Rethinking Jewish Diaspora: On Analogy, Translation, and Abjection

In this text, Ben Ratskoff nuances the concept of “radical diasporism” beyond Jewish opposition to Zionism. Through a careful, almost theological demonstration, he argues that the geographic dispersion that gave “diaspora” its name is not only a divine curse but also an invitation to subvert state structures.

For Richard Iton. May his memory be a blessing.

When the concept of “diaspora” exploded in Anglophone academic discourse in the 1990s, promising to describe all sorts of contemporary identities, experiences, and communities, as well as to transcend nationalist and racial essentialisms, its theorists articulated a rather ambivalent relationship to the Jewish case. These theorists often tacitly deferred to the ‘classic’ or ‘ideal’ Jewish type of diaspora—shaped by the term’s etymological meaning of geographical dispersion from a homeland—before either generalizing this Jewish experience beyond any historical and cultural specificity or claiming to supersede it entirely with new notions of fragmentation, transnationality, and hybridity. In one of the earliest efforts to distinguish the new conception from a Jewish one, theorist Stuart Hall attempted to displace what he considered an “old, the imperialising, the hegemonising form of ‘ethnicity’”—for, he continued, “we have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of this backward-looking conception of diaspora” (“Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” 1990). In its place, the new diaspora concept would be defined “by the recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of ‘identity’ which lives with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.”

It is not quite clear how the recognition of Jewish identity’s heterogeneity and difference will serve the Palestinian struggle for liberation. While monopolizing expressions and definitions of Jewish identity remains an important strategy of the state of Israel and its supporters, the state of Israel has also embraced of late a representational politics of diversity that reproduces the state’s legitimacy and expands the settler community—a politics of diversity that, moreover, does little to ameliorate material inequalities that persist across this settler community. In any case, Hall’s veiled dismissal of a putatively old Jewish conception of diaspora indexes how routine nods to diaspora’s traditional association with Jewish history and experience typically lack critical engagement with this association and often stage a subsequent attempt to supersede it.

In so doing, they recontextualized Jewish diaspora in the newly-elaborated terms of postcolonial and postmodern discourse, most often by highlighting complex, multicultural forms of Jewish identity or outlining philosophies of Jewishness that were ethically aligned with progressive political agendas. However, as founding director of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ) Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz noted, “Diasporism is shaped by the historical moment, and will and should change” (The Colors of Jews, 2007).

We might today reconsider, for example, the political investment in the cultivation of multicultural Jewish identities when a shallow multiculturalism has become a staple of state regimes of representation and recognition. Or we might question whether jockeying over ethical philosophies of Jewishness sufficiently disrupts settler colonialism in Palestine. Yet, additional questions linger about the Jewish provenance of the diaspora concept and how it became central to late-20th century cultural theory. A somewhat imaginative and playful exploration of the concept’s peculiar origins might provide the basis for beginning to sketch a theory of Jewish political agency out of stateless abjection, one that can resist the seductions of self-determination and territorial sovereignty.

A decisive moment in the simultaneous attribution of a Jewish provenance to the diaspora concept and the metaphorical lifting of this concept from Jewish history occurred when British africanist George Shepperson delivered a landmark paper at the 1965 International Congress of African History at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. As Shepperson later acknowledged, this paper came at the tail end of a decade during which the expressions “African diaspora” and “Black diaspora” were first formulated. Shepperson famously conceptualized the “African diaspora” not only to name the totality of African peoples dispersed by the ruptures of the Middle Passage and European colonization. He did so also to move beyond “isolationist” forms of historiography that could not adequately explain both the effects of the slave trade and the influence of “New World” African cultures on continental history, politics, and cultures. Pan-Africanist and Black internationalist militants had, for decades (if not centuries), elaborated various, competing visions of Black global collectivity and relation. But Shepperson’s talk is significant because it self-consciously transferred the Jewish concept of diaspora to the study of Black history and culture.

While earlier scholarship and activism had made biblical citations in order to locate a source for Black liberation—most notably, “Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God” (Psalms 68:31)—Shepperson’s turn to the nomenclature of “diaspora” explicitly invoke a biblical analogy. Quoting from the King James Bible, he opened his paper with an illustration of Jewish precedent: “‘Thou shalt be removed into all the kingdoms of the earth,’ said the Lord God of Jews, according to Deuteronomy, Chapter 28, verse 25.” Shepperson glossed, “From then onwards, the Jewish Dispersal or Diaspora swept over the world.” From when onwards? Shepperson’s hasty jump from divine prophecy to historical fulfillment is puzzling. In the narrative structure of the bible, the verse Shepperson cites is delivered by Moses to the children of Israel at a moment representing precisely the opposite of dispersion: at the precipice of their entrance into the Promised Land.

