Religion in Diaspora

Cultures of Citizenship

Sondra L. Hausner, Jane Garnett, Sondra L. Hausner, Jane Garnett

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349571055, 9781137400291
• eBook ISBN: 9781137400307
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cognitive Psychology & Cognition
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection addresses the relationship between diaspora, religion and the politics of identity in the modern world. It illuminates religious understandings of citizenship, association and civil society, and situates them historically within diverse cultures of memory and state traditions.

Part I

Memories and Legacies

1

Reconsidering ‘Diaspora’

Jonathan Boyarin

The last few decades of interdisciplinary scholarship on culture, politics, and identity have been marked by a lively and still-expanding interest in comparative dynamics of diaspora, especially the interactions of diasporic formations with the nation states that serve variously as their ‘homelands’ and their ‘hosts’. My own participation in that multidisciplinary and intercultural discourse has been inspired by my strong identification with something I have become accustomed to call Jewishness – neither necessarily nor solely the Jewish religion nor a people called ‘the Jews’ – combined with a fairly consistent disaffiliation with two nation states, the United States and Israel. In terms of positive cultural content, that combination of identifications and dis-identifications primarily resulted in a commitment to Yiddish culture, which may fairly be referred to as a diasporic culture par excellence and perhaps even as a culture of resistance in the age of monolithic territorial nationalisms.

Yet, by now no one should view an interest in Jewish diaspora as idiosyncratic. First of all, it is not merely an ancient or pre-modern phenomenon, nor is it in any sense obviated by the establishment of a Jewish nation state. To be sure, and as I discuss below, the existence of Israel has transformed for many Jews the rhetorical filiation with the Holy Land into practices of pilgrimage, financial and lobbying support, and the like. And the range and number of Jewish communities around the world seem to have drastically shrunk throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Yet, Jewish diasporic formations continue to thrive – indeed, some of the liveliest Jewish diasporic communities are radically neotraditionalist and separatist (Boyarin, 1997).

Moreover, while Jewish diaspora should not be taken as a model, paradigm, or test case, it is extraordinary in its historical depth, its geographical range, and its interactions with a Jewish homeland both lost and regained, with a range of pre-modern polities and with various forms of the post-Enlightenment, liberal nation state. In as much as Jewish difference has been a central ‘test case’ for ideologies of diversity and collective identity in the nation state, Jewish diaspora raises the question of the relation between self-interested diasporic identities and ideals of ‘disaggregated’ identities fundamentally grounded in relation to ethnically or religiously different Others. Thus, for example, the philosopher Judith Butler has recently argued for a parallel between the diasporic dispersal of ethno-religious communities such as ‘the Jews’ on one hand and the contingent and constructed nature of individual personhood on the other – a parallel in which she clearly finds positive moral value (Butler, 2012). In sharp retort, Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz writes that ‘the lack of political sovereignty itself contains regressive forms of identity that are highly preoccupied with ethnic boundaries and survival, while diasporas – Jewish diasporas included – reify and narrow identity’ (Illouz, 2013, p. 318).

Another persistent reason to attend to Jewish diaspora is its pertinence to world system theories and the dynamics of empire. Early on, struck by the massive disruptions that had befallen and been undertaken by virtually all of the world’s major Jewish communities through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I conceived a project to describe those disruptions and resettlements under the rubric of ‘the new diaspora’. The project remains on the drawing board some 30 years later, but the problem that it was to address – to wit, how those several communities’ fortunes were dependent on their geographical situation in the dynamics of colonialism, nationalism, modernisation, and anti-colonialism – has nevertheless remained one of my ongoing concerns.

Perhaps it was good timing that led to the remarkable resonance of a piece titled ‘Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity’, co-written with my brother Daniel, first published in Critical Inquiry in 1993, and then in a volume on Identities, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah (1993). That paper was inspired in large measure by an immediately earlier article on the politics of identity by Walter Benn Michaels (1992) that Daniel and I understood as being necessarily based on ideas of freedom and autonomy that were Protestant-individualist and (perhaps more implicitly) liberal-statist and that accordingly underlie notions of polity in the United States. It therefore worked very hard to articulate a notion of genealogically based identity as an alternative to territorial nationalism, while distinguishing our idea of genealogy as lucidly as possible from the legacy of biological racism. Finally, Daniel and I argued that this diasporic mode of collective identification remained a viable and ethical alternative to Zionism.

