= Can the Jewish diaspora be understood as one of history's longest-running examples of a distributed civilizational commons?

Source

Most of the material below comes from a prompt to ChatGPT inspired by the publication of Alain Santacreu's book, 'Contresionisme' (publisher: Contrelitterature). It refers to a intellectual lineage which could be summarized as follows:

= > Rosenzweig → Landauer → Diasporism (Dubnow, Leibowitz) → contemporary Jewish critiques of sovereignty → Santacreu's "Contresionisme."

I am personally only directly familiar with some of the historical-materialist literature, i.e. Wallerstein, Abram Leon, or associated emancipatory approaches such as Gustav Landauer.

Context

Michel Bauwens:

"What interests me in the various traditions surveyed below is the emergence of a common intuition across otherwise very different intellectual frameworks. Whether one looks at Franz Rosenzweig's conception of the Jewish people as an "eternal people," the Bundist doctrine of doikayt ("hereness"), Isaac Deutscher's figure of the "non-Jewish Jew," or Immanuel Wallerstein's analysis of diasporic networks within the world-system, one encounters a recurring theme: the positive valuation of distributed existence as an alternative to territorial concentration and sovereign statehood.

The significance of this convergence goes beyond the Jewish question as such. It raises a broader civilizational issue: can enduring human communities reproduce themselves through networks, shared traditions, and mutual obligations rather than through exclusive territorial sovereignty? In different ways, each of these thinkers suggests that dispersion need not be understood as a deficiency or an incomplete condition awaiting political resolution. Instead, it can constitute a distinctive mode of collective existence, one capable of generating cultural continuity, social cohesion, and even universalist forms of mediation between different peoples and civilizations.

From this perspective, the Jewish diaspora appears not merely as a religious, ethnic, or national phenomenon, but as one of history's most durable experiments in translocal organization. This possibility invites comparison with contemporary theories of distributed networks, peer-to-peer coordination, and commons-based forms of governance. While such parallels should not be overstated, they open a fruitful line of inquiry: namely, whether the long historical experience of diasporic Judaism can illuminate emerging forms of non-territorial cooperation and post-sovereign organization in the transition toward a new civilizational configuration."

Description

ChatGPT, prompted by Michel Bauwens:

What Santacreu calls "contresionisme" appears to be his own reformulation of an older current of Jewish thought that is neither simply anti-Zionist nor merely critical of Israeli policy. Rather, it belongs to a long tradition that saw diaspora, exile, and extra-territoriality as constitutive of Judaism itself, and therefore regarded the normalization of the Jews into a nation-state as a betrayal of Judaism's deepest vocation.

To understand the genealogy of this position, it helps to distinguish three different currents:

Position	Main Idea
Zionism	The Jewish condition of exile should end through political sovereignty in a Jewish state.
Anti-Zionism	Opposition to Zionism for political, religious, or ideological reasons.
Counter-Zionism (as Santacreu uses it)	Judaism possesses a positive vocation of exile and universality that should not be overcome through statehood.

History

This third position has several important antecedents.

1. Franz Rosenzweig: Israel as the "eternal people"

The key precursor is indeed Franz Rosenzweig and his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption.

Rosenzweig did not reject Jewish peoplehood. What he rejected was the idea that Jewish redemption could be realized politically through normal statehood.

In The Star of Redemption, he develops a polarity between:

Christianity as the religion that enters history and the nations; >< Judaism as the people that stands partly outside history.

For Rosenzweig, Israel's mission is precisely to preserve a witness to eternity within history. The Jewish people already possesses its homeland symbolically through liturgy, sacred time, and covenant. Therefore it does not need to become a nation like other nations. Scholars have frequently described the political implication of Rosenzweig's position as a form of anti- or non-Zionism.

One famous Rosenzweig remark was that if Zionism truly brought redemption, then The Star of Redemption itself would become unnecessary. That captures his skepticism toward political messianism.

2. Martin Buber and Gustav Landauer

A second source is Martin Buber and especially Gustav Landauer.

Landauer envisioned community as a spiritual and cultural reality rather than a state apparatus. His slogan of creating community through withdrawal from dominant structures strongly influenced later anarchist and communitarian currents.

Santacreu explicitly invokes Landauer's notion of a "community through withdrawal" as one of the foundations of contresionisme.

