'Diaspora' began as a farming metaphor: people scattered like sown seed
The Greek word behind diaspora comes from a verb for sowing. It first appears in the Septuagint, the Greek Bible, describing exiled Israelites, and for centuries it meant the Jewish dispersion almost exclusively. Today scholars apply it to scientists abroad, hurricane evacuees and even globalised Christians, and some worry it now means almost anything.
Diaspeiro combines dia, across, with speiro, to sow. Many writers credit Thucydides with the first use, but sociologist Stephane Dufoix pointed out that the passage usually cited uses only the plain verb for sowing, in a line about Aeginetans scattered through Greece. He traced the mix-up partly to Simon Dubnow, whose 1931 encyclopedia entry called the Greek colonies of southern Italy a diaspora. The verified first use is in the Septuagint, including Deuteronomy 28:25, where Israel is warned it will be dispersed among all the kingdoms of the earth.
The Greek translators applied it to the Assyrian deportations from Samaria between 740 and 722 BC, the Babylonian exile from Judah in 587 BC and, later, the Roman expulsions after 70 AD. English picked it up slowly: a 1594 translation of a commentary by Lambert Daneau uses it, though the Oxford English Dictionary dates its first English record to 1694, in a work by Welsh theologian James Owen. The broader sense of any large expatriate community spread by the mid-1950s.
Scholars have argued over the boundaries ever since. William Safran's 1991 criteria, shaped by the Jewish case, required forced exile, a remembered homeland and a hope of return. Robin Cohen countered in 1997 that departure could be voluntary and integration deep. Rogers Brubaker's 2005 version kept three tests: dispersal, orientation to a real or imagined homeland, and a maintained social boundary. His survey of WorldCat found that 17 of 18 diaspora books from 1900 to 1910 concerned Jews, against only two of 20 sampled from 2002.
Some benchmarks: the Jewish diaspora, dating to the first millennium BC, is usually called the oldest continuing one; Jerusalem's Armenian Quarter, founded in the 4th century AD, may be the oldest diaspora community still in one place; and India's, at 17.5 million people in 2019, is the largest. Diaspora studies even has its own journal, founded in 1991 and edited by Khachig Tololyan.
Source: Diaspora
