ABSTRACT
The Society of Friends (Quakers) does not see itself (and is not usually described) as a diaspora. According to definitions that scholars such as Robin Cohen (1997) or Ruth Mayer (2005) have offered, the Quakers never were a diaspora. They were persecuted in their home country and they migrated, partly, albeit not exclusively, to escape persecution. But for Quaker migrants, there was no issue of collective assimilation to a host society. Those British Quakers (and some Dutch and Germans from the Rhineland) who emigrated to North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries entered a society in the making in which they were one among many religious communities (Hull 1970). There was no ethnic divide or language barrier. In Pennsylvania, they even dominated politically and culturally over a substantial period of time (Wellenreuther 1972). Unlike the Jewish and other Christian communities, Quakers did not collectively anticipate a return to the homeland (Lachenicht 2011). Neither did they mythologize or idealize Britain, the Netherlands or Germany as a Promised Land or second Canaan. Instead, they came expressly to stay-and, what is more, to spread even further. For several decades after 1650, their millenarian enthusiasm included a universal missionary vision. The scattering in Britain, Europe, and North America seemed to them to be a salvation-historical necessity, part of a divine plan for the triumphal procession of the Quaker faith across the globe. This vision did not last beyond the turn of the century, but it did shape Quaker ways of tackling the challenge of distance.
