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This paper examines the diasporist French Jewish group, Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, founded in 1967 “to promote a diasporic Jewish existence without subjugation to the synagogue or to Zionism.” In contrast to the post-revolutionary assimilationist model which demanded the full acceptance of French national identity in the public sphere, or a Zionist model which called for a Jewish nationalism to compete with French nationalism, the Cercle offered a model in which exile and diaspora becomes constitutive of Jewish identity. The Cercle aimed to position Jewishness as an alternate mode of being-in-the-world defined against Christian European nationalism, analogous to how Black intellectuals used Blackness to expose the constructed nature of whiteness. Yet to expose the constructed, economically calculative nature of European nationalisms that claim the status of the organic and natural, the Cercle offered a narrative of the historical construction of Jewishness, and this social constructionism conflicted with the almost metaphysical status they accorded to Jewish exile and otherness.
In 1967, spurred by a wave of public sympathy among French intellectuals and politicians toward the state of Israel in the wake of the Six Day War, many French Jews began to assert a public political identity as a collective people for the first time.[i] This identification with the nation-state of Israel, which took the form of public demonstrations and the formation of new political and cultural organizations designed to mobilize French Jewish support for Israel and its policies,[ii] represented the end of what French sociologist Claude Tapia has termed “an old tradition of neutrality and discretion associated with French Jewry.”[iii] It was against this backdrop that Richard Marienstras established the Cercle in 1967.[iv]
The founding manifesto of the Cercle argued that the reaction of French Jews after 1967 to rally around the state of Israel was an unavoidable reaction to “a certain diffuse and residual consciousness of the historical and cultural dimensions” of Jewish identity.[v] Such a “residual consciousness” of Jewish national identity was a more honest expression of the cultural essence of Jewishness than a privatized, confessional religious understanding, which had left French Jews no grounds for a collective political response to the Holocaust.[vi] In the face of a universalist left which saw all expressions of subnational ethnic solidarity as retrograde and suspect, and a French Jewish community which thought such solidarity could only be expressed through Zionism, the founding manifesto of the Cercle demanded a third option, and declared “diasporas constitute for Jews a unique mode of existence that a long past has rendered natural, advantageous, and venerable and which has maintained the best of the Jewish universalist tradition; and that the diasporas, like other minorities, must be among those encouraged… to ‘preserve their cultural values.’”[vii] This essentialist diasporism represented a radical new claim for the an-economic value of Jewish difference, defined in opposition to the calculative, economic framework of the nation-state, a nationalist framework which the Cercle understood as ultimately necessitating the suppression of difference in the name of the same, through the negationist violence of the Holocaust. [viii]
Yet this diasporic essentialism conflicted with the historiographical element of the Cercle’s project,. In calling for diasporic politics to challenge hegemonic European and Jewish nationalisms, the ideologues of the Cercle Gaston Crémieux constructed a history of Jewishness that portrayed the nation-state itself as a foreign model imported into Judaism from external sources from as far back as Hellenic times, pointing to parallels between modern Zionist myths and the myths of the Greek and Roman Empires.[ix] The historiography of scholars of the Cercle such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet positioned Jewish history as a foil to expose the way in which all histories are constructed, economically calculative, and fictive, to denaturalize nationalisms that claim the status of the organic.
Yet to do this, the Cercle fell back upon a conception of Jewish history in which exile is accorded a nearly ontological status, as paradigmatically constitutive of Jewish identity. This depiction of Jews as the metaphysical people of exile necessarily conflicts with the Cercle’s effort to read Jewishness as socially constituted and constructed, and this tension marks the failure of the Cercle’s constructive project.
The paper will examine how the attempt to oppose Jewish diasporism to European nationalisms parallels and differs from attempts to use Blackness to reveal the constructed nature of whiteness. It will suggest that the Cercle diasporic conception of Jewishness, after the Holocaust and the formation of the state of Israel, tries and perhaps fails to enable the articulation of other forms of minority identity.
[i] Cohen, Martine. “French Jewry: Assertion of Identity and the Development of the Pattern of Integration,” translated Cynthia Landes. *European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe* 28, no. 1 (1995): 5-14, p. 7.
[ii] Ibid, 7-8.
[iii] Tapia, Claude. *Les Juifs Sépharades En France, 1965-1985: Études Psychosociologiques Et Historiques*. (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1986).
[iv] Hammerschlag, Sarah. Introduction to Richard Marienstras’s “The Jews of the Diaspora, or the Vocation of a Minority,” in *Modern French Jewish Thought: Writings on Religion and Politics*, ed. Sarah Hammerschlag. (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), p. 137.
[v] Cercle Gaston Crémieux, “Historique et Principes Généreaux,” as cited in: Wolf, Joan Beth. *Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France*. (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 56.
[vi] Marienstras, Richard. "The Jews of the Diaspora, or the Vocation of a Minority." *European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe* Vol. 9, no. 2 (1975): 6-22, p. 14.
[vii] Cercle Gaston Crémieux, “Historique et Principes Généreaux,” as cited in: Wolf, Joan Beth. *Harnessing the Holocaust: The Politics of Memory in France*, 56.
[viii] Marienstras, “The Jews of the Diaspora, or the Vocation of a Minority,” 9.
[ix] Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. “Forms of Political Activity in the Jewish World, Principally around the First Century C.E.,” in Vidal-Naquet, Pierre. *The Jews: History, Memory, and the Present*, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, with a foreword by Paul Berman. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 10.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
This paper examines the diasporist French Jewish political group, Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux, founded in 1967 “to promote a diasporic Jewish existence without subjugation to the synagogue or to Zionism.” In contrast to an assimilationist model which demanded the acceptance of French national identity in the public sphere, or a Zionist model of Jewish nationalism, the Cercle offered exile and diaspora as constitutive of Jewish identity, positioned as an alternate mode of being-in-the-world defined against white Christian European nationalism. Yet to expose the historically constructed, economically calculative nature of European nationalisms that claim the status of organic and natural, the Cercle offered a narrative of the historical construction of Jewishness, and this social constructionism conflicted with the almost metaphysical status they accorded to Jewish exile and otherness. Thus the Cercle failed to construct an anti-national model of Jewishness, but this failure sheds light on larger fault lines in Jewish politics.