. The mass departure of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and in all the successive waves of expulsion and emigration, great and small, was a process that eventually raised the question of Sephardi identity with unprecedented urgency and frequency. However, the formation of a Sephardi communal identity was gradual. In the immediate aftermath of 1492, any broad communal and cultural associations among His-pano-Jewish refugees remained tenuous and highly conditional. In-deed, ties that had traditionally bound the individual Jew to his local kahal (community) had themselves been relatively weak throughout the Middle Ages. For centuries, wealthy Jews regularly sought to free themselves of the fiscal responsibilities and leadership roles demanded by the local community, and Jewish communal councils were often forced to appeal to the crown for help in this regard.31

Thus, even at the local level, the cohesiveness of the Hispano-Jew-ish community was in large part dependent on external forces prior to 1492. If this was true for the individual kahal, Jewish supra-com-

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munal organization was effectively nonexistent. Centralizing adminis-trative policies in the kingdoms of Castile and Portugal led to the creation of posts with wide-ranging jurisdiction in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, these administrative networks never pro-duced kingdom-wide or pan-peninsular Sephardi identity and were often viewed by Jews as a departure from their traditional and pre-ferred communal structures.32 The Jews who left Iberia at the close of the fifteeenth century brought with them this vague sense of commu-nal identity and affiliation. It is therefore not surprising to see Jews continuing to organize themselves with regard to cities or regions of origin in the first generation after the expulsion. On the contrary, one of the most notable features of Sephardi diaspora culture is the reluc-tance of the exiles to fully and consistently embrace their relationship to the Sephardi community writ large. This tendency among many of the Hispano-Jewish elite to abandon both their communal responsi-bilities and at times even their Jewish identities remained something of a cultural trait for centuries.33

Slowly, the experience of exile, migration, and resettlement helped to forge a Sephardi collective identity much as it has for modern diaspora communities. In the first decades following the mass migra-tions from their native land, the Jews of Spain and Portugal dispersed throughout the Mediterranean, settling among Jews with a variety of different ethnic and quasi-national identities. Just as the conversions of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries led to what David Nirenberg has called “a violent destabilization of traditional catego-ries of religious identity,” so too did the decades following 1492 cause Jewish and Converso refugees to develop new forms of communal boundaries and definitions of ethno-religious identity.34 In the first case, conversions of individuals or small groups could be ignored, but the conversions of thousands brought myriad or practical and philo-sophical issues into sharp relief. Similarly, the later movement of masses of Jews forced the refugees and those among whom they set-tled to confront matters of ethnic identity, communal association, and religious status as never before.35

If we take the Sephardi diaspora as a discrete phenomenon within the broader history of Jewish exile, a “Diaspora within a Diaspora,” to use Jonathan Israel’s phrase, then it becomes easier to compare it to modern transnational communities.36 Ostensibly, the Sephardi expe-rience following 1492 differs from contemporary diaspora communi-ties in that Iberian Jews were summarily exiled and forbidden to return. However, the break with their homeland was not as absolute as it is sometimes portrayed. To begin with, voluntary Jewish migra-

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tion from the Spanish kingdoms took place long before the edict of expulsion was written and, in the case of Portuguese Conversos, con-tinued through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Further-more, Jews could and did return to Iberia after 1492. Ironically, the persistence of popular identification of the Conversos with Judaism, aided by the Spanish and Portuguese inquisitions, made it possible for many New Christians to retain a level of Jewish identity into the sixteenth century and beyond.37 Such details challenge the popular notion that “Since there was no [Jewish] homeland to which to re-turn, there was no alternative to diaspora,” and they help to under-score points of comparison between the experience of at least one subset of Jews and that of modern diaspora communities.38

As we acknowledge that the effects of exile on individual Jewish communities such as the early modern Sephardim parallel those of so many current diaspora communities, we begin to view the social and cultural developments of these communities in a new light. The creation of the Sephardi diaspora community—a self-identified His-pano-Jewish nation in exile from its native soil rather than from a more distant ancestral homeland—highlights the significance of sub-ethnic identity as a defining element within Jewish history and forces a reevaluation of the uniqueness of the Jewish diaspora experience. Indeed, the concept that the Sephardi community only truly began to coalesce in the crucible of exile echoes Moshe Idel’s groundbreak-ing argument that a turn toward mysticism among Sephardi intellec-tuals was not a direct result of the trauma of 1492 but rather an incidental effect of exile. Overturning a theory of cause and effect that was widely accepted among Judaica scholars for decades, Idel notes that a new direction in Sephardi Kabbalah developed when scholars who had remained separated in Iberia were brought together by the process of migration and the formation of new intellectual communities.39 It is my contention that the factors identified by Idel as governing the development of trends within Jewish thought should also extend to the social, political, and cultural development of Se-phardi society. In both cases it is the phenomenon of diaspora that is the crucial factor in shaping a new “nation” within the Jewish world.

