Canada, where I live, the country of my birth, is a country that, with the exception the First Nations (aboriginal Canadians), is made up of a wide assortment of diasporas, including a Jewish one numbering between 350,000 and 400,000, the fourth largest Jewish community in the world. I live in Waterloo, a city with a small, diverse Jewish community that includes two synagogues and a Chabad Center.
Recently, members of the small congregation that I belong to received an email describing enhanced security precautions to be put in place in preparation for the upcoming High Holy Days. These include a private security guard, a video surveillance system, the installation of shatterproof window glass, and the offer of a security-related training session by the local police force.
None of this is unique or unusual. Every synagogue and Jewish facility of any kind in North America and beyond is involved in similar measures concerning security. And with good reason. Violent attacks on Jews and Jewish institutions have reached pandemic proportions. Toronto recently adopted a contentious bubble zone bylaw designed to limit protests outside places of worship, schools, and childcare centers, in reaction to the intimidating tactics employed by anti-Israel protesters.
I found myself wondering what the world would be like if there was no Jewish Diaspora and the vast majority of the world’s Jews lived in Israel. Does there have to be a Diaspora?
History of the Jewish Diaspora
The Jewish Diaspora has a long history, going back at least to the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE. Authors such as James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword, 2002) and Paul Johnson (History of the Jews, 1988) point out that by the first century CE, the Jews represented about 10% of the population of the Roman Empire, about six million. Coincidentally, one-half lived in the Holy Land and the rest in the Diaspora, similar to today.
Diasporas don’t have to be permanent. We know that about 50 years after the Babylonian exile, and after the Persian Empire prevailed over the Babylonians, those Jews who wished to could return to their ancestral home in Judea.
There is an even better and more recent example. Not that long ago the Middle East, outside the British Mandate of Palestine, contained almost a million Jews. On May 16, 1948, two days after the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel, The New York Times published an article headlined: “Jews in grave danger in all Muslim lands; 900,000 in Africa and Asia face wrath of their foes.”
Over the next few years, almost all of the Jews in North Africa and the Middle East were uprooted, often brutally, leaving behind their assets, memories, and traditions, going back, in some cases, millennia. Most of them ended up in Israel, where today, they and their descendants make up one-half of the Jews in the country.
An ancient Jewish Diaspora – situated on a vast segment of the globe, from Morocco in the west, to Iran in the east, and from Turkey in the north, to Yemen in the south, as well as the exoduses from Iran and Ethiopia, covering more than 12 million sq.k., and with a population of 600 million (according to Wikipedia) – disappeared.
Mass Jewish exodus
This mass exodus occurred after the creation of the Jewish state, a development unacceptable to the Arab world. That it took place in concert with the creation of the Palestinian refugees, a refugee population roughly equal in size to that of the Jewish refugees from the Arab world – in other words, a population exchange – is an observation that has never been widely acknowledged.
Former US first lady Eleanor Roosevelt did in a newspaper column she wrote in 1956 on the topic, the Palestinian refugees, when she noted that Israel had taken in thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
In a letter to The New York Review of Books, James A. Michener (1967) notes the “Arab [Palestinian] refugees left Israel in the heat of war, while the Jewish refugees from Arab lands were thrown out callously in cold blood in times of peace.”
The seeds of this Jewish exodus were sown centuries earlier by virtue of the “dhimmi” status allotted to Jews (and Christians) in the Muslim world. At the best of times, dhimmis received a measure of protection and were allowed to practice their faith. However, they were subject to special taxes and restrictions, including not exhibiting their religious rites and symbols in public.
In other words, they were expected to keep a low profile. At other times, as when the ruling regime adopted a less tolerant attitude to outsiders, their assets might be seized, or they might experience violent pogroms and forced conversion.
Benefits of a Jewish Diaspora
Some claim that a strong Jewish Diaspora is an important adjunct to a Jewish state. Jews in the Diaspora can lobby their governments and influence political decisions relative to Jewish concerns.
Really? Canada’s record regarding the admission of desperate Jewish refugees before and during World War II is shameful and well-documented in None Is Too Many, by Irving Abella and Harold Troper (1983).
The frantic efforts of the leaders of the Canadian Jewish community, at that time 160,000, were useless, even in cases related to family reunification. The current efforts by Canadian Jewish leaders to influence Canadian government policy regarding Israel, Hamas, and the ongoing war in Gaza aren’t any more successful.
The wave of antisemitism that engulfed the Western world after the October 7 massacre in Israel by Hamas has made life for Jews in the Diaspora uncomfortable and unsafe.
Many are careful about identifying publicly as Jews. Orthodox Jews may wear a cap instead of a kippah. Mezuzahs have been removed from exterior doors. There is an upsurge in interest in private Jewish schools, and Jewish university students consult lists of Jew-friendly universities.
Isn’t this another form of “dhimmitude”?
The writer, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is a retired professor, University of Waterloo.