ABSTRACT
In the Jewish religio-cultural complex, Diaspora, and its complementary theme, the Return, are pervasive ideological tropes through which the experience of being Jewish is mediated.1 As Sander Gilman has pointed out, ‘the overarching model for Jewish history has been that of the center and the periphery.’2 For Immanuel Wallerstein, who first theorised the core-periphery model, it was a way of understanding the economic organisation of the modern world system.3 This is certainly not to suggest that Jews were modern avant la lettre but, rather, that the Jewish understanding of Diaspora intersects in complicated ways with the organisation of the modern ‘western’ world. Until 1948 there was nowhere for Jews to return to, the Return was a myth set in a utopian future. With the establishment of Israel the mythic core-periphery structure of Diaspora and Return was fundamentally altered, at least in the ideological claims of Zionists and of the Israeli state. The important point here is that the materialisation of Israel took the shape of a modern state
The core-periphery model is central to modernity because of the way spatial relationships tended to be organised in capitalist modernity. In global terms this meant the ‘west’ and the rest, within each state it meant the capital and the provinces. When the Jewish core was set in a semi-mythic past and an imaginary future, the Diasporic present operated as a temporalised periphery which was, simultaneously, always already a representation of the core-that-is-to-come. To put it simply, the Diaspora had to be lived as home because the real home was impossibly positioned in the future. As the modern states took shape around them the Jews became, literally, displaced; people out of place. Unlike the great diasporas of modernity, most importantly the African, the Jewish diaspora preceded modernity but was, nevertheless, reconstituted by it. Within the modern states the pre-existing Jewish presence, with no Jewish state to give referential meaning to the ‘Jews’—the problem, if you like, of whether ‘Jews’ are a nation or a religious group-placed the Jews in an anomolous situation. Zionism offered one Jewish solution to this anomoly.