Buber, meanwhile, favored a Jewish cultural renaissance in Palestine but opposed exclusive sovereignty and advocated a binational arrangement between Jews and Arabs. He thus represented an alternative strand of Zionism that never fully accepted the nation-state model.

3. Gershom Scholem and the critique of political messianism

Gershom Scholem was himself a Zionist, but he repeatedly warned against identifying political success with messianic fulfillment.

The debate between Scholem and Rosenzweig revolved around exactly this issue: can redemption be translated into history and politics, or does that inevitably produce a dangerous confusion between the divine and the political?

This theme later became central in many critiques of Zionism from within Jewish thought.

4. Diasporism

A more direct ancestor of Santacreu's position is "Diasporism."

Figures such as Simon Dubnow argued that Jewish creativity had flourished precisely because Jews lived dispersed among nations.

In the twentieth century, thinkers such as Yeshayahu Leibowitz insisted that Judaism should not be confused with state power and warned that state sovereignty could corrupt religious life. Santacreu explicitly contrasts his concept with but also draws from these diasporist traditions.

The central diasporist intuition is:

Exile is not merely a misfortune awaiting correction; it is a spiritual condition with universal significance.

5. The Universalist Pole of Judaism

The deeper philosophical claim shared by Rosenzweig, Landauer, and many diasporists is that Judaism contains two poles:

Particular Pole	Universal Pole
Peoplehood	Ethical vocation
Covenant	Humanity
Memory	Universal redemption
Community	Responsibility for the Other
Land	Exile

The counter-Zionist argument is not that Jewish particularity should disappear. Rather, it argues that the universal mission of Judaism is best preserved when Jews are not identified with a sovereign state.

In this perspective, diaspora becomes:

a witness to human incompleteness,
a protection against political idolatry,
a reminder that no earthly state can embody redemption.

This is very close to Rosenzweig's understanding of the Jewish people as an "eternal people" whose deepest reality is liturgical and spiritual rather than territorial.

6. Why Santacreu Finds Rosenzweig Important

From the material available on Santacreu's book, the culminating chapter is explicitly titled L'Étoile de la rédemption, signalling Rosenzweig as a major inspiration.

Santacreu appears to radicalize Rosenzweig in several directions:

combining Rosenzweig's critique of historical redemption,
Landauer's anarchism,
a diasporist defense of exile,
and a contemporary critique of nationalism, state power, and capitalism.

For him, "contresionisme" is not simply opposition to Zionism but an attempt to recover what he sees as the original universalist and exilic vocation of Judaism.

From an intellectual-historical perspective, the closest lineage would be:

=> Rosenzweig → Landauer → Diasporism (Dubnow, Leibowitz) → contemporary Jewish critiques of sovereignty → Santacreu's "Contresionisme."

You may also find it fruitful to connect this with the work of Hannah Arendt, who feared the transformation of Jewish identity into a conventional nationalism, and with George Steiner, who often described the diasporic condition as one of the great creative achievements of Jewish civilization. Those two figures are not usually classified as "counter-Zionists," but they participate in the same broad defense of the civilizational value of Jewish extra-territoriality.

Discussion 1

Part 1: Historical Materialist Interpretations of Jewish Distinctiveness: the People-Class

Jewish Marxist interpretations of Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionism (coming from Jews who remained engaged with Jewish questions); General Marxist or historical-materialist analyses of Jewish history (often written by non-Jewish Marxists and treating Jews as a social formation rather than a spiritual tradition).

The two traditions often overlap, but they start from different questions.

I. Jewish Marxist Interpretations

A central feature of Jewish Marxist thought is that it generally rejects both:

the assimilationist solution ("Judaism will simply disappear");

the Zionist solution ("the Jewish question is solved by statehood").

Instead many Jewish Marxists treated Jewish existence as a distinctive historical and social phenomenon generated by particular economic and political conditions.

Main Currents:

Thinker	Main Thesis	Attitude toward Zionism
Karl Marx	Judaism interpreted primarily through the lens of money, commerce, and bourgeois society.	Critical; expected emancipation through universal human liberation rather than nationalism.
Ber Borochov	Jews constitute a distorted class structure due to diaspora conditions.	Socialist Zionist; supported a Jewish homeland.
Vladimir Medem	Jewish workers form a national-cultural community within the diaspora.	Opposed Zionism; advocated "doikayt" ("hereness").
The Bund	Jewish autonomy should be pursued where Jews live.	Strongly anti-Zionist.
Abram Leon	Jews constitute a "people-class" produced by feudal and mercantile structures.	Rejected Zionism as ahistorical.
Isaac Deutscher	Jewish creativity emerges from marginality and border-crossing.	Critical supporter of Israel after 1948 but wary of nationalism.