The creation of a self-fashioned and elastic Sephardi community in the wake of 1492 evokes the dynamic character of modern diaspora communities as described by Hall:

The Diaspora experience. . . . is defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity, diversity; by a conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybrid-

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ity. Diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and re-producing themselves anew, through transformation and difference.40

There are several natural points of affinity between Hall’s descrip-tion and the dynamics of early modern Sephardi culture. Parallels can be found in the six-point definition of a diaspora community laid out by William Safran in the inaugural issue of the journal Diaspora. These include: dispersion from a common “center” to two or more “peripheral” regions; preservation of a collective memory or vision of their homeland; a feeling of alienation from their current host soci-ety; and an ethnic and communal solidarity that is shaped by an on-going relationship with their homeland and its culture.41

If the experience of diaspora was largely responsible for creating Sephardi identity, and if this new post-expulsion community was characterized by migration to a variety of locales, by a continued rela-tionship to a homeland and continued promotion of its memory, and by the construction of a new group identity within the broader rubric of Judaism, then there seems little reason not to draw comparisons between the Sephardi experience and that of other diaspora commu-nities, both early modern and modern.

Diaspora studies and its associated fields within cultural studies may also offer a way out of the current, and relatively stagnant, de-bate regarding the essence of Sephardi Judaism. For the study of Sephardi Conversos, this debate turns on the search for their “true” religious identity. Were they crypto-Jews who yearned to openly re-turn to their ancestral faith, or were they faithful Christians wrong-fully hounded by the Inquisition? In studies of Sephardi Jews—those Iberian exiles who escaped baptism—the focus has shifted toward discussions of their retention of Spanish cultural outlook and traits, what has been termed their hispanidad.42 Rather than merely identify Spanish cultural elements that were preserved by Jews in exile, I pro-pose that we shift our focus toward the way in which Sephardim em-ployed the elements of hispanicity to help define themselves and their cultural and communal borders.43 At what point, for instance, did local and regional designations (Toledan, Castilian) give way to the more general “Sephardi,” and why? How was Spanish or Portuguese heritage invoked or ignored in the construction of synagogue com-munities or confraternal organizations? What role did language play in deciding who could lay claim to Sephardi identity? For such ques-tions the numerous studies on modern transnational communities and minority-majority relations should prove extremely helpful.

Moreover, the potential benefits of reenvisioning what diaspora

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means for Jewish history extend far beyond the case of the Sephardim. Despite the absence of a single dramatic expulsion ushering in an era of Ashkenazi diaspora, we do have evidence of Jews of northern and central European origin dispersed in cohesive communities through-out the early modern Mediterranean. Much like their Iberian coun-terparts, Ashkenazi settlers maintained a distinct religious and ethnocultural identity that set them apart from other Jews. It has even been observed that their cultural identity and communal autonomy was, in certain Mediterranean centers, greater than that of the Se-phardim.44 If so, perhaps we need to begin to think of the early mod-ern period as an era of multiple Jewish diasporas that form around new (or newly articulated) concepts of homeland, culture, and com-munity. Failure to recognize how early modern Jewish communities self-fashioned new identities or reinforced older ones in new ways re-turns us to a portrait of the Jewish diaspora that is culturally mono-lithic. Conversely, if we only view as diasporic the experience of Sephardi Jews, we are in danger of not only marginalizing Jews within the field of diaspora studies but also marginalizing Sephardi identity within the master narrative of Jewish history. Following a trend that has dominated the field of Judaic studies throughout much of its his-tory, Ashkenazi Judaism once again becomes the norm against which Sephardi distinction and otherness become measured.

The Contributions of Sephardi Studies to Diaspora Theory

Having argued for the value of employing current theoretical models to the study of Jewish diasporas, I would like to note that analyzing Jewish history by means of smaller diasporas such as that of the early modern Sephardi community also presents benefits for the field of diaspora studies.

