Diaspora, a traveling homeland

I am an Israeli. Although I wasn't born there, I grew up in Jerusalem. My whole life, but as well the lives of at least two diasporic generations before me, was very much influenced by one idea, namely that there is a homeland. Israel. In a perfect world, all Jews would live there. We all know there are a million reasons why that isn't the case and can't happen in the near future. However, that is the ideal. It was the ideal in the orthodox community in Munich, where I spent my childhood. It was the idea in the Zionist youth camps in Germany, where I spent my early childhood summers. And it was, of course, what we were suggested at school in Jerusalem.

Even when still living in Jerusalem, I was sometimes confronted with ideas contradicting that ideal. They were mostly non-nationalist attempts to make sense of the reality between the Jordan river and the sea. Proponents of a one state solution. Anarchists. Palestinian anti-Zionists. But none of the concepts putting a Jewish identity in the center of our collective self definition denied the indisputable role of the Jewish state as the geographical and ideological center point of that collective. Even those Israelis demanding radical changes to the political landscape of their society saw themselves as “fully realized Jews”, so to speak. While our brothers in the US or Europe may have had chosen the materialistic option, opting for a better quality of life, us Israelis were “guarding the fire”, being nationally liberated and hence free of those restraints that kept diasporic Jews content but small. 

We were envious. But proud.

I can't deny that I always felt a subtle contradiction in the subtext of that idea. I couldn't make sense of the pride we felt of our Yiddish past as a family on one hand, and of how Yiddish was ridiculed in the non-orthodox public in Jerusalem, on the other. Even though I hadn’t grown up with that language, I was very much aware of it being the language of my ancestors. Yiddish was the language in which god knows how many generations before me had lived, loved, thought, written, sung. It was the language of a music I loved and played. It was, and still is, a language that has a secret and immediate back door into my heart, even though I have to concentrate a lot in order to understand it. And yet, here I was in a middle school in East Jerusalem, trying to fit in by speaking Hebrew with a Yiddish accent, whenever I wanted to express how laughable something was. 

To me, that discontinuity between much of what defined the Jewishness of my ancestors and what counted as “truly Jewish” in the Israeli context always felt a bit off. But of course, as a teenager and a young adult a whole lot of things feel a bit off. In fact, anything that doesn't feel a bit off should probably be re-examined until it does ;)

I left Israel when I was 26. Technically, I just went to study in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. But to be honest, I was never sure I would come back. The little contradictions had grown into the feeling of being alienated from the ideology that guides Israeli life. To me it feels like the omnipresence of ideological demands is significantly bigger in Israel than the rest of the western world. So migrating to a country void of those demands, at least for me, was a very liberating step to take. But aside of that immediate sense of liberation, another thing happened: I found myself back in the diaspora of my early childhood, back in the diaspora that had shaped my parents and grandparents and so many generations before them. The streets had different names than the streets my grandfather had walked on. The food wasn't the food my grandmother had probably tasted in Königsberg/Кёнигсберг. The latent suspicion, paired with fascination of/by anything Jewish was probably significantly politer than what my great grandfather had encountered in Berlin. But the slight distance between myself and the reality around me felt intergenerationally familiar. My understanding of the term diaspora was very intuitive and not elaborate. But I immediately felt comfortably uncomfortable in it.

Since those first days on the streets of Rotterdam, before I spoke a single word of Dutch, before I had found an apartment and friends, I migrated twice more: to Buenos Aires and to Berlin. In those 15 years in three cities, the notion of living in the diaspora has kept me busy. I discovered different angles of it in different places, different situations, different languages, different stages of my life. I made a home in it. A home to carry with me. But still a home. And so when David suggested I read a book called Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora by Daniel Boyarin, I was quick to grab it and immediately hooked. 

I don't think I overstate it by saying it revolutionized my understanding of what diaspora is, what it can be and how we can perceive it, as Jews.

Foremost, Boyarín distinguishes between Exile and Diaspora.

Referencing Samir Dayal, he defines diasporic as “having a double consciousness”, sharing a culture “with the place in which they dwell but also with another group of people who live elsewhere”. In other words, cultural phenomena have a hybrid context in a diasporic reality: one local context and one trans-local context. Both contexts are shared with a certain group of people and not shared with the other.

In opposition to the notion of exile, though, it is not necessary for either of those two to be the context of a lost homeland. Exile, by Boyarin’s definition of the term, stands for a situation of “not being at home”, while the word diaspora “frequently focuses more on the creation of new homes”. 

With those two ideas in mind we can easily recognise the notion of exile in the way I grew up thinking about Israel. We didn’t simply see two communities, connected by certain cultural ties while being separated by certain cultural and geographical differences. We saw an origin, a homeland and a final destination in one, while viewing the other as an inevitable but ideally temporary situation awaiting an eventual solution. 

Boyarín’s idea of a diaspora doesn't need a solution, though. It's not necessarily the result of a common ancestry and a common historical homeland that was taken away in a traumatic turn of events. Rather than that, it is a complex, but possibly stable identity. Diaspora isn't always created by a rupture and hence isn’t always a state of post trauma. In fact, he writes: “I am suggesting that trauma and oppression are not necessary or the most useful of taxa for describing diasporic situations. […] There are diasporic cultural formations (including some of the Jews’), […] simply produced out of secondary connections between scattered communities”. 

For the first time in my life, the word diaspora, a term that defined a lot of how I had experienced life for the last decade and a half, ceased to be a synonym for exile. It had ceased describing a disconnection from a place and gained the meaning of a connection to a multitude of communities and realities of Jews around the globe. Rather than an absence, it turned into a presence. 

I could imagine that the generation of my grandparents, Ostjuden unconcerned with or in opposition to Zionism, may have felt similar. Eretz Yisroel/Israel/Palästina may or may not have simply been another diaspora, one of the many Jewish communities they felt connected to.