The most important figure for your interests may actually be Abram Leon.

Abram Leon and the "People-Class"

Leon wrote The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation while participating in the Belgian resistance before being murdered in Auschwitz.

His core thesis was that Jews became a unique historical formation because they occupied a specific economic niche in pre-capitalist societies.

Historical Period	Jewish Function
Ancient World	Religious-ethnic community.
Feudal Europe	Commercial and intermediary strata.
Rise of Capitalism	Function gradually dissolved.
Modern Era	Assimilation and nationalism emerge as competing responses.

His famous concept is that Jews formed a "people-class":

simultaneously a people;

simultaneously a socio-economic function.

For Leon, Zionism misunderstood the historical roots of Jewish existence and sought a territorial solution to a problem generated by broader social relations.

The Bund and Diasporic Socialism

The closest Marxist analogue to Santacreu's counter-Zionism is arguably the Bund.

The Bund developed the doctrine of:

Doikayt ("hereness")

meaning:

Jews should struggle where they are rather than seek national redemption elsewhere.

Their position can be summarized as:

Question	Bundist Answer
Is Jewish nationhood real?	Yes.
Does it require a state?	No.
Is diaspora a pathology?	No.
What is the goal?	Cultural autonomy and socialism wherever Jews live.

This is perhaps the closest political ancestor to modern diasporism.

Isaac Deutscher and the "Non-Jewish Jew"

A particularly interesting bridge figure is Isaac Deutscher.

His celebrated essay The Non-Jewish Jew argues that many of Judaism's greatest contributions emerged from individuals located at the margins:

Spinoza,
Heine,
Marx,
Freud,
Trotsky,
Luxemburg.

According to Deutscher, exile generated a unique critical perspective.

This idea often resonates strongly with contemporary counter-Zionist thinkers because it interprets diaspora not as weakness but as a source of intellectual universality.

II. Historical-Materialist Interpretations by Non-Jewish Marxists

These thinkers generally ask:

What socio-economic conditions produced Jewish distinctiveness?

rather than

What is Judaism's spiritual vocation?

They tend to explain Jewish history through political economy.

Typical Historical-Materialist Themes

Theme	Historical-Materialist Interpretation
Diaspora	Product of imperial and economic history.
Jewish persistence	Result of specific social and occupational functions.
Antisemitism	Linked to class conflict, state formation, and economic crises.
Zionism	Modern nationalist response to capitalist modernity.
Israel	Nation-state formed under twentieth-century geopolitical conditions.

Maxime Rodinson

One of the most influential non-Jewish Marxist interpreters was the French historian and Arabist Maxime Rodinson.

Rodinson argued that Zionism should be understood as a modern nationalist movement emerging under specific historical conditions rather than as a timeless biblical destiny.

His work remains foundational because it historicized both Zionism and anti-Zionism rather than treating either as self-evident.

Eric Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm (himself of Jewish background but working as a general Marxist historian) situated Zionism within the broader nineteenth-century age of nationalism.

His approach stressed that nations are historical constructions rather than eternal entities.

Applied to Judaism, this implies:

Jewish identity has changed across epochs;
Zionism represents one modern political crystallization among several possibilities.

Immanuel Wallerstein

Immanuel Wallerstein interpreted Jewish history through world-systems analysis.

The Jewish diaspora appears as a transnational network embedded within changing world-economic structures.

This approach has interesting affinities with later network and commons thinking because it emphasizes:

long-distance connections,
intermediary functions,
cross-border cultural reproduction.
Comparison with Santacreu's Counter-Zionism

The major difference can be summarized as follows:

Perspective	Primary Explanation	Value of Diaspora
Rosenzweig	Theological	Positive spiritual vocation.
Santacreu	Theological-civilizational	Positive universal mission.
Bundism	Socialist-national	Positive social condition.
Abram Leon	Historical-materialist	Product of socio-economic structures.
Rodinson	Marxist historiography	Historical outcome rather than vocation.
Wallerstein	World-systems theory	Functional transnational network.

