Expulsion and Diaspora Formation: Religious and Ethnic Identities in Flux from Antiquity to the Seventeenth Century

The eleven essays brought together in this volume explore the relations between expulsion, diaspora, and exile between Late Antiquity and the seventeenth century. The essays range from Hellenistic Egypt to seventeenth-century Hungary and involve expulsion and migration of Jews, Muslims and Protestants. The common goal of these essays is to shed light on a certain number of issues: first, to try to understand the dynamics of expulsion, in particular its social and political causes; second, to examine how expelled communities integrate (or not) into their new host societies; and finally, to understand how the experiences of expulsion and exile are made into founding myths that establish (or attempt to establish) group identities.

John Tolan is professor of history at the University of Nantes (France) and member of the Academia Europæa. He is author of numerous articles and books in medieval history and cultural studies, including Petrus Alfonsi and his Medieval Readers (1993), Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (2002), Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (2008), and Saint Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (2009). He is director of a major project funded by the European Research Council, “RELMIN: The legal status of religious minorities in the Euro-Mediterranean world (5th-15th centuries)” (www.relmin.eu).