The Lebanese Diaspora
An Introduction
When I set out to write this series of posts on the Lebanese diaspora, I intended to divide it into three parts. First, early Lebanese migration, which occurred between 1880 and 1920, before the French mandate in Lebanon, consisted of Syrians of Mount Lebanon, most of whom traveled to the USA and many of them returned to their homeland. The second surge occurred in the 1970s, at the start of the Lebanese Civil War, and lasted until the 1990s. The third flight, which is still underway, began a few years ago because of the banking crisis that set off an economic implosion in 2019, and then the Beirut Port explosion of 2020.
As I started writing this first post, I got caught up in the term diaspora. I understand the meaning of the word and its significance in modern Lebanon, or for that matter, all people who've left their country of origin and spread out across the world in the past 150 years. What interested me was that this word has a unique history with roots in the eastern Mediterranean. The etymology of diaspora is Greek from “diaspeirein to scatter, from dia through, or in different directions + speirein to sow.” According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary “diaspora: 1. Diaspora (capitalized): the Jews living outside Palestine or modern Israel, members of the Diaspora. 2. people settled far from their ancestral homelands, members of the African diaspora.” The Cambridge Dictionary offers similar definitions. The Encyclopedia Britannica explains “the concept of diaspora has long been used to refer to the Greeks in the Hellenic world and to the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem in the early 6th century BCE. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars began to use it concerning the African diaspora, and the term was extended further in the following decades.” The Jewish link to this word is especially interesting in regards to the worldwide running commentary over the current Israel-Hamas War and the unabashed outpouring of anti-semitism in Europe and the USA.
Although the Diaspora occurred in antiquity, its narrative is certainly not ancient history. Diaspora has become a common noun for people who’ve left their homeland for other countries. The African diaspora was a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Famine and poverty caused the Irish diaspora. The Vietnamese diaspora occurred during the war in Vietnam. “France's population of Arabic origin is the continent's largest, drawing on Francophone diasporas from North Africa and Lebanon.” My grandparents were part of the Italian diaspora (from the late 19th century until the mid-20th century)
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A century and a half of Lebanese emigration has caused one of the longest-lasting diasporas in the modern era. Currently, approximately 15.5 million Lebanese live outside Lebanon, meanwhile nearly 5.5 million people live in Lebanon. As the numbers of emigrants grow this disparity will grow too. Over the next few weeks, I'll be writing posts about what drove people from Mount Lebanon to emigrate, how they were affected by the societies they moved to, how they adapted to customs and incorporated Lebanese traditions into their new lives, how their return affected their families and communities socially and materialistically, and how, even today, as Lebanese continue to emigrate, these factors affect their lives, and affect the Lebanese living in Lebanon.