Receiving the Exile: New Communities and the Displaced (original) (raw)
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Exile and Religious Identity, 1500–1800
2014
The engrossing and thoroughly researched collection of essays edited by Jesse Spohnholz and Gary K. Waite centres on the early modern experience of exile religionis causa and its multifaceted impact on the religious identities of individuals and groups forced to flee from their native lands or to live in a state of internal exile, devising strategies of dissimulation and secrecy. The volume aims to expand and problematize the usual focus of scholarship on the Jewish diaspora and international Calvinism (with exile generally treated as a "catalyst for radicalisation"), to cross disciplinary borders, and to challenge the customary macrohistorical approach (as "no single history of early modern Europe exists"). Thirteen essays by established and younger scholars of history, church history, early modern literature, and Renaissance studies are grouped together in three thematic sections, dealing principally with individual aspects of "identity re-formation" faced by exiles of different faiths in a variety of contexts. The first section (Hans B. Leaman, Liesbeth Corens, Katy Gibbons, and Françoise Moreil) investigates the experience of exile of Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed individuals and communities as a powerful driving force in consolidating solidarity and doctrinal conformity among co-religionists. It was reinforced by a carefully nurtured belief that transience and marginality are marks of Christian fortitude (see in particular Leaman's analyses of Martin Luther and Urbanus Rhegius's Trostbriefe, or exilic consolations); by expectations of a bright future back home; by the preservation, in the host countries, of their distinctive practices and objects of worship (such as the veneration of saints and relics among the expatriate English Catholic community, discussed by Corens); and also by a shared economic precariousness-albeit with obvious social-and literacy-based differences in the capacity for integration, social mobility, and language assimilation in the host countries (see the chapter by Gibbons, but also Pastore's essay, in the third section, on refugees from the Valtellina living in Switzerland)-and inevitable linguistic inadequacies and demarcations (Moreil).
Expulsion and Diaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities in Flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century
This essay is the opening chapter of a book of collected essays on Religious and Ethnic Identities in flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century. It explores the themes of expulsion and exile, focusing on three themes: the dynamics and causes of expulsion; the ways in which expelled communities integrate (or not) into their new host societies; and the ways in which experiences of expulsion and exile are made into founding myths that establish (or attempt to establish) group identities.
The eleven essays brought together in this volume explore the relations between expulsion, diaspora, and exile between Late Antiquity and the seventeenth century. The essays range from Hellenistic Egypt to seventeenth-century Hungary and involve expulsion and migration of Jews, Muslims and Protestants. The common goal of these essays is to shed light on a certain number of issues: first, to try to understand the dynamics of expulsion, in particular its social and political causes; second, to examine how expelled communities integrate (or not) into their new host societies; and finally, to understand how the experiences of expulsion and exile are made into founding myths that establish (or attempt to establish) group identities.
Human history is full of exiles and so is theatre. Hamlet and Lear in Shakespeare, Karl Moor in Schiller’s Robbers, Grusha in Brecht’s the Caucasian Chalk Circle, the Armenian immigrant family in Kalinoski’s Beast on the Moon, the old lady in Durrenmatt’s Visit, not to mention the numerous examples we get from the classics (Medea, Oedipus, Iphighenia, among others). To understand the popularity of this idea in ancient Greek drama, one has to understand the importance of belonging,....
Exile as Process: The Case of Franz L. Neumann
about the displaced persons who are to be classed as exiles rather than refugees or émigrés or emigrants or cosmopolitans or members of a diaspora. The disputes are an indicator, first, of the political weights variously attached to the term-ranging from the disgrace of the expelled kleptocrat to the celebration of the freedom fighter-and, second, to the historical place of the trope in metaphorical or symbolic senses in numerous religious, aesthetic, and other cultural contexts-ranging from the sacral privileged status of the Christian or Jew awaiting the ultimate restoration to the elevated distance occupied by the creative artist. The issues are further complicated by the circumstance that the contested concepts figure in many of the variations in the claims and counter-claims constitutive of the displaced condition, so that persons seeking asylum may claim refugee status and deny that they are exiles, lest they be excluded as likely disturbers of the political order or policies of the host state, while individuals seeking recognition as agents and allies in political ventures will assert their status as exiles and reject the passive victimization implied by the term refugee. 2. In the present report, I will not address the problem of relating the extended cultural trope of exile to the concrete political phenomena subject to characterization as exile, except insofar as I want to reiterate the position that I developed in earlier papers, viz., that in these contexts it is misleading to treat exile as symbol rather than as metaphor, since the latter keeps open important questions that the former imperiously closes. My principal aim in this study is to change the terms of the dispute about the specification of exile by suggesting that these diverse modes of displacement are best recognized not as static classificatory boxes but as overlapping regions on a multi-dimensional continuum along which individuals and groups may move-by virtue of their own changing designs and actions, their variable and often contested recognition by others, and, above all, as a function of the bargaining between the displaced and others, including not only the hosts but also one another and those who remained behind in their places of departure.
Mediterranean Historical Review , 2019
This case study considers rabbinic texts that address the migration of converso refugees to Venetian Crete in the mid-sixteenth century. New papal policies and the onset of the Roman Inquisition on mainland Italy prompted a refugee crisis in Candia that led to tensions between the migrants and local Candiote Jews. Coming primarily from Sephardic origins, these migrants were in search of refuge as well as the opportunity to reclaim their Jewish identities after forced conversion; here we con- sider three letters contained in Takkanot Kandiyah from rabbinic authorities on how to diffuse the situation and approach the converso issue within a halakhic framework.