ABSTRACT

In a connected world, research takes a special interest in the mobility of ideas, goods, capital, as well as people. Mobility of people takes on various forms, and the diversity of migrants reflects this heterogeneity. Searching for analytical concepts to examine and describe the experiences of migrants, the terms exile, diaspora, and transmigration have become central to migration research and have attracted a lot of attention across disciplinary boundaries, including political science and sociology, ethnology and anthropology, and cultural studies and geography. Like migration, the terms exile and diaspora are commonly used and even prevalent outside of academic discourses. Nevertheless, they are not easy to define. The dislocation and dispersal of a people as the result of a traumatic historical event and the concept of exile are central to the narrative of the experiences of the Jewish diaspora. The meaning of the term diaspora, or diaspeirein , has undergone a number of changes over the course of its semantic history.