First, looking at ethno-national or racial concepts of community for the sixteenth century also challenges some notions regarding the emergence of race as a major category of identity in the West. Henry Goldschmidt has argued that “Discourses of race were constructed through the incorporation of pre-existing differences, by resignifying prior forms of human identity in terms of racial biology, lending ra-cialized meanings to religion, ethnicity, class.”45 This statement as-sumes that racial meanings were not inherent in the common understanding of religious community. Yet recent studies on Sephardi attitudes toward race, nation, and religion seem to contradict this neat progression from religious to racial identity.46 What the Sephardim of

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this early period understood to be the prerequisite for membership in their community and its relationship to contemporary views on re-ligious or ethnic “nations” remains unclear. The answer to this ques-tion has important ramifications for the role played by race, religion, ethnicity, and culture within modern diasporas.

Another way in which the example of the Sephardi diaspora might shed light on later diasporas is to provide an example of a diaspora community that was formed prior to the advent of the modern nation-state. Theorists generally position the diaspora community in opposi-tion to the modern nation-state and what they see as its imperialist or colonizing tendencies. As a result, diaspora serves as a foil for the colo-nial process as much as it functions as a subject in its own right. One unfortunate effect of this tendentious approach is the depiction of diaspora communities almost exclusively in positive terms as sites of resistance, perseverance, and cultural creativity. Many scholars cur-rently writing on diaspora communities do not look at their members as outsiders living on the margin of nation-states but as powerful agents of culture, self-fashioning new identities in response to their continu-ously changing relationship with a variety of states and communities.

John Barclay sees diaspora communities as being marked by “adap-tive creativity rather than reactive accommodation,” and in Paul Gil-roy’s definition of the term, the nature of diaspora is more mutable and nuanced (and thus more accurate) than homeland.47 The creative power and resilience of the transnational community is thus read as a triumphant negation of colonial discourse. This view of diaspora is dependent on the presumption of an earlier, colonial, pre-diasporic experience of a community defined by repression and relative power-lessness. Treatment of minority groups becomes limited to “strategies of survival” employed by those “who suffered the greatest abuses from the institutions in power.”48 This view allows for the jubilant breaking of shackles as the colonized minority moves into diaspora. Focusing on a pre-modern society such as the early Sephardic diaspora has the potential to challenge the reductive contrast between national and transnational by relocating the discussion to a pre-colonial era.

Just as we return a degree of agency to the minority groups who make up modern diaspora communities by casting off the colonial identities given to them by others, so too must we take care not to over-determine their own identity and group cohesion. Sephardim, like Jews in general, may indeed form an identifiably distinct group, but the nature of their Sephardi character is every bit as resistant to description as their Jewishness.49 Any study of the Sephardi commu-nity should highlight the difficult complexities of cultural identity

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and self-perception that go beyond the usual clichés of minority achievement in the face of oppression. As Benjamin Braude has noted regarding modern historiographies of Jews and Armenians, scholars have tended to be more concerned with similar ways in which mem-bers of the two groups have died than in how they have lived.50 This unfortunate trend has also begun to taint studies looking for points of comparison between Jewish and other diasporas. In his discussion of similarities between black and Jewish diasporas, Clifford remarks that both groups share “a common history of victimization.”51 Simi-larly, Daniel Boyarin has argued for Jews and other minorities (such as African Americans) to understand the sources of each other’s pain. I contend that Jewish history offers much more—both to Jews and non-Jews—than a closer understanding of minority experience, let alone minority pain.52 The realities of the Jewish diaspora experience are to be found somewhere between the lachrymose depiction of exile as endless suffering and displacement, and the equally prob-lematic celebrations of modern diasporas as defiant and empowering counterpoints to the colonizing nation-state.

Narrowing the temporal and cultural scope of Jewish communi-ties to focus on sub-ethnic diasporas suggests a more heterodox defi-nition of the Jewish diaspora. It also has notable implications for the broader field of diaspora and transnational studies. One such obser-vation is that current diasporas will rise and fall, much like their early modern counterparts. Thus, as we search for the historical point at which the Sephardim cease to be Iberian Jews and become some-thing else (Ottoman Jews, Mizrahim, the Portuguese Nation), we are reminded of the limited utility of diaspora as an analytic framework. The example of the early modern Sephardi diaspora and the changes it underwent emphasizes that diasporas are not permanent structures but transitory moments between dispersion and integration. Today, for instance, the Sephardi diaspora has morphed into a double or triple diaspora of Jews who carry with them a strong sense of identity with an Iberian past but also with a Turkish or North African past. In some cases, it is even possible to add the layer of an Israeli past for those Sephardim who have left through Israel and are now living in nations such as the United States or Canada.53

