Curated Article: The Civilizational Value of the Jewish Diasporic 'Extra-Territorial' Experience in the Context of the Emerging 'Translocal' Network Nations

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

The Context

In our latest article in this substack, entitled ‘The historical evolution of translocal civilizational infrastructures’ , we distinguished two distinct historical forms:

• Phyles refer to translocal communities which use businesses and institutions to maintain a translocally integrated life, located in one or more different civilizations. Phyles do not have a civilizational ambition, they exist within civilizations, and adapt to it, and sometimes play a part in their promotion or expansion. They are not a civilization by themselves, they are organized communities. Think of internationally organized medieval guilds for example, which had half-way houses for their members throughout Europe, or the various groups identified in Marshall Hodgson’s Venture of Islam. Phyles should be considered mono-cultural.

• Cosmopolises are different: they are vast ‘communities of the mind’, bound by faith and common rituals, and aim to reproduce and expand their way of life based on specific values. They have a civilizational ambition, and historically, they fused with imperial powers, who needed them to keep an integrative unity in a multi-cultural ensemble.

It is in that context that the Jewish diasporic community experience is interesting: they were more than phyles, they were a Cosmopolis that was explicitly distributed and diasporic. They where in fact a civilization that maintained themselves globally amongst other civilizations. My suggestion for people interested in contemporary forms of translocal community building, that they should be looking into phyles and cosmpolises ‘in general’, for inspiration and genealogies of their ways of life, and how to protect and reproduce them, is that they should especially look at the challenging history of the Jewish diaspora, which survived two millenia under sometimes very hostile circumstances.

This article is not a prose article but a curated reading list, as I have done several before in this substack, since my work is above all one of documentation and curation.

It was prompted by the reading of a review of a French book by Alan Santacrue, called ‘Contresionisme’, which wants to represent the other polarity of the Jewish tradition, not the striving for nation-hood in a already populated territory, and the perhaps fatal challenges that this created, but rather the universalist but ‘distributed’ counterpole, which cherished the diasporic existence and experience, which had been a conscious decision of the Jewish rabbi’s, who for more than a millenia, forbade any talk of a return to Zion or Israel. For Santacrue, diaspora, exile, and extra-territoriality are constitutive of Judaism itself, and he 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.

• The first is Zionism, which holds that the Jewish condition of exile should end through the achievement of political sovereignty in a Jewish state.

• The second is Anti-Zionism, a broad category encompassing opposition to Zionism for political, religious, or ideological reasons.

• The third, and the one Santacreu focuses on, is what he calls Counter-Zionism. This perspective argues that Judaism possesses a positive vocation of exile and universality that should not be overcome through statehood.

I have not read Santacreu, but because I have my own familiar linkages, and because I was taught in my university years, and beyond, by representatives of the progressive Jewish traditions (amongst my professors were Ernest Mandel and Marcel Liebman, in the Free University of Brussels), I have a certain familiarity with this literature. However, since I have a longstanding interest in the history and evolution of human spirituality, mysticism, and hermeticism/esoterism, I am not unfamiliar with most of the references to the more spiritual authors such as Franz Rosenzweig and Gerschom Scholem..

This annotated bibliography combines different threads.

• The first thread is derived from the one suggested by Santacreu himself. It refers to an intellectual lineage which could be summarized as follows:

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

• The second thread contains the books and tradition that I am personally more familiar with, and I’ve read quite a few of them. They are ‘historical materialist’ if not Marxist in orientation. They list the book by the Belgian Jewish Marxist Abram Leon, about the Jewish people as a unique ‘people class’, and also of the socialist mass movement in Eastern Europe that was the Bund, now forgotten but they were much larger than the Bolsheviks originally (the great majority of the Party’s leaders were of Jewish descent), but also exponents of world-systems analysis, such as Wallerstein.

• The third thread contains more contemporary authors, who explicitly connect the Jewish Diasporic experience to network theory. This is where the link with P2P and commons thinking is the closest, but paradoxically, before my recent bibliographic search, I didn’t know any of them, so this is a big win for future reading and thinking.

I do feel that there is a definite convergence of views happening across these three threads.

They all seek the answer to a similar question, which goes beyond the ‘Jewish Question’ and has a potential civilizational impact for all of us:

< Can enduring human communities reproduce themselves through networks, shared traditions, and mutual obligations rather than through exclusive territorial sovereignty? 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. 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. >

The Annotated Bibliography

Thread #1: A reading list on Counter-Zionism: in praise of the diasporic experience

This third position has several important antecedents.

1. Franz Rosenzweig: Israel as the “Eternal People”

Key Work: The Star of Redemption (1921)

The key precursor is 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 through ordinary statehood.

In his book, he contrasts Christianity, which enters history and mixes with the nations, with Judaism, which stands partly outside history. For Rosenzweig, Israel’s mission is to preserve a witness to eternity within history. The Jewish people already possess its homeland symbolically—through liturgy, sacred time, and covenant. Therefore, it does not need to become a nation like other nations. Scholars often describe Rosenzweig’s political position as a form of anti- or non-Zionism.