Shepperson’s amalgamation of prophetic curse and historical dispersion suggests he was not interested, at least at this time, in a critical engagement with Jewish diaspora. But he was still compelled to appeal to a Jewish analogy. Why? The same year that Shepperson delivered his paper in Dar es Salaam, U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s notorious report on The Negro Family also invoked a Jewish analogy. In his report, Moynihan cited U.S. historian Stanley Elkins’ infamous study of plantation slavery in the United States, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959). Elkins’ study had provocatively used psychological research on Nazi concentration camp prisoners to explain how the brutality of U.S. plantations had produced stereotypical “Sambo” personalities: childlike, docile, and dependent on the master’s patriarchy. Citing Elkins’ analogy between concentration camp prisoners and enslaved Black people in the United States, Moynihan constructed a governmental anti-racism that decried the brutality of slavery while pathologizing Black poverty in the present.

Rather interestingly, Shepperson himself had reviewed Elkins’ study five years earlier and favorably called attention to Elkins’ “striking” and “entirely original” analogy between concentration camp prisoners and enslaved Black people. It is impossible to know if and how Elkins’ analogy to Jewish trauma directly influenced Shepperson’s own analogical turn to “Jewish Dispersal” half a decade later. Still, this turn might be considered a reflection of the growing postwar tendency to invest the Jewish — biblical, historical, or otherwise — with explanatory power. Indeed, both Elkins’ and Shepperson’s analogies might be considered symptomatic of trends in postwar liberalism that sought to manage on-going crises of anti-Blackness and Black militancy through analogies, paradigms, and limiting cases of Jewish suffering.

But, apart from this historical contextualization of Shepperson’s diaspora analogy within postwar discursive trends, and apart as well from Shepperson’s puzzling amalgamation of divine prophecy and historical dispersal, there is another complication in Shepperson’s citation of the King James Bible: no such verse exists in the Hebrew Torah.

Well, not exactly. It is perhaps banal to point out that the King James Bible cited by Shepperson is in fact a 17th-century English translation. This translation drew partly on an ancient Greek translation of the Torah from its original Hebrew, known as the Septuagint, and was completed in the third century BC. It is in this Septuagint that the Greek neologism “diaspora” materialized and was affixed to the Jewish people. An oral tradition recorded in the Babylonian Talmud—a Hebrew-Aramaic compendium of rabbinic teachings, interpretations, and debates compiled in the Jewish academies of the Sassanid Persian Empire—provides a rich origin story for the Septuagint set at the Hellenistic royal court of King Ptolemy in Alexandria.

The Talmud in Tractate Megillah narrates the following: “King Ptolemy assembled 72 sages of Israel and put them into 72 separate rooms and did not reveal to them why he had assembled them. He entered and approached each one of the sages and said: ‘Write for me the Torah of Moses your teacher.’ The Sacred One, Blessed be He, placed wisdom in the heart of each one of the sages and they unanimously consented to one understanding.” That is, the 72 sages produced 72 identical Greek versions of the Torah. This oral tradition locates the Greek translation of the Torah at a site of imperial power, staging a confrontation and struggle between the monarchical representative of Hellenistic domination, King Ptolemy, and the learned representatives of minoritarian Jewish knowledge.

The Septuagint thus appears, from this Talmudic perspective, as a highly ambiguous text. The king’s request for a Greek translation stages a familiar imperial dynamic of translation: the dominant power demands access to the knowledge and cultures of the dominated and coerces their translation into schemas legible to him. The king’s hostile management of the 72 sages—how else to describe their solitary confinement?—exposes that the seemingly benign request to include and domesticate Jewish knowledge, by translating it into the imperial language, entails something far more sinister: enforced vulnerability and surveillance. But the sages do not refuse to translate, and the Talmud does not here denigrate the translation. By miraculously producing a single translation, the sages affirm translation as an effective mode of transcultural relation while also evading the king’s attempt to fragment, control, and perhaps misinterpret Jewish knowledge.

While this story complicates simplistic citations of the “diaspora” concept’s biblical provenance, the translation itself seems to complicate the very meaning of diaspora. The fifth book of the Torah records instructions and admonishments to the wandering children of Israel as they congregate in the plains of Moav, anticipating their entry into the Promised Land. As Moses communicates the blessings or curses that will fall upon the children of Israel as a result of their behavior, he warns, in the Torah’s Hebrew, that if they do not obey the commandments they will “become an object of horror [l’za’avah] to all the kingdoms of the earth” (28:25). It is this becoming an object of horror, becoming abject, that the 72 sages curiously translated by formulating a neologism from the Greek root that signifies the scattering of seeds: diaspora. The Septuagint here thus reads, “Thou shalt be a diaspora in all the kingdoms of the earth.”

