c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) During the recent immigration rallies held throughout the country, I heard one young woman tell a TV interviewer she was “a proud member of the Mexican Diaspora living in the U.S.”

Her use of the term Diaspora caught my attention and set me thinking how this ancient Greek word for dispersion, is used by many demographic groups in today’s highly mobile world.

Millions of Chinese residing outside of China consider themselves part of a Diaspora. When Fidel Castro became the “maximum leader” of Cuba in 1959, a large number of Cubans fled their homeland and established a Diaspora community in Florida. Members of Eastern Orthodox Churches, especially Greeks and Armenians, frequently speak of their Diaspora communities. Followers of the Dalai Lama living outside Tibet identify as a Diaspora community. Other religious or ethnic groups employ the same word to describe living away from their population or spiritual centers.

When people use Diaspora, there is often the unspoken assumption they will someday, somehow physically return to their ancestral homelands. But the truth is usually otherwise.

It’s unlikely members of the Chinese Diaspora, now representing several generations, will leave Singapore, the United States or other countries to return to China. Will the Polish-American Diaspora communities in Chicago and Buffalo leave the U.S. for Warsaw or Krakow? Will Cleveland’s Ukrainian community move from the shore of Lake Erie to Kiev on the shore of the Dnieper River? Probably not.

Nor is it probable that younger members of the Cuban Diaspora, now nearly 50 years old, will return to the island after Castro’s death. African slaves were brought to America in chains where they and their descendants first endured human slavery and later continuing racism. Yet few African-Americans have left the United States despite the appeals of the “Back to Africa” movements that have dotted U.S. history.

Immigration experts predict the overwhelming majority of today’s Mexicans and other Hispanics who currently reside (with or without legal papers) inside the U.S. will not voluntarily return to their countries of origin. The experts say the same thing about Turkish “guest workers” living in Germany, Muslims from North Africa and the Middle East residing in France, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere in Europe.

Indeed, that is the usual historic pattern. Once members of a group leave their homeland for whatever reasons, few actually return, and as the generations go by, that possibility becomes more remote.

That’s because Diaspora communities generally adopt the language, dress, customs, names and even religious styles of the majority population in their new homes. Once that happens, it becomes harder to leave a familiar _ even bad _ situation, and move to a homeland that many members of a Diaspora community have never visited.

This historical record of Diaspora communities not returning “home” makes the Jewish people’s dispersion and actual return to the land of Israel all the more noteworthy. While the prophet Jeremiah mentions Jews living in Egypt, the first significant Diaspora began with the Babylonian destruction of the Holy Temple in 586 B.C. Some Jewish exiles returned 48 years later following Persian King Cyrus’ compassionate decree.

But after the Roman destruction of the Second Temple in 70 A.D., the Diaspora became a central feature of Jewish life. However, Jerusalem and the land of Israel remained the religious focal point, and Jews during the long centuries of dispersion constantly prayed for a physical return to Zion.

That Jews maintained a belief about the end of the Diaspora and the reestablishment of national sovereignty in their historic homeland is remarkable. When modern Israel achieved its independence in 1948, some political and religious leaders of the Jewish state urged an end to the Diaspora, calling Jewish life outside Israel spiritually and psychologically inferior and incomplete.

But the Diaspora did not disappear. Both the Jewish state situated in the land of the Bible, and the Diaspora in a myriad nations, have continued to co-exist, frequently in close cooperation and mutual enrichment with one another, and sometimes in tension especially when prominent Israelis publicly criticize the quality of Jewish life within the global Diaspora and call for mass emigration.

After 2,000 years of the Jewish Diaspora, people wonder whether it will continue as it has. Or will it finally come to an end?

When asked that question, I always respond with the quote attributed to Yogi Berra: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

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