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

Rosenzweig’s thought goes beyond a simple rejection of statehood. His philosophy of revelation and love finds its fulfillment in what can be called a sociology of redemption—the uplifting of a whole community to a higher level of love. Love, for Rosenzweig, is not static; it is a movement. To love means to multiply love, turning the grasp of one who reaches out to another into tenderness and care.

This love becomes a historically transformative power through prayer—not just private devotion but a social act. Prayer is the event where the loneliness of the one who initiates love and the partnership of love finally enters a third phase: the language of a complete community raised to a new level by that love.

In 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:

1. combining Rosenzweig’s critique of historical redemption,

2. Landauer’s anarchism,

3. a diasporist defense of exile,

4. 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.

2. Martin Buber and Gustav Landauer

Key Works (Landauer): For Socialism (1911), Revolution (1907)
Key Works (Buber): I and Thou (1923), Paths in Utopia (1949)

A second source is Martin Buber and especially Gustav Landauer. Landauer saw community as a spiritual and cultural reality rather than a state apparatus. His idea of creating community through withdrawal from dominant structures strongly influenced later anarchist and communitarian thinkers. Santacreu explicitly draws on Landauer’s notion of a “community through withdrawal” as one of the foundations of contresionisme.

Please note how this concept is related to one that is very popular in the current p2p movement: Exodus.

Here’s a quote from David Graeber as an illustration:

“David Graeber, in: Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology:

““The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called ‘engaged withdrawal,’ mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community.

One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.” (60-61)

Landauer and Rosenzweig share a transformative idea of community that moves between theology and politics, inside and outside history. Both base this on a radical critique of politics—what can be called anti-politics. According to Landauer, politics is an artificial device of power—a technique connected to the state, representation, and institutions. In contrast, anti-politics is a counter-power that refuses to establish itself as power.

For Landauer, the bond of the anarchic community is the recovery of a disintegrated world through creating bonds between human beings. The spirit that emerges from the anarchist community undertakes the redemption of the present. In the preface to the second edition of For Socialism, Landauer describes revolution as a mystical change in human relations: “The incredible miracle is brought into the realm of possibility.”

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

The relationship between Buber and Landauer is particularly significant. Buber saw Landauer as one who “had lived as a prophet of the human community yet to come and fell as its blood-witness.” Landauer’s brutal death in the Bavarian revolution of 1919 had a tremendous impact on Buber.

Please note that the Belgian author Henk Vandaele published an article which specifically compared Gustav Landauer’s work to my commons-based approach.

3. Gershom Scholem and the Critique of Political Messianism

Key Work: Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941)

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 this question: 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 Jewish critiques of Zionism. Scholem’s scholarly work on Jewish mysticism constantly highlighted the dangers of messianism, especially when it became entangled with historical and political action.

4. Diasporism

Key Figures: Simon Dubnow, Yeshayahu Leibowitz
Key Works (Dubnow): History of the Jews (10 volumes, 1898-1919), Letters on Old and New Judaism (1907)
Key Works (Leibowitz): Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State (1992)

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 that exile is not merely a misfortune waiting to be corrected; it is a spiritual condition with universal significance. This tradition saw the dispersed condition not as a deficiency but as the very ground of Jewish distinctiveness and contribution to civilization.

The deeper philosophical claim shared by many diasporists is that Judaism contains two poles: a particular pole vs. a universalist pole. 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:

1. a witness to human incompleteness,

2. a protection against political idolatry,

3. 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.

The lineage above can also be connected 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.

Thread #2: The historical-materialist interpretations of a unique people-class

Beyond the theological and philosophical currents we have explored, there exists a rich tradition of historical-materialist interpretations of Judaism, Jewish history, and Zionism. These come from two overlapping but distinct streams: Jewish Marxists who remained engaged with Jewish questions, and general Marxist or historical-materialist analyses often written by non-Jewish Marxists who treated Jews as a social formation rather than a spiritual tradition. Both streams often reject both the assimilationist solution (”Judaism will simply disappear”) and the Zionist solution (”the Jewish question is solved by statehood”). Instead, many of these thinkers treated Jewish existence as a distinctive historical and social phenomenon generated by particular economic and political conditions.

5. Karl Marx

Key Work: On the Jewish Question (1844)

The starting point for any Marxist discussion is Karl Marx himself. In his early essay On the Jewish Question, Marx interpreted Judaism primarily through the lens of money, commerce, and bourgeois society. He was critical of Judaism as a social phenomenon and expected emancipation to come not through Jewish nationalism but through universal human liberation. For Marx, the Jewish question would be resolved not by creating a Jewish state but by abolishing the conditions that produced Jewish distinctiveness in the first place.

6. Ber Borochov

Key Work: Our Platform (1906), The National Question and the Class Struggle (1905)

A very different figure was Ber Borochov, who developed a Marxist theory of Jewish nationalism. Borochov argued that Jews constituted a distorted class structure due to the conditions of the diaspora. Because Jews were barred from agriculture and industry in Eastern Europe, they were concentrated in commerce and intermediary occupations, creating an abnormal class pyramid. Borochov became a Socialist Zionist—he supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine as a necessary step to normalize the Jewish class structure and allow Jews to become productive as a working-class people like any other nation.

