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Jewish Diaspora: Term
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In the Jewish Diaspora, a Jewish quarter is the area of a city traditionally inhabited by Jews. Jewish quarters, like the Jewish ghettos in Europe, were often the outgrowths of segregated ghettos instituted by the surrounding Christian authorities. A Yiddish term for a Jewish quarter or neighborhood is "Di yiddishe gas" (Yiddish:
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Ultimately, the notion that the Jewish diaspora is somehow unique has lost out. Wesleyan University professor Khachig Tölölyan, who founded and edits the journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, says he and many scholars agree the capital-D version ought to be retired from discourse altogether. Tölölyan, a member of the Armenian diaspora, does not permit use of the capitalized Diaspora in his journal. If he is for expanding the term’s usage, though, he does not support doing it to such a degree that the word loses all utility. His journal sometimes includes a section called “Diasporama”—clippings with absurd uses of the word. These have included discussion of an “egg cream diaspora” and of an “anatomical diaspora” resulting from a bomb victim’s severed body parts.
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[T]o chronology: Gruen deals with the Jewish experience in the diaspora from the time of Alexander the Great to Nero, a span of 400 years. The starting date is easy to understand. Although the diaspora started with the Babylonian exile, it is not until the Greek kingdoms some 250 years later that there is much evidence for the Jewish diaspora. The terminal date for the study is a little more puzzling. Gruen argues that the Jewish War and destruction of the Second Temple marks a significant shift in the experience of diaspora Jews, and he contends that this justifies his study of the diaspora that focuses only on the Second Temple period (6-7). But Gruen draws the line too sharply here.
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Whether this was the first diaspora or not, it is clear that the recognized Jewish diaspora begins with the Babylonian captivity. It was then that organized communities of Jewish exiles were established in Babylonia and Egypt. They quickly developed institutions to accommodate their corporate needs in the diaspora, including the Bet Knesset which has come to be known to us in its Greek translation as the synagogue and which, in fact, means house of assembly, a kind of town hall, where Jews could undertake all their public functions, especially governance, study, and worship. Indeed the Hebrew term knesset (assembly) comes from the Aramaic kanishta which in turn is a translation of edah, the original Hebrew term describing the Jewish polity, the assembly or congregation of the entire people. Hence, the bet knesset was a miniature version of that larger assembly -- one which could be established anywhere.30 Thus the framework established over 2,500 years ago has remained the basic framework for diaspora Jewish organization ever since.
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