THE SHRINKING DIASPORA-Recent anti-Semitic events – from France and Belgium to Argentina – are accelerating the relentless shrinking of the Jewish Diaspora. Once spread virtually throughout the world, the Diaspora – the scattering of Jews after the fall of ancient Israel – is retreating from many of its global redoubts as Jews increasingly cluster in two places: Israel and the United States.
Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Jewish communities throughout Europe are again on the decline. This time, the pressure mainly comes not from the traditional anti-Semitic Right but from Islamic fundamentalists, which include many European citizens.
Not all this decline is attributable to attacks from Islamic militants. Demographic factors – intermarriage and low birth rates – afflict almost all Diaspora communities.
But large-scale migration out of Europe is something not seen since the 1950s. In France, the nation with the largest Jewish population outside Israel and the United States, the outflow of Jews doubled in 2014, to 7,000, from the year before. The Jewish Agency is now drawing up plans to attract 120,000 more to Israel.
Overall, nearly 26,500 Europeans immigrated last year to Israel – a 32 percent increase from 2013. In Britain, a Jewish population of less than 300,000 has not grown for a generation. With recent polls showing close to half of all Britons holding some anti-Semitic views, a majority of British Jews now feel there is no future for them in Europe; one in four is considering emigration.
Other historically significant Jewish communities, such as that in Argentina, also are losing population. The number of Jews in the South American republic has fallen from roughly 300,000 in the 1960s to 250,000 today. This demographic decline will likely be accelerated now that the current Peronista regime has been accused of collaborating with Iranian terrorists implicated in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded more than 300. The government is widely suspected of complicity in the murder last month of the prosecutor investigating the bombing.
Argentina and France aren’t the only nations with formerly large, now-shrinking Jewish communities. In 1948, Iran was home to 100,000 Jews; now it’s a tenth of that number. In South Africa, the population reached 119,000 at the end of apartheid but since has dropped by roughly half. The largest numerical losses were in the former Soviet Union, where, in 1980, there were some 1.7 million Jews; now, as few as 250,000 remain. Most have resettled in Israel or the United States.
These outflows follow earlier migrations triggered by Israel’s independence, from often-ancient Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Creation of the Jewish state largely ended the long Jewish presence in lands from Morocco and Egypt to Iraq.
Future for the Diaspora? -As one Jewish community after another has declined, the role of Israel has expanded. In 1939, most of the world’s 16 million Jews lived in Europe, and, even by 1945, barely one in five Jews resided in Palestine. Since then, the Diaspora population has dropped from 10 million to 8 million, while Israel now accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world’s Jews, according to the Jewish Agency. Overall, the United States and Israel account for 81 percent of Jews worldwide, compared with barely a quarter in 1939.
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At the same time, Israel’s Jewish community will grow faster due to a birthrate twice as high as in most countries, including the United States. These trends confirm some of the predictions made a half century ago by the French sociologist Georges Friedmann in his provocative book, “The End of the Jewish People?”As Israel became stronger, more dominant and, more Middle Eastern in mentality, he suggested, Israeli identity would soon supplant that of the Diaspora. “The ‘Jewish people,’” he wrote, “is disappearing and giving place to the Israeli nation.”
This merging of Jewish and Israeli identities validates the Zionist vision of making Jews into a “normal” nation. Of course, Jewish communities would persist, particularly in the United States, as well as Canada and Australia. But those who remain Jewish in identity – as opposed to integrating into the non-Jewish majority – would face pressure to aliyah, immigrate to Israel. Many right-wing Israeli nationalists worry that Israelis will soon be outnumbered by Arabs of Palestinian extraction, and the nationalists seek Jewish migration from the Diaspora to counter that trend.
There’s some irony in the call to aliyah, given that as many as 1 million Israelis, or one in eight, live abroad, mostly in more comfortable Diaspora countries. Roughly a half million of them hold joint Israeli-U.S. passports. Israeli immigrants also tend to differ from past Jewish immigrants.
In my own suburban Los Angeles neighborhood, many Israelis do not appear to observe some American customs, like Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July, which were eagerly embraced by my own immigrant grandparents. Rather than becoming Americans, they tend to carry Israeli attitudes – notably reflexive support for Israel and a focus on Hebrew – into the institutions of Jewish life in the country, notably through Jewish schools.
Diaspora worth saving? -Zionists traditionally have had little regard for the Diaspora, other than as a source of funding, political support and, ultimately, new settlers. Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, originally from Milwaukee, regarded the children of dispersion as objects of “pity” not equal to the vital young Israelis “growing up in the desert.” Highly skilled “wandering Israelis” may still be found in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Wall Street or even Costa Rica, as well as in Europe, but they come not so much as Jews as Israelis.
But before jettisoning the Diaspora, Jews may want to reflect on the importance of the Diaspora, which easily predates the birth of Christ. At that time, as many as two in three Jews lived outside Palestine; over 1 million lived in Egypt alone, with Alexandria increasingly serving as the center of Jewish learning. One in 11 people in the Roman Empire – which spread from Spain to the Middle East – was Jewish.
Even then, Jews faced discrimination. Greeks, Romans and other ancient peoples often misunderstood and detested the Jews in their midst. As the Greek Sibylline Oracle suggested: “Every sea and every land is full of you, and everyone hates you, because of your ways.”
Jews sometimes thrived in exile for awhile, but then faced expulsion, as occurred in England in 1290. The 1492 expulsion of the 200,000 Jews in Spain – for centuries arguably the most advanced center of Jewish culture – led them to Italy, Turkey and Muslim North Africa. Some of the Jews leaving France today are themselves on a grand circular route of return – descendants of people who may have been originally exiled from Palestine, first to Spain, then to the Muslim world, to France and now to Israel.
This history reveals why Israel remains vital to Jewish survival. But that does not mean we should dismiss the Diaspora as fundamentally tragic. The mingling of Jewish and other cultures helped create the earliest global financial networks, the development of “off the shelf” clothing and the Hollywood entertainment industry. Intellectually, the Diaspora created some of the world’s greatest minds, including Moses Maimonides, Baruch Spinoza, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Andrew Grove and Saul Bellow.
Diasporas tend to produce remarkable innovation and creative thinking. Dispersed colonies of Armenians, Lebanese, Chinese and Indians have played disproportionate roles in modern cultures and economies, due largely to their global reach and knowledge. One of the great tragedies of the current wave of Islamist agitation lies in the gradual eviction of Christians, Baha’i and other minorities from the Middle East, where they have played critical roles in these countries.
Ultimately, maintaining the Diaspora may prove as important to Jews as the continued security of Israel. Without the Diaspora, Israel just becomes another nation, with its unique history but no real universal message. The universality of the Jewish experience grows not from the soil, but from culture and thought developed largely in “exile.” In this respect, the erosion of the French Jewish community, as well as others, is not just a tragedy for that country, but for the world.
(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. His newest book, The New Class Conflict is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He lives in Los Angeles.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 14
Pub: Feb 17, 2015
