Summary
The Dispersion of the Jews over the world outside Palestine, the subject of Chapter I, section 3 of the Palestine Royal Commission Report, which treats the Palestine problem as inextricably linked with the Jewish problem as a whole (Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, PDF p.19 / printed p.7).
Details
- The Report dates the Dispersion’s beginning long before the disaster of 135 A.D., to the exiles who did not return from Babylon in 538 B.C., and traces its waves through ‘Iraq, Egypt, Syria, the Yemen, Greece and Italy, and with the Arab conquest into north-west Africa and Spain (PDF p.19 / printed p.7).
- Its population figures, given without sources on the page, are perhaps about four million Jews in the early days of the Diaspora and probably about one and a half million in 1700; by the Report’s present, of some sixteen and a half million Jews in the world (computed from PDF p.23 / printed p.11: about four and a half million in the United States and twelve million elsewhere), about nine million are in Central and Eastern Europe.
- The Report’s Diaspora history turns on assimilation in the Moslem world (Egyptian and Spanish Jews assimilated in all but religion), persecution in the Christian world, the ghetto and the Pale of Settlement, emancipation in the West, and the new racial Antisemitism and pogroms that set at least three million Jews fleeing Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1910 (PDF p.19-23 / printed p.7-11).
- Zionism is presented as arising from the Diaspora condition itself: a minority-status that, even under full tolerance, would leave the world one vast ghetto, and that escape from it required a national life in Palestine (PDF p.25-26 / printed p.13-14).
Related pages
Zionism, Antisemitism, Report of the Palestine Royal Commission, Negation of the Diaspora, Palestinian Arab diaspora