Conclusion

Rogers Brubaker has noted that “If everyone is diasporic, then no one is distinctively so. The term loses its discriminating power—its

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ability to pick out phenomena, to make distinctions. The universal-ization of diaspora, paradoxically, means the disappearance of diaspora.”54 Brubaker’s comments describe the proliferation of the term’s use in describing myriad transnational communities, rather than its more classical use in reference to a few unique communities, such as the Jews. Ironically, it is my contention that the use of the term in its more classical sense (the broad sweep of Jewish history) lacks sufficient discrimination, and that we can only hope to delin-eate diasporas by eschewing the older category of galut in favor of a multiplicity of Jewish diasporas.

Mounting interest in the formation of the Sephardi diaspora and the attendant construction of Sephardi identity has produced a criti-cal mass of scholarly literature grounded in close readings of a variety of sources. It now remains for us to step back from these sources and some of the tendentious theories in which they have become fixed and to evaluate the meaning of Sephardi identity with fresh eyes. I suggest that the current discourse on diaspora offers a vehicle through which we may revisit some of the essential conceptions of Se-phardi self-perception and communal boundaries. I have argued that Sephardi identity based on a recognizable, shared communal culture was only forged after 1492 as a product of the long process of migra-tion and resettlement. If we accept that this identity was a conse-quence of exile, we are then able to search for other similarities to later diasporas that merit comparison. Can we speak of a “Sephardi Mediterranean,” as Gilroy has done with the Black Atlantic?55 Was there a Sephardically experienced Italy or Ottoman Empire? Recent work on the Portuguese Converso diaspora has provided a fine model for the discussion of a number of issues pertaining to the impact of exile and resettlement on Sephardi identity and communal self-fash-ioning. It remains to be seen whether or not the shared experience of Hispano-Jewish exiles of the sixteenth century forged an ethno-reli-gious “nation” in much the same way that it did for the Judeo-Portu-guese nação of the seventeenth century.56 Whether or not the early modern Sephardi community conforms to all current categories of diaspora should not lead to its exclusion from the current academic debate within the field of diaspora studies. Rather, inconsistencies should help us to challenge prevailing theoretical categories and am-plify our image of diaspora communities.

Abandoning the presumption of the natural and immutable bonds formed by Jews during their long exile from the ancient Land of Is-rael can both sharpen our understanding of the cultural impact of 1492 and provide a model of diaspora that can integrate the Jewish

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experience into the current discourse on the transnational commu-nities. The existence of a diaspora community whose boundaries re-mained extremely open and mutable for decades after leaving their homeland, and whose self-fashioned identity resists essentialist defi-nitions such as “Jew” and “Ottoman,” should be of interest to those studying modern diasporas. If nothing else, an example of a diaspora community that pre-dates the rise of the nation-state and its colonial legacy will challenge some prevailing assumptions of the inherent value of diaspora identities. For those theorists who view diaspora communities as beleaguered, if resilient, minorities, the experience of the early Sephardi exiles stands as an important example in which diaspora played a larger role in the formation of attitudes toward themselves and others than merely the empowerment of its members to resist the coercive authority of the dominant culture.

Notes

1 David Biale, “Confessions of an Historian of Jewish Culture,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 1, no. 1 (Fall 1994): 40; Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences: The New Jewish Cultural Studies, (Minneapolis, Minn., 1997), ix.

2 Conversos (sometimes referred to as marranos or cristianos nuevos) were Christian converts from Judaism, many of whom left Iberia and rejoined the Jewish community.

3 See Jonathan Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden, 2002); Marc Saperstein and Nancy Berg, “‘Arab Chains’ and ‘The Good things of Sepharad,’” AJS Review 26 (2002): 301–26; and Norman Stillman and Yedida K. Stillman, ed., From Iberia to Diaspora: Studies in Sephardic History and Cul-ture (Leiden, 1999).

4 For a definition of the diaspora model, see William Safran, “Diasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return” Diaspora 1 (1991): 83–99, and Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Dis-course,” Diaspora 10 (2001): 189–219.

