Guide

The Historical-Cultural Communities of the Diaspora

1880–1890

Each of the three major diaspora communities and the smaller communities therein had their own particular characteristics and circumstances.

Painting of several women facing viewer, and cherub overhead.

By Israel Bartal and Kenneth B. Moss

The Three Large Diasporas: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Judeo-Arabic-Speaking

Seen from a broadly anthropological perspective, most Jews circa 1880 still belonged in meaningful—though rapidly attenuating—ways to three large diasporas spread across different countries and stretched over thousands of miles of the Old World: the Ashkenazic diaspora, the Sephardic diaspora, and the diaspora of speakers of Judeo-Arabic dialects.

Although one could find legally separate Sephardic communities in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and the Ottoman Empire by the end of the nineteenth century, these communities continued to share a common culture and many ties. Similarly, the Jewish Arab diaspora stretching from Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia in the west to Syria and Iraq in the east was divided among the spheres of influence of the French and British colonialists and provinces ruled by the Ottoman sultan, yet was bound together by any number of migratory and familial ties.

The Ashkenazic diaspora crossed the borders of several countries, from France and the Netherlands in the west to the Russian Empire in the east; within this variegated expanse, many of the Ashkenazic Jews of Eastern Europe particularly continued to maintain robust ties of language, culture, religiosity, and sociability with little regard for the national borders that separated the Russian Empire, Romania, and Austro-Hungarian Galicia.

The Smaller Ethnic Jewish Communities of Europe, Asia, and Africa

Alongside these three large groups were other Jewish ethnic communities throughout the Jewish Old World of the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa. Their geographical spread was more limited. In southeastern France were four communities of Provençal Jews, who maintained their own prayer customs and spoke in Shuadit (Judeo-Provençal). In Italy, there was a community of Jews who preserved the Judeo-Italian language and Italian customs, despite the fact that this ancient community was already at an advanced stage of absorption into the Sephardic and Ashkenazic (Tedeschi) communities.

Quite a few Jews lived in Greece, spoke an ancient Judeo-Greek, and prayed in accordance with the Romaniot prayer rite. In Iran, northeastern Iraq, and the south of the Russian Empire (in today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Azerbaijan) lived tens of thousands of Jews whose languages and customs derived from long-standing Persian Jewish culture and who had their own Jewish Iranian tongues, including Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Tajik (Bukhari), and Judeo-Tat (Juhuri). Near them, in the geographical seam between Iran, Iraq, and Syria, one could find the Jews of Kurdistan, who were speakers of various dialects of Aramaic (sometimes known as Jewish Neo-Aramaic of Hulaulá). In Ethiopia, there was an ancient community with a liturgical language (Ge’ez) in addition to two spoken languages, Amharic and Tigrinya, whose customs differed completely from those of Yemeni Jews living on the other side of the Red Sea and speaking Judeo-Arabic. The Indian subcontinent featured two groups, Cochin Jews and Bene Israel, each with their own language and customs. Finally, the Karaites, who rejected the Mishnah and Talmud in favor of their own (nonrabbinic) interpretive tradition of the Written Torah, were scattered across the three continents—from Lithuania and Ukraine in the north, through the Crimean Peninsula and Turkey, to Iraq and Egypt.

The three large diasporas presented above were shaped by an extended process of population movements, some of which lasted for centuries. In many cases, waves of immigrants from different Jewish ethnic groups arrived at the same destinations, with older residents from one ethnic group welcoming new settlers from another Jewish ethnic group. Thus, “overlapping areas” were formed between two or three of the great diasporas, in which Ashkenazim and Sephardim, or Sephardim and Judeo-Arabic speakers lived side by side. A large tract of this kind, between the Ashkenazic and Sephardic diasporas, stretched from the Black Sea through the Balkans to northern Italy.

Ethnic Jewish Diversity and Intercommunal Ties: Living Together and Apart

Jewish ethnic-demographic diversity had existed even in the early modern period in commercial cities such as Aleppo in Syria, or Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, and in a number of commercial centers in North Africa. It now expanded into large cities whose economies attracted Jewish immigrants of various origins in the late nineteenth century. Sometimes, the different groups merged within a few generations into one community. In many cases, however, the communities lived separately, side by side—for example in Amsterdam, Jerusalem, Cairo, and new diasporic centers in the United States, Latin America, and Western Europe.

However, contacts between the various ethnic-cultural groups were not limited to daily meetings of neighbors. Intercommunal ties that crossed political boundaries and bypassed cultural and linguistic barriers have continuously existed between Jewish ethnic-religious groups since antiquity. These contacts did not disappear with the disintegration of traditional corporate frameworks. On the contrary, the upheavals of the new era intensified such ties, albeit in new forms and via modern technologies. These new links allowed immigrant communities to live in their new places and become close to Jews from a different group, while at the same time maintaining a kind of “imagined community” of their original group.

Political Borders and Cultural Boundaries

From a demographic-geopolitical perspective, the political borders at the end of the nineteenth century did not match the ethnic-cultural boundaries between the Jewish diasporas. In 1880, on the eve of the great mass migration, the vast majority of the three great Jewish ethnic groups still lived in the territories of three multiethnic empires in the Old World: the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires. But shifting political borders and the onset of mass migrations began to alter this situation dramatically. Substantial numbers of Ashkenazim and Sephardim found themselves in young nation-states that had recently gained independence from imperial rule: the kingdoms of Italy, Greece, Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria.

Immigration to Western European countries placed rapidly expanding Jewish populations in countries whose citizens enjoyed democratic, parliamentary rule, a well-developed capitalist economy, and that were in the midst of a massive colonial expansion. Britain and France were establishing colonies or maintaining various levels of involvement in territories that were under a different type of control. Small numbers of Jews from all three Old World groups had already found their way to overseas European colonial outposts before 1880, and Ashkenazic immigrants from Eastern Europe began to join them in significant numbers in our period.

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