Introduction to Shofar Special Issue: Rethinking Exile, Center, and Diaspora in Modern Jewish Culture

Abstract

The essays in this special issue stem from a conference held at the University Cambridge in May 2016 on the theme Rethinking Exile, Center, and Diaspora in Modern Jewish Culture. With participants from the UK, Israel, Germany, and the US, the discussions and presentations took their starting point from the reflection that, over the course multiple centuries prior to the modern era, Jewish culture was shaped in various ways by the concept and by the practical circumstances that corresponded to this concept. The conference aimed to explore ways in which inherited Jewish culture has also been reshaped and affected by the presence nonexilic or anti-exilic dynamics in more recent and contemporary Jewish history.Historically, the Jewish concept entailed the idea living in a world without an active geographical center. While Jerusalem and the Land Israel played a role such a in terms the ancient past and the envisioned messianic future, the present world was understood as one in which, broadly speaking, Jews and Jewish culture possess no geographical center. That is to say, while the Land Israel constituted a present liturgical focus and a present hope for messianic return, there was not a prominent sense living outside of a geographical that existed elsewhere in the world. From this perspective, the establishment the State Israel marked a significant change: now, a geographic location had arisen that laid claim to a new role a special center for Jewish culture and identity.The papers at the conference thus asked: how was Jewish culture, previously predicated on a conscious absence an active geographical center, affected by this emergence this influential new state affairs? How did the cultural inheritance Jewish identity as exilic/diasporic continue to shape the ways in which Jews, both in the State Israel and in other countries, conceived Jewishness?In exploring these questions, the papers also sought to explore ways in which Jewish exilic cultural identity was reshaped and affected by additional aspects modernity other than the establishment State Israel. For instance, if another key element Jewish understandings involved political exclusion and subservience, in what ways did the experience life in America, with its promise liberty, citizenship, and freedom religion, reshape Jewish conceptions being in exile? Did the American experiment already functionally constitute an end exile or negation exile even prior to the rise Zionism? Did life in America cause just a profound a reshaping Jewish exilic identity as the establishment the State Israel? If so, can one trace a similar reshaping exilic/diasporic identity in other liberal-democratic countries such as France and the United Kingdom?In addition to historical questions, the papers also sought to tease out implications these dynamics for contemporary Jewish life and thought. In what ways does the tension between the exilic cultural inheritance and these modern nonexilic elements manifest itself? How does this tension impact political, ethical, literary, artistic, or religious patterns among Jews today? How do the dynamics belonging or nonbelonging in other countries affect the attitudes Jews towards the reality or imagined fantasy the State Israel? What are the challenges involved in trying to understand past orientations from the very different circumstances the present? …