Discussion 2

Can the Jewish diaspora be understood as one of history's longest-running examples of a distributed civilizational commons?

No major thinker who has fully synthesized those strands with commons theory.

Among existing authors, the closest approaches would probably be:

Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin (diaspora as alternative polity);
Daniel Elazar (diaspora as transnational federation);
Isaac Deutscher (diaspora as creative mediation);
Immanuel Wallerstein (diaspora as world-system network).

there are several intellectual lineages that converge toward exactly that interpretation.

The key point is that these authors stop seeing the Jewish diaspora primarily as:

a religion,
an ethnicity,
a nation without a state,

and begin seeing it as a distributed civilizational network.

That is where the connection with commons, peer-to-peer forms, and network civilization begins.

First Lineage: Diaspora as an Alternative to the Nation-State

The most important authors here are the Boyarins.

Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin

Their book Powers of Diaspora is probably the closest thing to a direct precursor of the synthesis we are discussing. They explicitly argue that Jewish history demonstrates the viability of a durable culture existing without sovereignty and that diaspora should not be viewed as a pathology to be overcome. Instead they present diasporic communities as forms of cultural self-organization that challenge the nation-state ideal.

Their argument can almost be translated into commons language:

Nation-State Logic	Diasporic Logic
Territorial sovereignty	Distributed community
Centralized institutions	Multiple local nodes
Political unity	Networked coordination
Borders	Relational boundaries
State authority	Cultural self-governance

This is remarkably close to later discussions of distributed networks.

Second Lineage: Jewish Civilization as a Network

A crucial but often overlooked figure is the political theorist Daniel J. Elazar.

Elazar argued that the Jewish people functioned historically as a transnational polity.

His striking claim was that Jews remained a functioning political civilization for centuries without a state, through federated institutions, communal autonomy, legal traditions, and translocal coordination.

His model looks surprisingly modern:

Classical State	Jewish Diasporic Polity (Elazar)
Territory	Network of communities
Central government	Distributed authority
Citizenship	Covenantal membership
Administrative hierarchy	Horizontal communal federation

For someone interested in P2P theory, Elazar is perhaps the most neglected precursor.

Third Lineage: World-Systems and Networks

The bridge toward contemporary network theory is found in Immanuel Wallerstein and related scholars.

The Jewish diaspora becomes visible as:

a transcontinental communication network;
a trust network;
a commercial network;
a knowledge network.

In this perspective, Jewish history begins to resemble what later scholars call:

merchant diasporas,
knowledge diasporas,
network civilizations.

The interesting shift is that Jews become less a "nation" and more a civilizational infrastructure.

Fourth Lineage: The "Non-Jewish Jew"

Isaac Deutscher adds another dimension.

His famous concept of the "non-Jewish Jew" suggests that Jewish creativity emerges precisely from border-crossing and participation in multiple cultural worlds simultaneously.

That idea can be reformulated in network language:

Territorial Civilization	Diasporic Civilization
Identity through belonging	Identity through connection
Rootedness	Translation
Homogeneity	Multiplicity
Cultural reproduction	Cultural mediation

This is one reason why so many influential intellectual mediators—from Spinoza to Marx to Freud—appear in Deutscher's account.

Discussion 3

Preliminary Potential Synthesis with P2P/Commons Approaches

Jewish Diaspora	Commons / P2P Systems
Distributed communities	Distributed networks
Shared traditions	Shared protocols
Communal self-governance	Peer governance
Multiple autonomous nodes	Federated structures
Persistence without state sovereignty	Coordination without central authority
Covenant	Commons agreements / social protocols

Speculative Conclusions with a Cosmo-Local Flavor

Michel Bauwens:

Recent scholarship on diaspora studies has increasingly analyzed Jewish communities as trans-state networks maintained through shared cultural infrastructures rather than through territorial proximity alone. Across centuries, dispersed communities remained connected through religious law, textual traditions, educational institutions, commercial networks, kinship ties, and collective memory. Their continuity depended not on a single territorial center but on the capacity to maintain coherence across multiple localities.

This perspective invites a broader civilizational question. The significance of diasporic communities may not lie in their ability to replace territorial forms of organization, but in their capacity to connect and coordinate them across larger scales. The Jewish diaspora can thus be understood not simply as a dispersed people, but as an historical example of a distributed layer of social organization linking multiple local and regional communities through shared institutions, norms, and narratives.