By the time the article was written, talk about the decline or imminent demise of the nation state was very much in the air.¹ That talk has been both taken up and obscured by the subsequent fascination with the concept of ‘globalisation’ in various disciplines, in popular media, and, not least, in academic administrations and funding centres. Whether any of us still sees the nation state as necessarily a form in decline, and hence the pertinence or obsolescence of the notion that diaspora might serve as a model different from or competitive with the nation state, are certainly questions pertinent to the relation between diaspora and religion. Today, it seems that while the nation state might not in fact be declining, certainly not as inevitably or as rapidly as we might have imagined two decades ago, the aspect of state function that increasingly predominates is the police function, to the detriment of the social welfare function. In that respect, the ‘self-help’ aspect of diaspora communities – their tendency to rely on their own for basic forms of social support – may be increasingly adaptive and may well encourage diasporic communities to solidify and regroup, rather than to dissolve into multi-ethnic or post-ethnic liberal polities.

In any case, the 1993 ‘Diaspora’ article is still cited relatively frequently, to the detriment of at least two subsequent pieces which take up and in some ways refine the ideas in the 1993 paper. The introduction to the short volume Powers of Diaspora (D. Boyarin and J. Boyarin, 2002) addressed a criticism made by Geoffrey Harpham in a personal letter to me and Daniel: how could we claim, on the one hand, that diaspora constituted a poetics of identity based on powerlessness and, on the other hand, propose diaspora as a model for the relation between identity and polity, which necessarily entails the enjoyment and exercise of power? Hence, the title of our book, wherein we did some work to identify the forms of power that diasporas do embrace, perhaps always, perhaps necessarily: most centrally, power over gender roles and, hence, patterns of marriage and kinship that enable diasporic communities to reproduce themselves outside the territorial homeland (see also Tölölyan, 1996). We also distinguished whatever diasporic ethics might be from altruism, suggesting that diasporic collectives are primarily interested in self-preservation and promotion. This should not vitiate our opening observation that the power diasporas enjoy differs in kind and not only in quantity from the monopoly on so-called legitimate violence claimed by states.

The introduction to Powers of Diaspora also countered attempts to displace discussions of Jewishness and Jewish experience from the purview of comparative studies of so-called new diasporas. Some of these attempts to move away from or beyond Jewish diaspora might have been motivated by a misguided assumption that collective Jewish identity is primarily and inevitably oriented toward Zionism and the Jewish state. That stance is pertinent as well to some of the critiques by younger scholars that I discuss below.

The last chapter of Powers of Diaspora was a paper I had originally published in the mid-1990s (Boyarin, 1997). It dealt with a then-recent United States Supreme Court decision striking down, as an unconstitutional establishment of religion, New York State legislation creating a special school district that coincided with the boundaries of the Village of Kiryas Joel. Kiryas Joel, named for the great communal leader Rabbi Joel Teitelbaum of the group known as the Satmar Hasidim, has an entirely Hasidic population. Its leaders had turned to legislation as a way to assure that their children who needed special education could get the services they needed from the state, without being obligated to go to the local public schools. That legislation was immediately challenged in court as unconstitutionally designed to favour one particular religious group. The successful challenge resulted in legislative redesign which ultimately passed constitutional muster. My analysis, however, focused on the seeming difficulty the Court had in adjudicating this case within the principles and precedents of Federal law on religious freedom. The Court was faced with a community that defines itself genealogically and collectively and struggled to articulate a response grounded in a religious freedom jurisprudence based on the assumption that religion is a private matter and that rights are based on territorially determined citizenship.

Throughout our separate and joint work on diaspora, Daniel and I have stressed two points that evidently appear to many scholars mutually contradictory. One point is that Jewish experiences of diaspora are highly distinctive and unusually rich for thinking about the relations among space, time, memory, and identity more generally. The second is that Jewish experience can and certainly should be compared and contrasted with other group experiences in order to shape a broader, anthropological (i.e. species-oriented and not merely group-oriented) self-understanding.

One key finding of these investigations is that absence from a lost homeland is not necessarily the defining characteristic of a diasporic population. As Daniel has recently summarised this view:

[D]iaspora is most usefully mobilized as a synchronic condition by which human groups are related to each other in space; they may (and frequently do) have an origin in an actually shared past but need not (and, moreover, need not even have a story of such a shared – traumatic – past). Once this is said, a ‘homeland’ (real or even imagined) is not a necessary or sufficient condition for the existence of a diaspora, and within the history of a given collective, there can be multiple diasporas, from Babylonia, Bari and Otranto, Spain, the Rhineland, shifting homelands and even diaspora in which homeland is entirely absent and replaced completely by cultural connection.

(Boyarin, forthcoming)

In this view, diaspora is not so much a shared predicament of loss as a shared strategy of survival, continuity, and the reproduction of meaning. While this account tends to emphasise ‘strong’ notions of collective identity, it is also open to the ways that interactions with collective others are fruitful and even necessary for group identity to persist in transformation. Although it does not insist that the answers to all new questions are somehow found in the group’s cultural heritage, it does emphasise the redeployment of internal rhetorics, systems of conflict resolution, and the like in the face of new challenges to the balance between personal autonomy and group affiliation.

