Common Law and Jewish Law. The Diasporic Principle of dina de-malkhuta dina

Abstract

Medieval rabbis conceived of a legal framework for the relations between Jews and non-Jews according to a principle: dina de-malkhuta dina, 'the Law of the Kingdom is Law.' This framework depended on the fact that Jews were living in Galut, Diaspora. Thus, the notion of Diaspora, which in the last century came to be used to refer to the fate of migrants in general, bears a dual legal connotation in Judaism. This article tries first, by tracing back the origin of the word "galut" or "golah" (translated as "exile") in Antiquity, to demonstrate how it is related to the core of Jewish definitions of the "present" as construed by Rabbinic Judaism. It then ventures across the boundaries of time and place to question the purely theological and particularly Jewish evolution of this concept. It is an attempt to apprehend the ways in which the evolution of the notion of Diaspora bears witness to the transformation of the history of the Jews.

Tensions as Resources in Jewish Historical Civilizational Experience

“… 16 On the attitude toward Galut, see Ben - Sasson 1984; Hallamish and Ravitzky 1991. On the attitude toward Galut in principle see Baer [1947] 2000; Goldberg 2008.…”