The People Who Almost Forgot: JudeoSpanish Online Communities As a Digital Home-Land – Part 2

Michal Held

The Center for Study of Jewish Languages and Literatures, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem

The Digital HomeLand

According to Robin Cohen,[16] offline Diaspora communities have traumatic characteristics, such as dispersal from the homeland, selfexiles in search of work, trade, or colonial ambitions and an uneasy relationship with the ‘host’ society. On the other hand, he claims, these communities also have some reassuring features such as a collective memory and myth concerning the homeland, a return movement, a strong ethnic group consciousness, a sense of solidarity with comembers of the Diaspora community in other countries, the possibility of a positive experience in tolerant host countries and an idealization of the homeland.

The Digital Diaspora is a derivative of the offline Diaspora described  by Robin, only it is conceived and practiced online, with possible yet not essential breaks through to de offline world. In an study of Hip-Hop music in cyberspace, Adre Pinar and Sean Jacobs suggest that virtual diasporic communities are constructed according to their symbolic marginalism because of their cultural and ethnic orientation. They understand the Virtual Diaspora as a metaphor for a terrain in which, due to experiential and historical dynamics, social agents position themselves appositionally as well as opportunistically to the status quo or the dominant ideology, and thus the Virtual Diaspora established what Pierre Bourdieu define as «its own  sociopolitical space or field».[17]

A close reading of our corpus of online messages raises the question whether in the case of the JS interaction on the Internet we are witnessing a state of a Sephardi Digital Diaspora. When Sephardi homelands no longer existe offline and are shifted to the Internet, where “the people who almost forgot” them reconstruct a vivid virtual Sephardi community, are they forming a digital Diaspora? 

The concept of the digital Diaspora is used in relation to societies whose members have been brutally uprooted from their realistic homeland and who reorganized themselves, both personally and collectively, around an alternative Diaspora, virtually situated in cyberspace. In the context of the online JS interactions, the traumatic aspects of the historical Sephardi Diaspora seem less relevant, and the virtual replacement of the otherwise nonexisting Sephardi community evolves around a wish to reassemble the disentangling collective memory and the idealized Sephardi community, its language and culture.

In addition, a recent study emphasizes two main characteristics of the Digital Diaspora: the affinity (political, cultural or religious) with an exiting or a potential offline homeland, and the creation of a hybrid identity. [18] Both these traits are quite uncharacteristic of the Sephardi online communities, whose members are using their online interactions to form a unified rather than a hybrid identity, in the context of having  no single offline homeland with which the may affiliate.

Therefore, in the case of the study of Sephardi online communities, I propose that the concept of the Digital Diaspora should be replaced with the more accurate Digital Home-Land (DH-L): a virtual territory in which long-lost offline communities, such as the Sephardi one in our case, are reconstructed online. Their reconstruction involves a process of creating a milieu de mémoire when most aspects of the trauma of losing the lieu de mémoire have already faded away. It is only natural for endangered ethnic languages, such as JS, to play an important role in the formation and practice of the (DH-L) when the offline homeland they are associated whith disappears.

Once an existence of a new DHL is acknowledged, one may reasonably ask who the citizens of it are, and what grants them their citizenship. The contexts for these questions are works such as that of Marc Prensky, who identified the Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants in 2001.[19] According to his model, recently expanded by Palfrey and Gasser, Digital Natives were born after 1980, when social digital technologies came online.[20] Digital Natives live much of their lives online; they are constantly connected to the web; they experience friendship and relate to information differently from their parents; they are tremendously creative; they rely upon the connected space for all the information they need to live their lives; they will move markets and transform industries, education and global politics.[21]

As opposed to Digital Natives, Digital Settlers grew up in an analogonlyworld, and although they are active online and use webbased technologies quite sophisticatedly, they continue to rely heavily on traditional, analog forms of interaction. Finally, Digital Immigrants are those who learned to use basic webbased interaction forms, such as email and social networks, late in life and have never turned it into a meaningful aspect of their lives.[22]