Deferring for a moment the question of this less than straightforward translational choice, we can nonetheless make some startling observations. Unlike the verses that prophesy exile later, and in which the Jewish people become an example to nations, this verse translating to diaspora instead prophecizes that the Jewish people will become an abject example to kingdoms. This emphasis on the state and its perception of Jewish abjection draws our attention to the political implications of horror. Philosopher Julia Kristeva’s extended essay on abjection, Powers of Horror (1980), describes how the abject’s power to provoke horror and disgust indicates an invasion, a confrontation with the perverse and vile normatively repressed under the “orderly surface of civilizations.” Far from translating mere spatial dislocation and dispersion, diaspora was deployed in the Septuagint to gloss how the kingdoms of the earth would perceive Jewish abjection, a provocative horror invading and disrupting the state’s normative order.

Additionally, the original prophecy—“You will become an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth”—does not seem directly articulated in relation to a homeland. Indeed, dislocation from the homeland is prophesized some ten verses later. There, the Torah draws on a distinct lexicon of exile (e.g. golah, galus, etc.), which is followed by another forewarning that the children of Israel will become exemplary: “You will become an object of astonishment,
an example, and a topic of discussion among all the nations to which God will lead you.” None of these terms are translated into Greek as diaspora. As historical sociologist Stéphane Dufoix has convincingly demonstrated, the Greek term diaspora in fact never translates the Hebrew words for exile. Exile, it seems, belongs to a complementary but distinct semantic field, one with complementary but distinct cosmological and political implications.

This is not to suggest that diaspora is divorced from the politics of space. By drawing on a Greek lexicon of scattering, the translators rendered the curse of Jewish abjection legible to the dominant power indeed through a spatial figure. This figure of dispersion does not specifically predict the Jews’ exilic dislocation from the territorial homeland, but rather their unruly and unsettling demographic diffusion. Political scientist and cultural critic Richard Iton evocatively conceived of diaspora as an impulse that resists “hierarchy, hegemony, and administration” and mobilizes “the capacity to imagine and operate simultaneously within, against, and outside the nation-state” (In Search of the Black Fantastic, 2008). It is this conception of diaspora that illuminates the translators’ peculiar move from object of horror to spatial dispersion, theorizing movement that exceeds state domestication and management. Diaspora does not map alternative, exilic geographies as much as it improvises across, invades into, and steals within extant ones.

This rendering differentiates diaspora not only from mere disidentification with the territorial homeland and also from practices that seek primarily to de-essentialize Jewish identity and ritual. These “false prophets of diasporism,” to borrow writer Ari Brostoff’s phrase, seem in themselves insufficient for a substantive, spatial provocation of the international imperialist order (Missing Time, 2022). Furthermore, myopic resistance to Jewish identification and settlement over there can lead to the utopian fabrication of Jewish practices here that replay dynamics of settler replacement and self-indigenization, as has been critiqued by geographer Gabi Kirk (“The Problematics of Return,” 2018). And the reclamation of Jewish identities supposedly uncontaminated by Zionism can displace strategic organizing for Palestinian liberation with intramural debates over Jewish representation.

Attention to the emergence of diaspora in the Greek translation of the Torah provides an alternative frame for evaluating diaspora’s political potential. Analyzing this political potential does not attempt to ignore that the verse’s clear and simple meaning conveys a divine punishment. It rather reads the translators’ choice in line with a well-established rabbinic strategy of interpretation, one that turns the curses inside out to reveal concealed blessings. Becoming an object of horror to the kingdoms of the earth, for the translators, did not only convey divine punishment, but also intimated worldly, spatialized possibility.

Diaspora therefore, needs not describe an all-encompassing and stable Jewish identity or ideology. Recalling the term’s highly contingent emergence at Ptolemy’s Hellenistic court, diaspora might rather more modestly describe the destabilizing political forms that materialize at acute, located moments of struggle: Jewish migrant students strapping Yiddish socialist literature to their bodies and smuggling it from Germany back to their communities in the Russian Empire; Auschwitz survivor and filmmaker Marceline Loridan-Ivens carrying and storing suitcases of funds for the underground Algerian anti-colonial movement; Israeli Black Panthers traveling to illegally meet with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). These are but a few, discrete Jewish political practices that preceded the diaspora explosion of the 1990s and that suggest the kinds of individual and collective provocation and insubordination that a theory of Jewish diasporic political agency can elaborate and provide. ■