"A Pathologically Abnormal Situation": Le Cercle Gaston Crémieux and the [Im]possibility of an An-economic Jewishness

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.