Biological age is, thus, an absolute characteristic of the Digital Natives, who are intensively exposed to and make use of digital technologies and tools, internalized by most but not necessarily all of them as a way of life. Don Tapscott’s work on what he describes as a remarkably bright community, which has developed revolutionary new  ways of thinking, interacting, working, and socializing. According to him, the members of the first generation to have literally grownd up digital are part of a global cultural phenomenon: they are changing every aspect of our society.[23]

The members of the Sephardi online communities explored in this study may hardly be definedas a Digital Natives. Some of them are Digital Settlers; others go only as a far as being Digital Immigrants. My definition of the online territory they share as a DHL requires an understanding of the concepts of Digital Natives and the net generation that differs from the onedimensional interpretation offered by the abovementioned researchers.

The people who lost their actual Sephardi life do not have to be born digital in order to gain full citizenship rights in the DHL.

The ethnic void that they face and their attempt to reacquire it online enable them to establish the DHL and act as its digital citizens although most of them were born long before 1980, and had not internalized digital technologies and ways of thinking. Thus, when Sephardi culture can hardly be practiced offline, the people who experienced it in their own past or in that of their families reconstruct it as a DH-L: a virtual replacement for the actual Sephardi ‘place’ leading to the creation of a contemporary reconstructed Sephardi personal and collective memory that could not have existed otherwise or anywhere else.

The Sephardi DH-L represents a wider situation, in which the very concept of place is shifting, and the people who practice the change do not necessarily have to be born
digital. They may immigrate to or settle into an online place, their DH-L, and use it as an alternative for the lost Sephardi or any other offline homeland I am pointing here to a higher degree of communal imagination than the one defined by Anderson, who referred to concrete nations that are being imagined by their members. As opposed to this view, in the Sephardi DH-L we actually witness the reconstruction of an imaginary identity based upon a culture that is merely virtual and has none or very little function in today’s world. The separation of Home from Land in the DH-L emphasizes the fact that the virtual Sephardi community signifies  a shift in the concept of place, as the home no longer depends solely on the land in the DH-L.

 The JS language used by the members of the online Sephardi communities, and the ethnic state that they are intensively concerned with, function as a metaphoric place, where compensation for the absence of either a realistic or an imagined Sephardi community is found. Thus, a Sephardi identity that substitutes the lost realistic system of homelands that Sephardi Jews inhabited and longed for in the past is created.

These lost actual homelands are now being replaced with the DH-L–perhaps the only Sephardi homeland existing in the twenty-first century, when a JS interaction on a daily basis is more possible online than anywhere else in the world.

The People Who Almost Forgot: JudeoSpanish Online Communities As a Digital Home-Land – Part 1

The People Who Almost Forgot: JudeoSpanish Online Communities As a Digital Home-Land – Part 3

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[16] Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London 1997, p. 180.

[17] Andre Pinard and Sean Jacobs, «Building a Virtual Diaspora: HipHop in Cyberspace», in Michael D. Ayers (ed.), Cybersounds: Essays on Virtual Music Culture, Peter Lang, New York 2006, p.84.

[18] Jennifer M. Brinkerhoff, Digital Diasporas: Identity and Transitional Engagement, Cambridge University Press, New York 2009.

[19] Marc Prensky, “Digital natives, Digital Immigrants Part 1,”On the Horizon 5 (2001), pp.1-6;idem, “Digital natives, Digital Immigrants Part 2: Do they Really think differently? ”On The Horizon 6 (2001), pp.1-6.

[20] John Palfrey and Urs Gasser, Born Digital: Understanding the Firs Generation of Digital Natives, New York 2008, p. 1.

[21] Ibid, pp. 47.

[22] Ibid. pp. 34.

[23] Don Tapscott, Growing up Digital: The Rise of the Net Generation, McGraw-Hill: New York 1997. For a digital description of the book, as well as Tapscott’s activity in general, see: http://dontapscott.com/

Fuente: El Prezente – Studies in Sephardic Culture. Editors: Tamar Alezander – Yaakov Bentolila – Eliezer Papo. El Prezente, vol. 4, December 2010