5 The need for such fresh eyes on Jewish identity is signaled in Yossi Shain, “Jewish Kinship at a Crossroads: Lessons for Homelands and Diasporas,” Political Science Quarterly 117 (2002): 279–309, and Ammiel Alcalay, “Exploding Identities: Notes on Ethnicity and Literary His-tory,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 15–27.

6 A classic articulation of this understanding of Jewish exile is Yitzhak Baer, Galut (New York, 1948). More recently, see Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflections on Homelessness and Homecoming (Bloomington,

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Ind., 1986); Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, “The Jewish Historical Experi-ence in the Framework of Comparative Universal History,” in Explora-tions in Jewish Historical Experience, ed. Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt (Leiden, 2004), 45–84; and Etan Levine, ed., Diaspora: Exile and the Contemporary Jewish Condition (New York, 1986).

7 Todd M. Endelman, “The Legitimization of the Diaspora Experience in Recent Jewish Historiography,” Modern Judaism 11 (1991): 195–209, esp. 196, 201–3.

8 Ruth Wisse, Jews and Power (New York, 2007), xiv. Her implicit confla-tion of “politics” and “power” is another problem altogether.

9 Ibid., 171–72. 10 Yossi Shain, “American Jews and the Construction of Israel’s Jewish

Identity,” Diaspora 9 (2001): 163–301. For the inability of many Jewish historians to fully separate diaspora from the longstanding image of galut, see the discussion in Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford, 2007), 38–43.

11 Orlando Patterson, Ethnic Chauvinism: The Reactionary Impulse (New York, 1977), 63–66. See also Butler, “Defining Diaspora.” For a discussion of the “lachrymose conception of Jewish history,” see Salo Baron, A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 20 vols. (Philadelphia, 1952–93), 1: 24.

12 See Ammiel Alcalay’s lament regarding the lack of attention tradition-ally given to Jewish cultural contributions to European history. Alcalay, “Exploding Identities.”

13 I suggest reorienting the debate on inter-faith symbiosis in my article “Beyond Tolerance and Persecution: Reassessing Our Approach to Me-dieval Convivencia,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 11, no. 2 (Winter 2005): 1–18.

14 See Daniel Boyarin’s introduction to Jews and Other Differences; Ephraim Nimni, “From Galut to T’futsoth: Post-Zionism and Dis><location of Jew-ish Diasporas,” in The Challenge of Post-Zionism, ed. E. Nimni (London, 2003), 117–52, esp. 140–45; and David N. Myers, “‘Distant Relatives Happening onto the Same Inn’: The Meeting of East and West as Liter-ary Theme and Cultural Ideal,” Jewish Social Studies n.s. 1, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 75–100, esp. 85.

15 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

16 Endelman, “Legitimization of the Diaspora Experience,” 205. To be sure, scholars have begun to de-essentialize the uniformity of the Jew-ish experience and question the “Jewishness” of Jewish history. The use of culture as heuristic tool in this regard is employed with mixed re-sults in the collection of essays in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History (New York, 2002). See, in particular, Biale’s introduction (3–9). A more explicit exposition of this problem is offered in Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? Unfortunately, such studies remain a minor motif within the field, and their implications for the reconceptualiza-tion of galut remain under-realized.

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17 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Contemporary Postcolo-nial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London, 1996), 119.

18 Daniel Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Iden-tity,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 711–12. It should be noted that the ques-tions of “persecution” and “identity” in the periods to which Boyarin is referring, such as that under Andalusi rule, are actually far more com-plex than he seems to acknowledge (720–21.) Such generalizations represent, in my opinion, one of the most problematic aspects of the current discourse on diaspora.

19 James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 325–27. 20 Ibid., 308–9. 21 Michel de Certeau, Culture in the Plural (Minneapolis, Minn., 1997), 71. 22 See, e.g., the discussion of “Diaspora consciousness” in Erich Gruen,

Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 232–52; Denise Eileen McCoskey, “Diaspora in the Reading of Jewish History, Identity and Difference,” Diaspora 12, no. 3 (2003): 387–418; and John M. G. Barclay, Negotiating Diaspora: Jewish Strategies in the Roman Empire (London, 2004). Diane Wolf has tried to do the same for the Jewish refugee experience after the Holocaust in “‘This Is Not What I Want’: Holocaust Testimony, Postmemory, and Jewish Identity,” in Diasporas and Exiles: Varieties of Jewish Identity, ed. Howard Wettstein (Berkeley, 2002), 191–220.

