Diaspora, Revolution, and the Comfort of Myth
From Jerusalem it is easy to treat history as a theatre of large entities with clean names: “Rome,” “the Jews,” “the Revolution,” “the West.” The move is understandable. It gives the mind a sense of control. The problem is that it also produces bad analysis.
A non-essentialist approach begins with a simple premise: diaspora is not a single subject. It is a dispersion of lives across different legal regimes, class positions, languages, professions, geographies, and degrees of exposure to state violence and social pressure. In such a field, patterns can emerge without any unified “collective intention.” Often the pattern is structural: when doors are closed, certain corridors become crowded.
So why do Jewish names appear disproportionately in some revolutionary milieus of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the lands of the Russian Empire. Not because there is an “essence” of diaspora. Not because there is a hidden director. Because constraints produce channels.
If a population is marked by residency restrictions, educational quotas, occupational barriers, recurring waves of violence, and persistent administrative suspicion, then the repertoire of “ordinary” life strategies shrinks. People search for portable forms of security, portable forms of dignity, portable forms of future. Modern political movements can become such vehicles, not because they are a natural destiny, but because the existing order has already designated parts of the population as an anomaly inside the system.
This does not mean “the diaspora supported the Revolution.” There was no single stance. There were multiple socialisms, labor movements, liberal hopes, religious resistance, nationalist projects, assimilation strategies, and quiet practices of survival. Often the splits ran through families. Overrepresentation in specific circles says something about the shape of available routes, not about a unified will.
Conspiracy myths do something else entirely. They take a complex field and crush it into a caricature that absolves other actors of responsibility. If “they” caused everything, then no one else must explain anything: not the empire, not the police, not the landowners, not the factories, not the educated classes that found it convenient to unload the system’s tensions onto a minority. This is not courage. It is a shortcut disguised as explanation.
Why is the myth so durable. Because it is emotionally efficient. It provides a single object of hatred, which is cheaper than understanding how bureaucracies, economies, and security apparatuses manufacture “reality.” The myth functions like fast food for historical thinking: warm, salty, and cognitively disastrous.
What does this look like from Jerusalem today.
There is no Rome in the old sense. But there is external power, patronage, leverage. If one wants a contemporary analogue for imperial influence, Latin is unnecessary. Washington is enough. Funding, weapons, diplomatic shielding, institutional expectations, and the subtle art of telling a country what it “must” do for its own good. Empire has learned to speak in policy memos.
There is also Zionism, and the same non-essentialist discipline applies. Zionism is not Judaism. Zionism is a modern political-identity project with multiple strands, internal conflicts, and changing historical forms. It can be secular or religious, left or right, universalist in rhetoric or ethnonational in practice. It built statehood and refuge, and it also produces new regimes of exclusion. Treating it as a single substance is as misleading as treating “the diaspora” as a single actor.
At this point a sad moral becomes visible, and it is not bound to one period. Whenever Jews attempt to participate in “civilization” more than symbolically, enter revolutionary movements, modernizations, reforms, or today’s Western political configurations that promise hard stability, antisemitism can paradoxically remain intact, as if it cannot die without continuous feeding. This persistence is not produced by Jewish participation; it is produced by the majority’s recurring use of “the Jew” as an explanatory function for its own crises.
This is not a dispute with content. Antisemitism has the strange capacity to survive every version of the facts. If Jews are poor, they are “parasitic.” If they are wealthy, they “control.” If they are religious, they are “backward.” If they are secular, they “corrupt values.” If they stand aside, they “refuse integration.” If they integrate, they “infiltrate” and “destroy from within.” This is not an argument about particulars. It is a form that can retrofit any particular to its own need to persist.
That is why a wall appears. Not the Western Wall, not a wall of stone, but a wall of history. A non-Jewish history, and yet one repeatedly written “with the Jews” as a compulsory variable. Jews are often treated as a sign in an equation that cannot be removed, because without that sign the equation no longer matches someone else’s fears. One can change the coefficients, the epochs, the ideologies, but the sign remains, because it functions as an explanatory device precisely where the system refuses to see its own fractures.
The moral becomes even more concrete: rational decisions taken in the name of security, participation, and “normalcy” are often pulled into a machine that does not operate by rational rules. Short-sightedness appears. The belief that choosing the right alliance, the right language, the right political camp will make the problem disappear. The problem does not disappear because it is not primarily a response to facts. It is a response to someone else’s need for order.
This is visible as well in the gap between declarations and culture. Strategic support for Israel as a geopolitical instrument does not necessarily translate into acceptance of Jews as neighbors, citizens, or co-participants in history. These registers can move in opposite directions at the same time: political friendliness can coexist with the cultural resonance of old accusations.
From inside Jerusalem, one additional warning matters. Systems quickly turn questions of belonging into procedural questions. Once legitimacy becomes administrative, truth becomes something issued by committees, stamped by institutions, and guarded by security language. Then the main struggle is not between ideas, but between what may appear as an idea at all.
In that sense, the diaspora-and-revolution question is not merely a historical curiosity. It is a lesson in how constraints shape political visibility. When ordinary routes are blocked, “extraordinary” routes become crowded. Later, those crowded routes are used as “evidence” that the crowd itself was the cause. That is the basic trick. It worked in the Russian Empire, and it works anywhere an anxious majority needs a clean story.
If serious understanding is the goal, it helps to stop asking: “Which essence did it.” It helps to ask: “Which constraints produced which channels.” That question does not comfort paranoias, but it has one advantage: it is true enough to work with.
Signature: Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
