An Asian man and two boys, presumably his sons, in traditional Chinese dress, walking along a street in San Francisco’s Chinatown, c.1900. Part of the Chinese diaspora.
28 September 2021
A diaspora is a dispersal of people or the collection of places where such people are dispersed. The Diaspora, with capital letters, is that of Jews throughout the ancient world, which began with the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE. The word has been subsequently applied to other ethnic groups scattered outside their homelands, and even to any group that has dispersed.
The word comes from the Hellenistic Greek διασπορά (δια- “across” + σπορά “sowing”). It appears multiple times in the Septuagint, a second-to-third century BCE Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. One such appearance is Deuteronomy 28:25: “ἔση ἐν διασπορᾷ ἐν πάσαις βασιλείαις τῆς γῆς” (you shall be in diaspora in all kingdoms of the earth). It also appears several times in the Christian New Testament, which was originally written in Greek, in reference to the apostles spreading the gospel.
Diaspora makes its English debut in the closing years of the sixteenth century, in a 1594 translation of Lambert Daneau’s A Fruitfull Commentarie Upon the Twelve Small Prophets. In typical fashion for Christian theologians of the era (and for many still today), Daneau positions the Jewish Diaspora as a necessary precursor for Christian evangelism. In other words, that God’s purpose for the Jews was only as a steppingstone toward Christianity. In the commentary on Zechariah 10:9, John Stockwood translates:
Wherfore this thing sheweth the multiplying or increasing of this people: & that which otherwise might seeme most wofull, namely, to liue without the borders of their countrie, that the same shall bee both profitable and glorious for the Iewes, who by this meanes are sent forth to be as it were preachers of the glorie of God among the heathen, that they might sowe the first seedes of the grace of God, which was to be shewed toward them. This scattering abrode of the Iewes, as it were an heauenly sowing, fell out after their returne from the captiuitie of Babylon. Wherevpon both Acts.2. and also 1.Pet.1. and 1.Iam.ver.1. they are called Diaspora, that is, a scattering or sowing abrode.
Daneau’s original Latin reads “διασπορά, id est, dispersio” (diaspora, that is, dispersal).
Application of diaspora in English to groups other than the Jews dates to at least 1749, when it is applied to the Unitas Fratrum, or Union of Brothers, which is now better known as the Moravian Church, in an English translation of a Latin description of the religion. This reference is to the dispersal of Moravians to elsewhere in Europe:
Johannes à Lasco (a Polish Baron and Prelate, who, twenty years before, putting off in the mean while his Office at home, thro’ Love of Truth, had gone to foreign Countries, where he at different Times was Pastor of the Diaspora at London, Emden, Frankfort on the Mayn; but in the Year 1556. being sent for, returned into his own Country).
Again, the original Latin reads dispersis.
And by the end of the eighteenth century, diaspora was being used to describe the dispersal of non-ethnic groups. Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale University, wrote in 1794 about the spread of deist philosophers and philosophy in an anti-Enlightenment screed:
In this period, of taking great liberties with the person and religion of Jesus, of conceited wisdom, of bold an illiberal invectives against revelation, during the present rage and enthusiastic mania of deism, I fear not to risque the offence and vociferous repudiations of the disciples of the open Voltaire and Rosseau, or the covert deistical Gibbon, notwithstanding their public honors in the recent apotheoses of the newly resumed ethnical idolatry, and their repositation among the collection of Gods in the motly pantheon of the Temple of Reason. The blaze of this little political diaspora of extravagant and self-opinionated philosophers (a fraternity bringing the honorable name into contempt, as it did in the fourth century) will, like other momentary lamps of error, burn down, go out and evanish.
Today, diaspora is applied to many groups, including, but not limited to, Indians, Africans, Irish, Chinese, and Armenians. And diaspora and the adjective diasporic are even applied to the English language as it is spoken and written throughout the world.
Sources:
An Account of the Doctrine, Manners, Liturgy, and Idiom of the Unitas Fratrum. London: 1749, 108. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Daneau, Lambert. Commentariorum Lamberti Danaei in Prophetas Minores, vol. 2 of 2. Geneva: Eustatius Vignon, 1586, 949. Post Reformation Digital Library.
———. A Fruitfull Commentarie Upon the Twelve Small Prophets. John Stockwood, trans. Cambridge: John Legate, 1594, 1042. Early English Books Online (EEBO).
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2014, modified June 2021, s.v. diaspora, n., modified March 2018, s.v. diasporic, adj.
Stiles, Ezra. A History of Three of the Judges of King Charles I. Hartford, Connecticut: Elisha Babcock, 1794, 308–09. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Photo credit: Arnold Genthe, c.1900. Library of Congress. Public domain image.