From a cosmo-local perspective, the issue is therefore not the opposition between territory and networks, but their articulation. Human societies require rootedness in place, ecological adaptation, and the cultivation of local commons. Yet they also require mechanisms through which knowledge, culture, solidarity, and coordination can circulate beyond the local. The challenge is to understand how these different scales can coexist without one subsuming the others.

In this respect, the Jewish diaspora offers an instructive example. Historically, it neither abolished local communities nor sought to organize them under a single centralized authority. Rather, it functioned as a translocal connective tissue linking autonomous communities across diverse territories. Its institutions can therefore be interpreted as early forms of civilizational mediation, enabling coherence across distance while preserving substantial local autonomy.

This perspective resonates with contemporary cosmo-local proposals. Rather than envisioning a world composed exclusively of sovereign states or exclusively of distributed networks, cosmo-localism seeks a productive interrelation between multiple scales of organization: the hyperlocal, where commons are stewarded and everyday life unfolds; the bioregional and national, where ecological and cultural coordination takes place; and the planetary, where humanity addresses shared knowledge, global challenges, and common concerns.

Within such a framework, diasporic communities and nomadic knowledge communities may play a particularly important role. Their function is not to govern local communities from above, but to connect them horizontally across space. In this sense, they resemble what Austin Wade Smith describes as planetary guilds complementing bioregional guilds, and what David Ronfeldt has tentatively called axial entities of the commons. They constitute connective institutions operating across scales, facilitating circulation, translation, learning, and cooperation between otherwise separate communities.

This suggests a renewed role for what might be called magisteria of the commons: translocal institutions dedicated not to sovereignty, but to stewardship, coordination, and knowledge transmission. Such institutions would not stand above local communities as hierarchical authorities. Rather, they would serve as civilizational infrastructures linking local commons into larger networks of mutual learning and cooperation.

From this perspective, the historical significance of diasporic formations lies not in their deterritorialization, but in their demonstration that durable forms of translocal coordination can exist without requiring either centralized empire or homogeneous nation-state sovereignty. They point toward the possibility of a multi-layered civilizational architecture in which local rootedness, bioregional belonging, and planetary cooperation become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive.

More information

Translocal Civilizational Networks

Core Bibliography

Selections and comments via ChatGPT:

Franz Rosenzweig

Rosenzweig, Franz. The Star of Redemption. Trans. Barbara E. Galli. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005.

Rosenzweig, Franz. Judaism Despite Christianity: The Letters on Christianity and Judaism between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig. New York: Schocken Books, 1971.

Simon Rawidowicz

Rawidowicz, Simon. Israel: The Ever-Dying People and Other Essays. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1986.

Comment: affirmation of diaspora as a permanent civilizational condition.

Mordecai Kaplan

Kaplan, Mordecai M. Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life. New York: Macmillan, 1934; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1967.

Comment: explicitly reframes Judaism as a civilization rather than merely a religion or nation.

Diaspora as a Positive Civilizational Form

Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin

Boyarin, Daniel, and Jonathan Boyarin. Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

Boyarin, Daniel. A Traveling Homeland: The Babylonian Talmud as Diaspora. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015.

Comment: the diaspora represents a viable alternative mode of civilizational organization.

Gabriel Sheffer

Sheffer, Gabriel. Diaspora Politics: At Home Abroad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Comment: One of the foundational works on diasporas as trans-state political formations.

Historical-Materialist Interpretation

Abram Leon

Leon, Abram. The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation.

Jewish Polity Beyond the State

Daniel J. Elazar

Elazar, Daniel J. People and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of World Jewry. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

Elazar, Daniel J. The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Comment: He explicitly argues that world Jewry functioned historically as a distributed polity without statehood.

The Diaspora and the "Non-Jewish Jew"

Isaac Deutscher

Deutscher, Isaac. The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.

Comment: diaspora as a source of mediation, translation, and universalism.

Historical and Civilizational Perspectives

Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt

Eisenstadt, S. N. Jewish Civilization: The Jewish Historical Experience in a Comparative Perspective. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992.

one of the principal theorists of Axial Civilizations

Civilizational Value of Jewish Diasporic Extra-Territoriality

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