Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora

What makes us stay Jewish despite all the persecution and hate and forced conversions? Why people still not move en masse in Israel after the creation of the state in 1948 - although many acknowledge the safety net that it offers as the only place where eventually a Jew should be when things are getting ´really bad´ the diaspora?

Annika Hernroth-Rothstein, which defines herself as ´a Jew in the diaspora, a survivor among survivors, and a link in a vast chain that spans across the world´, a journalist and activist living in Sweden globetrotted the world to discover those links that helped us to not break in front of vicissitudes.

Her collection of accounts gathered in Exile: Portraits of the Jewish Diaspora adds up knowledge, information and introduce to the readers Jews from remote, unknown or out of reach places from around the world: Iran, Tunisia, Morocco, Uzbekistan, Cuba, Finland, Turkey, Venezuela or Siberia, among others. Obviously, many places can be openly visited, like in her local Sweden or Finland but it takes time, the good research and the proper connections to really know the people.

I really loved how the author have found the proper voice and background for each of the community stories: in some cases more history was needed, in other cases, the reader was offered a well-deserved introduction into the human network besides the institutional structures (my favorite so far are the stories from the Island of Cohanim - descendant of the High Priest in Jerusalem -, in Djerba, Tunisia and about the challenges encountered by the Jews in Venezuela). 

There are also interesting observations about the life of Jews in Iran ´one of the most elusive Jewish community in the world´, a country that used to save Jews during WWII while nowadays preaching Holocaust denial at its highest levels. According to her account based on her 2-week stay, the Jews of Iran ´are living in a gilded cage with freedoms and rights that can be taken away at the behest of their master with neither notice nor reason´. The forced isolation imposed by the life under sharia law allows the preservation of identity in the most ´Orthodox way´: inter-mariages are impossible (although conversions to Islam are a completely different story), there is plenty of kosher food available and physically aggressive anti-Semitism is absent, with no need of special protection of houses of prayers and Jewish institutions (in comparison with the situation in the liberal Sweden, for instance). 

There are also situations accounted that remind of the eternal diaspora situation, as the dispute in Uzbekistan between Askenazim (Jews of European descent) and Bukharian Jews (or Jews of the mountains as the Jews from this part of the former Soviet Union are called).

I was relatively disappointed about the part dedicated to Siberia: maybe too much discussion about the Russian/Putin connection and not too much about the diverse origin of the Jews that reached this cold remote province. Among others, there were for instance many Jews displaced by the Soviets during the WWII and the anti-Semitic persecutions from other Soviet republics like Moldova and Ukraine, known for their high-percentage of Jewish populations at the time.

My personal wish is that Annika will continue to travel the world and reveal more interesting Jewish stories. We all need to be reminded about those fine and multiple ties that connect all of us.

Rating: 4 stars