23 The work of Miriam Bodian on the Judeo-Portuguese nação (nation) is a notable exception. See her Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation, Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Bloomington, Ind., 1997); Miriam Bodian, “Amsterdam, Venice and the Marrano Diaspora of the 17th Cen-tury,” Dutch Jewish History 2 (1989): 47–65; and Miriam Bodian, “‘Men of the Nation’: The Shaping of ‘Converso’ Identity in Early Modern Eu-rope,” Past and Present 143 (1994): 48–76. See also Daniel Schroeter, “A Different Road to Modernity: Jewish Identity in the Arab World,” in Wett-stein, Diasporas and Exiles, 150–63, esp. 160–61.

24 McCoskey, “Diaspora in the Reading of Jewish History, Identity and Difference,” 407.

25 I have taken 1492 as a clear and universally recognized genesis for the Sephardi Diaspora, though Jewish migration from Iberia took place throughout the Middle Ages and especially in the period following the forced conversions of 1391. For Jewish and Converso emigration from Iberia during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, see Jo-seph Hacker, “Links Between Spanish Jewry and Palestine, 1391–1492,” in Vision and Conflict in the Holy Land, ed. R. I. Cohen (Jerusalem, 1985), 1111–39.

26 The older theory that Sephardi history can be divided between a “Golden Age” in Muslim al-Andalus and a less brilliant “Silver Age” under Christian rule has lost much of its acceptance.

27 A brief discussion of the topic is offered by Yom Tov Assis, “‘Sefarad’: A Definition in the Context of a Cultural Encounter,” in Encuentros and

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Desencuentros: Spanish Jewish Cultural Interaction Throughout History, ed. Carlos Carrete Parrondo (Tel Aviv, 2000), 29–37. I do not agree with his conclusion that “Sefarad is cultural and religious more than geo-graphical and political” (35).

28 See the designations of Jews in sixteenth-century Safed in H. Z. Hirsch-berg, “The Agreement Between the Musta‘ribs and the Maghribis in Cairo, 1527,” in Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume on the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday, ed. Saul Lieberman, 3 vols. (New York, 1974), 2: 585, n. 20.

29 Bernard Lewis, Notes and Documents from the Turkish Archives (Jerusalem, 1952), 25–28.

30 See, e.g., Winston James, “Migration, Racism and Identity Formation: The Caribbean Experience in Britain,” in Inside Babylon: The Caribbean Diaspora in Britain, ed. Winston James and Clive Harris (London, 1993), 231–87.

31 Jonathan Ray, The Sephardic Frontier: The Reconquista and the Jewish Com-munity in Medieval Iberia (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006), 131–44.

32 For the lack of supra-communal identity among Iberian Jews, see my “Royal Authority and the Jewish Community: The Crown Rabbi in Medi-eval Spain and Portugal,” in Jewish Religious Leadership: Image and Reality, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York, 2004), 307–31. Throughout the six-teenth century, cooperation among these autonomous Jewish communi-ties was generally imposed from without, or on a provisional basis to meet the needs of taxation. Joseph ben Isaac ibn Ezra, Masa Melekh: Dine minim u-minhagim, (Salonica, 1601), 46–48, 57. See also Stephanie Sieg-mund, The Medici State and the Ghetto of Venice (Stanford, 2006), 135–68.

33 Jonathan Israel, “Diasporas Jewish and Non-Jewish and the World Mar-itime Empires,” in Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks, ed. Ina Baghdiantz McCabe et al. (Oxford, 2005), 24.

34 David Nirenberg, “Mass Conversion and Genealogical Mentalities: Jews and Christians in Fifteenth-Century Spain,” Past and Present 74 (2002): 4. The years leading up to the establishment of the Portuguese Inquisi-tion in 1536 led to the migration of many Portuguese Conversos.

35 I am currently working on a project that traces the formation of a co-herent Sephardi diaspora community in the early sixteenth century. For now, see Bernard D. Cooperman, “Ethnicity and Institution Build-ing Among Jews in Early Modern Rome,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 119–245, and Minna Rozen, “Collective Memories and Group Bound-aries: The Judeo-Spanish Diaspora Between the Lands of Christendom and the World of Islam,” Michael 14 (1997): 35–52.

36 Jonathan Israel, Diasporas Within a Diaspora: Jews, Crypto-Jews and the World Maritime Empires (1540–1740) (Leiden, 2002).

