ABSTRACT
The most recent studies on diasporas have focused increasingly on themes connected with issues of ‘returns’ to the homelands and in particular those returns from the factual ‘birthplace home’ to the ancestral ‘ethnic home’. 1 Certain phenomena observed in the Jewish diaspora are present in other groups. One of these, for example, is the Abkhaz (including the Circassians), who left Turkey for the Caucasus and have been defined as representing a ‘diaspora of the diaspora’. What occurred was that when in the 1990s the borders of the ex-Soviet union opened up, many Abkhazis left Turkey, their then current home, and returned to their ancestral homeland. The members of this diaspora who went back believed that only a return to their ancestral homeland would allow them ‘a true existence of the Adgye-Abkhaz people and culture’ (see Cemre Erciyes 2008: 345), a thought that had formed the basis of the ideology of return for the wide majority of the Jewish diaspora in Israel. However, many returnees, once they had indeed gone back, began to consider themselves as a ‘diaspora in the homeland’, in the sense that they ended up maintaining diaspora links, a collective diaspora identity and feelings of belonging to their respective diaspora communities. These are the same mechanisms that we find in the Jewish case, although here these different belongings can be multiplied since there may be more than one exile in the long history of the Jewish diaspora.
