A diaspora is a dispersal or migration of a population and a culture from a central place to other parts of the world. The most famous diaspora, known as the Diaspora, was the migration of the Jewish people to regions outside the original settlement in Palestine, and much of Jewish history since that time has been an attempt to bring as many of the Jewish people as possible back to their homeland, to their Promised Land. A Greek diaspora has been under way for centuries, extending back to the era of Hellenistic culture. During much of the history of the last two thousand years, there have been thriving Greek communities in different parts of the world, all maintaining certain Greek traditions and looking back to the Greek homeland as the source of its culture and strength. There also was no Greek state for centuries so that the diaspora had the same goal as the Jewish diaspora--recreating a Greek homeland. While a diaspora indicates a dispersal, it also indicates a collective memory of a culture, and this is seen in the case of the Greek diaspora, a diaspora which in most regions has dissipated as the people have become assimilated or have emigrated once more, often back to Greece.
The word "diaspora" is derived from the Greek for "a scattering" or "to scatter about." Capitalized, the word has come to signify the body of Jews today living not in Israel but scattered outside the boundaries of Israel. Diaspora is much more than this, however, being seen as both a way of life and an intellectual concept, as a state of being and a state of mind. The history of the Diaspora says much about the nature of the concept and how it applies to the Greek situation. Some historians date the Diaspora from the time of the destruction of the first kingdom of Judah and the captivity in Babylon, but this would make Diaspora synonymous with exile. It is more proper to see the Diaspora as beginning with the Persian conquest of Babylonia. Th...