One more aspect of Jewish diaspora may help explain both its relevance to and its difference from other groupings. Certainly to a greater extent than other major world diasporas, and perhaps uniquely, Jewish diaspora resonates at the level of what might be called a global political theology based on the Western nation state’s origins in varieties of Christianity. I do not refer here only to the evident pertinence for current geopolitics of the twentieth-century attempts to overcome Jewish diaspora through genocide and the establishment of a Jewish nation state, but even more so to a larger historical framework in which the return and conversion of the remnant of the Jews was seen, by Christian missionaries and others aligned with the movements of European colonialism, as part of the conquest of the world for Christ which was to hasten the second coming.

In that sense, the historical convergence of the life of Jesus (as conceived in retrospect by early Christian writers) with the destruction of the Second Temple, the end of the Jewish commonwealth, and massive Jewish exile has perhaps helped shape an implicit notion of diaspora more broadly as an anomalous situation evoking a future vision of redemption and resolution. By contrast, then, the persistence of diaspora (and indeed, the constant production of new diasporas) might well evoke a troubling yet generally productive anti-teleological suspension and contingency. Diasporic formations, that is, might usefully be thought of as drawing on and propelling alternative temporalities to the dominant model of progressive, linear time that Walter Benjamin famously identified in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (Benjamin, 1969).

Meanwhile, younger scholars have addressed and criticised the new articulations of a positive Jewish diasporism in a range of ethnographic settings. Jasmin Habib’s Israel, Diaspora, and the Routes of National Belonging (2004) and Caryn Aviv and David Shneer’s New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (2005) question the continued validity of the term ‘diaspora’ as applied to Jews. Habib suggests that it be strictly limited to those Jews whose group identification centres on the Jewish state, while Aviv and Shneer recommend that it be consigned to the past of Jewish culture and politics altogether. Shaul Kelner’s Tours That Bind (2010) points out that the diasporist call that Daniel and I made has been responded to primarily by artists and intellectuals and, he claims, should not be taken for a popular or grass-roots form of Jewish identification. Nadia Abu el-Haj, in The Genealogical Science (2012), doubts how neatly genealogy – a concept whose valorisation is crucial to the argument of our 1993 article – can be distinguished from race and thus calls into question the plausibility of a diasporist, anamnestic, and simultaneously anti-racist politics.

Against a possible tendency to see the vitality of Jewish diasporic identification only in retrospect, newer work asserts the urgency of reorienting our understanding of Jewish ethnography on the spatial plane. Matti Bunzl’s Symptoms of Modernity (2004) cites my ethnography of Polish Jews in Paris (Boyarin, 1991) as ‘axiomatic’ in its indulgence of a ‘deep nostalgia for a world that has disappeared’ (p. 6) and goes on to complain that ‘we have next to no ethnographic data on the contemporary lifeworlds of European Jewry’ (ibid.). I take it that Bunzl’s reference to ‘deep nostalgia’ is intended as a contrast to cheap nostalgia. He acknowledges the profound yearning for recuperable resources of the past across and despite the gaps of massive disruption and loss. Yet, he also refuses to indulge what he names, focusing instead on the politicisation of Jewish and queer group identities in the complex context of post–Second World War Austria. The title of Aviv and Shneer’s book likewise, and unmistakably, points us firmly away from the worlds we have lost and into the worlds we inhabit now.

My response to Bunzl’s claim that others and I had focused too much on old Jews was to write about Jewish young adults in my Lower East Side neighbourhood of New York City (Boyarin, 2011). My study centred on the synagogue belonging to an organisation known as Congregation Anshe Brzezan – meaning literally, ‘People of the Town of Brzezany’, in the Galician province that was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now Poland. That organisation – called a landsmanshaft in Yiddish – was a classic form of migrant voluntary society, combining functions of marriage brokerage, a familiar style of religious services, along with the kind of practical benefits (in relation to death, sickness, temporary unemployment) that the state did not yet provide early in the twentieth century. There were thousands of such societies among Jewish immigrants to New York alone (and countless more among Italian and other immigrant groups) (Soyer, 2001).

But by the early twenty-first century, no one from Brzezan and almost no one from the surrounding towns was left at the synagogue, now called, simply, ‘the Stanton Street Shul’. Instead, I found there a curious and entirely tenuous mix of class and geographical mobility, new capital investments in an old neighbourhood late to the gentrification game, and powerful desires on the part of some indiv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: Cultures of Citizenship
• Part I: Memories and Legacies
• Part II: Associations
• Part III: Symbols
• Afterword
• Index