Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

If you want to know whether the inhabitants of a certain country share a common sense of national solidarity, a good way to find out is – oddly enough – to look at where their emigrants have settled.

That’s because people from the same geographic area will, for either positive or negative reasons, not necessarily live together as immigrants in a new country. Ethnic and religious diasporas are often an indicator of differences back home.

Positive reasons may revolve around religious institutions and practices. Negative ones are usually the result of some form of oppression or persecution in the country of origin. Often both are involved.

Let’s look at immigrants from France. Historically, French Catholics, as part of the ruling group in France, founded royal colonies, such as today’s Quebec. On the other hand, French Protestants, known as Huguenots, fled the country following the mass murders known as the St. Bartholemew’s Day Massacre in 1572; at least 25,000 were slaughtered.

They ended up in Calvinist settlements, such as Protestant Ulster, Presbyterian Scotland, Calvinist Holland, Puritan New England, and the Afrikaaner settlements in South Africa. Many anglisized their names – Paul Revere, of American Revolution fame, was from a Huguenot family. His father had changed his name from Revoir to Revere.

It was religion, not language or place of origin, which determined where they settled. (Indeed, French Protestants were not even permitted in New France.)

Most so-called “Lebanese” diasporas are actually made up of Lebanese Christians, mainly Maronites. Arabs from Lebanon, if they emigrate, will move into “Arab” areas.

The same holds true for people from the ethnically contested island of Cyprus. “Cypriots,” who settled in many areas of the British Empire, including London, were usually Greeks, and Greek Orthodox in religion. Turkish Cypriots, less mobile, settled in their own neighbourhoods if they left Cyprus, or in larger Turkish ones.

Armenians, especially following their genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Turks during the First World War, fled to secular nations like the United States, or settled among fellow eastern rite Christians in places like Lebanon. Coptic Christians from Egypt have also followed the same pattern.

The “overseas Chinese,” from countries like Malaysia or Indonesia, have often been the victims of pogroms at the hands of Muslim Malay peoples. In sectarian violence in Malaysia in 1969, sources put the death toll at close to 600 Chinese; in anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in 1998, more than 2,000 people died.

They settle in Chinese neighbourhoods when they come to the Americas. The last placed they’d want to live are in neighbourhoods inhabited by non-Chinese people from their countries of origin. Tamils and Sinhalese from war-torn Sri Lanka also live in separate ethnic enclaves.

Countries such as Fiji, Guyana, Mauritius, and Trinidad have large South Asian populations who are often at odds with African-origin citizens (or, in Fiji, indigenous ethnic Fijians). When these people move to North America, they typically live within larger Hindu and Sikh districts – though immigrants of Muslim Indian ancestry from those countries may choose to live elsewhere.

The diasporic people par excellence are the Jews, who have lived among – and often suffered abuse from – various nationalities all over the world.

Most North American Jews, if originally from Europe, arrived from today’s Belarus, Germany, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Ukraine. But when they came to Canada or the United States, these Ashkenazic Jews did not settle among the non-Jewish ethnic groups from those places. Instead, they lived in Jewish areas. This also holds true for Jewish citizens who settled in Argentina and Uruguay.

They may have identified themselves as Hungarian Jews, Polish Jews, Romanian Jews, and so on, but they did not consider themselves to be Hungarians, Poles or Romanians. Those were Christian peoples, who in turn also rarely considered the Jews as fellow compatriots.

The same is the case for Sephardic Middle Eastern Jews in North America or western Europe. They live apart from Muslim Arabs and Iranians.

Some diaspora communities maintain strong political ties with their homelands. This is particularly the case when they retain economic links and have advantages of language, culture and personal ties in doing business with compatriots in their country of origin.

But this is rarely true of those minorities escaping injustice. Jews are typically more concerned with Israel than with the countries which they left.

So if you want to get a picture of ethnic or religious differences “back home,” look to the diasporas of these peoples in their new places of residence.