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

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.’ 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, by tracing back the origin of the word “galut” or “golah” (translated as “exile”) in Antiquity, to demonstrate how “Diaspora” is related to the core of Jewish definitions of the “present” and questions the purely theological and particularly Jewish evolution of this concept