Arnold Toynbce, the noted British historian, has predicted that the world of the future will be one world politically, but will contain different religious communities scattered throughout the world and deriving from the example of the Diaspora, the scattered communities established in the exile by the laws when they were dispersed from their homeland in ancient times.
“As an historian, peering into the future in the light of the past, I spy the wave of the future in the Jewish Diaspora,” Dr. Toynbee writes in the current number of “Issues,” published by the anti-Ziohist American Council for Judaism. The Diasporas of the future, he asserts, will have no patch of the earth’s surface to call exclusively their own. There will however, be no patch on which they will not be represented by at least a sprinkling of local adherents.
The Diaspora pattern of the Jews, who were the first to learn how to preserve their identity as a community in exile, has been adopted by others, Dr. Toynbee writes. He cites as examples of this the fact that most Americans of Irish or Scottish origin maintain their communal identity as Roman Catholics or Presbyterians, respectively, in spite of their political and social assimilation as Americans.
In the Diaspora of the future, Dr. Toynbee predicts, “the Jewish American community can look forward confidently to being able to maintain a continuous communal identity.”
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
