The Post-Diasporic Jewish Identity

Jewish ethnic distinctions are fading into memory. What comes next?

Only two generations ago, most Jews married within their own ethnic groups. Iraqi Jews married Iraqis Jews, and Ashkenazim married Ashkenazim; Moroccans with other Moroccans, and Yemenites with Yemenites. This was partly due to the fact that, at the time, Jewish communities around the world were relatively isolated from one another. They were scattered across regions and separated by borders and languages for thousands of years. They never had any real reason or opportunity to merge communities together.

This separation was ingrained in Jewish consciousness so deeply at that time that even in the early days of Jewish statehood, not conforming to ethnic endogamy carried its own stigma in the Jewish world. For our grandparents’ generation, the diaspora and its ethnic distinctions heavily shaped Jewish heritage and cultural inheritance. It was illustrated in the languages they spoke at home, their foods, liturgy, customs, and social codes, all deeply rooted in various lands, cultures, and histories outside the Land of Israel.

But Jewish ethnic distinctions are quietly disappearing. Having married a half-Cochini and half-Moroccan Jew while being a half-Ashkenazi, half-Iraqi Jew, I am acutely aware that our children will be one-fourth of each. Their children— given that it’s likely that they will marry other “mixed” Jews due to how intermingled global Jewry is today— will be one-eighth. And so it will continue: the more diverse my descendents’ Jewish ancestry becomes, the less tethered they’ll be to any single tradition or custom that developed in the diaspora.

Within a few generations, Jewish ethnic distinctions will altogether become irrelevant.

Already, the identity of diaspora is fading away, whether we like it or not. Languages of exile are vanishing, and perhaps with the exception of Yiddish, will be gone within a single generation. My father’s first language, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, was never transmitted to my generation. The same goes for my husband and his parents, who never knew or spoke Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Malayalam. We each know a few words— his brother knows a song— but the languages are gone. The same is true for food, music, and rituals. They were already cultural fragments when we inherited them, and each generation becomes more fragmented.

I recall how, at the henna party before my wedding, an absurd realization came upon me, my mother, and the rest of my Iraqi aunties there: no one could remember the way in which Iraqi Jewish brides traditionally applied henna. Luckily, one older auntie was able to rack her brain and eventually it came to her, and the party continued. But losing the culture of my grandparents and great-grandparents is painful, even frightening. I myself, at times, have desperately tried to hold onto them, trying to learn recipes, songs, and even Judeo-Arabic. There’s a particular comfort in remembering the traditions of the past, and undeniable discomfort when one forgets. They guide us, give us purpose; without them, we are unmoored, floating in history without direction, lost, separated from our ancestors and, in some ineffable way, from our own soul.

And yet, for all their beauty, the traditions rooted in our diaspora can entrap us in an illusion. When we Jews shape our national self-perception through categories and differences, we fracture our collective soul and chain ourselves to the mental slavery of separation, superiority, judgement, racism, and ego. We’re not the first to experience it within the history of our peoplehood; even while enslaved in Egypt, not all Jews chose to leave when presented with liberation. They were too attached to the familiarity of Egyptian culture, routine, and society, even while under oppression. That said: a very real attachment to our diasporic identities still exists, perhaps because we cannot yet imagine what it means to be Jewish outside of them. That is for the next generations to imagine, because sooner or later, that will be their reality as Jewish cultural and ethnic distinctions fade into memory. A huge turning point in Jewish civilization is happening as we speak.

---

Throughout our history, we have moved in great, sweeping cycles of dispersion and return, fragmentation and convergence. Before the Umayyad Caliphate, Jews were scattered across the Mediterranean world. North African exiles mingled with Iberian Jews whose ancestors had suffered under brutal Roman and Visigothic rule, and merchants and scholars carried their beliefs and traditions from Babylonia and Egypt, each with their own distinct, even foreign customs and cultures. Yet under the golden age of al-Andalusia, a great unification occurred. Sephardic civilization was established, where Jews began speaking a common language, developing shared liturgy, and producing a cultural renaissance that would leave an indelible mark on Jewish life to this day.

Truthfully, these moments of cultural convergence have never so much erased Jewish identity as transformed it. If anything, they show that what may feel like loss is often the prelude to renewal.

Yet despite all the richness of the convergence that created Sephardic civilization, it was still one bounded by region. A Sephardic Jew of that era would not be able to imagine sharing a fully integrated communal life with an Ashkenazi Jew from the Rhineland, or a Yemenite Jew from the Arabian Peninsula. What is unfolding in our own time is something much more radical and complete, a global unification of communities once separated by continents, languages, and millenium.

The great Rav Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh: “Just as this occurs in an individual, so it occurs with the nation as a whole: when the spirit of Israel gathers inward beautifully within its depths, it feels a supreme wholeness within itself.” That “gathering inward” doesn’t necessarily need to look miraculous; I think more realistically it looks like two Jews from vastly different regional and ethnic backgrounds falling in love and making babies. Rav Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, understood this clearly. He argues in Mishpetei Uziel that ethnic separation within the Jewish people was unnatural, even dangerous: “Just as we are commanded to be one unified body (agudah achat), we are also sternly warned: Do not make yourselves into separate factions — Lo ta’asu atzmechem agudot agudot.”

If that is true, then perhaps marriage and families that span across Jewish ethnic lines isn’t just a sociological transformation, but part of the slow, natural healing process of our remaining fractures of exile.

In a strange way, we move backwards as we move forward in our history, returning to a moment before our identities were split into Iraqi, Ashkenazi, Cochini, Moroccan, or Yemenite. The last time Jews lived together in one place, with a shared sense of peoplehood unmediated by exile, was before those divisions ever existed. The age of exile gave us extraordinary cultural diversity. But now begins a new transformation, one that we don’t have a name for now but that our children and grandchildren certainly will: the early formation of a post-diasporic— a truly post-diasporic— Jewish identity.