TESTI / 2 / Liliana Ruth Feierstein
Meanwhile, the concept of diaspora – the Greek term applied in the Septuaginta to the Jewish experience – has been losing its textual meaning in recent decades, metamorphosing into its opposite: the idea of a geographical centre with a periphery of people who are not physically there. Yet diaspora is originally the radical Jewish conception of a culture that lives in a common text, a geography of letters without a centre and an origin, because all is commentary. And in time. The new, imprecise usage of the term incorporates a geopolitical notion of a geographical centre and national borders – a dichotomised here/there and inside/outside – a ‘normalisation’ of thinking in western categories. The Jewish Tradition established a conceptual alternative to the sanctification of territory, which is related to the prohibition of images: the connection should not be with the land, but with the Law.
