This paper focuses on the socially performative dimension of charity in a diasporic context. Beyond their differences of religion, the populations studied here shared exile for “matters of religion” between the 16th and the 18th centuries: Huguenots fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), New Christians of Jewish descent left the Iberian Peninsula from the Sixteenth Century, Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609-1614, Catholics fled England after the establishment of Anglicanism (circa 1560- 1570), and the Jacobites left Britain after the Glorious Revolution (1688). Practices of charity bring together highly mobile and heterogeneous populations in terms of political preferences, social status, and even religion. Charity seeks to ensure the cohesion of the group through its margins, despite the discontinuities associated with the diversity of social contexts and the forms of secrecy they impose. It structures the group by converting it into a social body and a moral community that includes the living and the dead, while “taking place” and creating its own territory on different scales. As repression decreases, charity provides a basis for the institutionalization of local communities, legitimates them in the eyes of the diaspora, and strengthens the links between communities. Finally, it takes part in the messianic destiny of the communities of believers these diasporas aim to be.