A Pathologically Abnormal Situation

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 either a French assimilationist model or a Zionist model, the Cercle offered a model in which the state of exile becomes constitutive of Jewish identity, positioned as an alternate mode of being-in-the-world defined against European nationalism. Yet to expose the historically constructed, contingent nature of European nationalisms that claim the status of organic and natural, the Cercle had to offer a particular narrative of the historical construction of Jewishness, and this social constructionism conflicted with the almost ontological, metaphysical status they wanted to accord 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 the possibility of a Jewish politics.