37 Haim Beinart, The Expulsion of the Jews from Spain (Oxford, 2002), 329–406. For the migration and return of Portuguese Conversos in the sixteenth century, see the essays collected in António Manuel Hes-panha, ed., Diáspora e Expansão: Os Judeus e os Descobrimentos Portugueses

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(Lisbon, 1997), and Y. H. Yerushalmi, “Professing Jews in Post-Expul-sion Spain and Portugal,” in Lieberman, Salo Wittmayer Baron Jubilee Volume, 2: 1023–58.

38 William Safran, “The Jewish Diaspora in Comparative Theoretical Per-spective,” Israel Studies 10 (2005): 36–60, esp. 44.

39 Moshe Idel, “Encounters Between Italian and Spanish Kabbalists in the Generation After the Expulsion,” in Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, ed. B. Gampel (New York, 1997), 189–222. Although the increas-ingly hostile social situation in Iberia led to the emigration of Jews and Conversos throughout the fifteenth century, this earlier migration did not create a diasporic community with a collective consciousness.

40 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity in Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York, 1994), 401–2.

41 Butler, “Defining Diaspora,” 192. 42 See Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation; Harm den Boer, “Más allá

de Hispanidad y Judaísmo: Hacia una caracterización de la literatura hispano-portuguesa de los sefardíes de Amsterdam,” in Los judaizantes en Europa y la literature castellana del Siglo de Oro, ed. Fernando Díaz Este-ban (Madrid, 1994), 65–75; and Eleazar Gutwirth, “On the Hispanicity of Sephardi Jewry,” Revue des Etudes Juives 145 (1986): 347–57.

43 The elasticity of Iberian identity can be seen in the references to “Le-vantines,” “Ponentines,” and “those who Speak Spanish” in the settle-ment charters given to Jews in Italy. See Bernard Cooperman, “Portuguese Conversos in Ancona: Jewish Political Activity in Early Mod-ern Italy,” in In Iberia and Beyond: Hispanic Jews Between Cultures, ed. B. Cooperman (Newark, N.J., 1998), 297–352, and Benjamin Ravid, “A Tale of Three Cities and Their ‘Raison d’etat,’” Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1991): 138–62.

44 See, e.g., the Ashkenazim of sixteenth-century Jerusalem and Safed in Abraham David, To Come to the Land: Immigration and Settlement in 16th-century Eretz-Israel (Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1999), 62–64, 109–11, 115–17.

45 Henry Goldschmidt, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford, 2004), 12.

46 Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation; Jonathan Schorsch, Jews and Blacks in the Early Modern World (New York, 2004); and John Edwards, “Beginnings of a Scientific Theory of Race? Spain, 1450–1600,” in From Iberia to Diaspora, ed. Norman Stillman and Yedida K. Stillman (Leiden, 1999), 625–36.

47 John M. G. Barclay, Negotiating Diaspora: Jewish Strategies in the Roman Empire (London, 2004), 3; Paul Gilroy, “Diaspora and the Detours of Identity,” in Identity and Difference, ed. Kathryn Woodward (Thousand Oaks, Calif., 1997), 299–346, esp. 336.

48 Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter Reformation Spain (Minneapolis, Minn., 1992), xiv.

49 On the problem of developing a workable definition for “Jewishness,”

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see Michael L. Satlow, “Defining Judaism: Accounting for ‘Religions’ in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74 (2006): 837–60. It is perhaps telling that, in his brief genealogy of the term “Jewishness,” he skips the early modern period under discussion here (ibid., 840–42).

50 Benjamin Braude, “The Nexus of Diaspora Enlightenment and Nation: Thoughts on Comparative History,” in Enlightenment and Diaspora: The Armenian and Jewish Cases, ed. Richard Hovanissian and David Myers (Atlanta, Ga., 1999), 7.

51 Clifford, “Diasporas,” 321. 52 See his observation that “difference can heal” in the introduction to

Jews and Other Differences, xii. 53 See Nimni, “From Galut to T’futsoth,” and Rina Cohen, “Constructing

Ethnicity: Myth of Return and Modes of Exclusion Among Israelis in Toronto,” International Migration 35 (1997): 373–94.

54 Rogers Brubaker, “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 28 (2005): 1–19, esp. 3.

55 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cam-bridge, Mass., 1993).

56 See, in particular, the works by Miriam Bodian cited in note 23, above.