Diasporas

In the early 2000s, the diaspora is commonly understood to comprise all Jews living outside modern Israel, regardless of their nation of birth. The establishment of the state of Israel following the United Nations partition plan created the opportunity to end the Jewish diaspora. The new nation attempted an in-gathering of Jewish exiles from around the world, in part by establishing the Law of Return (1950), which permitted any Jew to immigrate to Israel, and the Citizenship Law (1952), which permitted Jews to claim Israeli citizenship upon touching Israeli soil. In the first year of its independence, Israel took in and absorbed 203,000 Jews from forty-two different countries, comprising not only the survivors of European Jewry (largely Ashkenazim), but also large numbers of "Oriental" Jews from Arab lands who had become the victims of escalating violence and persecution as international pressure mounted to sanction the creation of a Jewish state in the British mandate. Some Jewish refugees arrived via special convoys organized by the Jewish Agency to move large numbers of Jewish refugees living in exigent circumstances, including Jews from Yemen (Operation Magic Carpet, 1949), Iraq (Operation Ezra and Operation Nehemiah, 1950), and later from Ethiopia (Operations Solomon, 1974, and Moses, 1984–1985). Due to extensive immigration from Europe and Arab lands where anti-Semitism surged, the Jewish population of Israel increased from 657,000 in 1948 to 1,810,000 by 1958.

There remain, in the early twenty-first century, multiple interpretations of the diaspora and its significance to Jewish history and to the modern state of Israel. Many Jews, for a variety of complex reasons, continue to reside outside the Jewish state, not only in the affluent nations of Europe and North America, but in countries around the world.