7. Vladimir Medem and the Bund

Key Works (Medem): The Social Democracy and the National Question (1904), various Bundist writings

Key Organization: The General Jewish Labour Bund (founded 1897)

A major alternative to Borochov’s Socialist Zionism came from the Bund, the Jewish socialist party of Eastern Europe, and its leading theorist Vladimir Medem. Medem and the Bund argued that Jewish workers formed a national-cultural community within the diaspora. They developed the doctrine of Doikayt—”hereness”—meaning that Jews should struggle where they are rather than seek national redemption elsewhere. The Bund was strongly anti-Zionist and advocated for Jewish cultural autonomy in the places where Jews actually lived.

The Bundist position can be summarized simply: Jewish nationhood is real, but it does not require a state; diaspora is not a pathology; the goal is cultural autonomy and socialism wherever Jews live. This is perhaps the closest political ancestor to modern diasporism and to Santacreu’s counter-Zionism.

8. Abram Leon and the “People-Class”

Key Work: The Jewish Question: A Marxist Interpretation (written 1942-1944, published posthumously)

This is one of the books from this thread that I read personally, but a few decades ago.

Leon wrote his book while participating in the Belgian resistance before being murdered in Auschwitz at the age of 26. His core thesis was that Jews became a unique historical formation because they occupied a specific economic niche in pre-capitalist societies. In the ancient world, Jews functioned as a religious-ethnic community. In feudal Europe, they became a commercial and intermediary strata. With the rise of capitalism, this function gradually dissolved. In the modern era, assimilation and nationalism emerged as competing responses to this dissolution.

Leon’s famous concept is that Jews formed a “people-class”—simultaneously a people and 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 Jewish question could only be resolved through the transformation of those broader social relations, not through the creation of a Jewish state.

9. Isaac Deutscher and the “Non-Jewish Jew”

Key Work: The Non-Jewish Jew and Other Essays (1968)

A particularly interesting bridge figure is Isaac Deutscher, the great biographer of Trotsky and Stalin. His celebrated essay The Non-Jewish Jew argues that many of Judaism’s greatest contributions emerged from individuals located at the margins of Jewish life—figures such as Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Freud, Trotsky, and Luxemburg. According to Deutscher, exile generated a unique critical perspective. These thinkers stood at the border between Jewish and Gentile worlds, and this border position gave them a unique vantage point from which to critique established orders.

This idea resonates strongly with contemporary counter-Zionist thinkers because it interprets diaspora not as weakness but as a source of intellectual universality. Deutscher himself was a critical supporter of Israel after 1948 but remained deeply wary of nationalism.

10. Maxime Rodinson

Key Work: Israel and the Arabs (1967), Marxism and the Muslim World (1972)

Among 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, treating neither as self-evident but as products of particular historical circumstances.

Thread #3: Networked Understandings of the Diasporic Condition

Can the Jewish diaspora be understood as one of history’s longest-running examples of a distributed civilizational commons? No major thinker has fully synthesized these strands with commons theory, but several intellectual lineages converge toward exactly that interpretation. Among existing authors, the closest approaches would probably be Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin on diaspora as an alternative polity, and Daniel Elazar on diaspora as a transnational federation,

The key point is that these authors stop seeing the Jewish diaspora primarily as a religion, an ethnicity, or a nation without a state, and begin seeing it as a distributed civilizational network. These interpretations are definitely inching in the direction of a commons-based understanding.

11. Daniel and Jonathan Boyarin: Diaspora as an Alternative to the Nation-State

Key Work: Powers of Diaspora: Two Essays on the Relevance of Jewish Culture (2002)

The most important authors in this lineage are 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.

Where the nation-state logic operates through territorial sovereignty, centralized institutions, political unity, borders, and state authority, the diasporic logic operates through distributed community, multiple local nodes, networked coordination, relational boundaries, and cultural self-governance. This is remarkably close to later discussions of distributed networks.

12. Daniel J. Elazar: Jewish Civilization as a Network

Key Work: The Jewish Polity: Jewish Political Organization from Biblical Times to the Present (1985), People and Polity: The Organizational Dynamics of World Jewry (1989)

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.

Elazar’s model looks surprisingly modern. Where the classical state operates through territory, central government, citizenship, and administrative hierarchy, the Jewish diasporic polity operates through a network of communities, distributed authority, covenantal membership, and horizontal communal federation.

In Conclusion:

Speculative Conclusions with a Cosmo-Local Flavor

What is remarkable about the diasporic history of the Jewish people is that they have, across nearly two millenia, achieved that their 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.

If you are familiar with the concept of Mode D by Kojin Karatani, which analyzes that every exploitative ‘mode of extraction’, which generates a new mode of exchange, it is not difficult to notice that the Jewish people have played more than a marginal role inc creating important Mode D modalities: one is the role in creating what became Christianity, which is one of the important Mode D expressions of the Axial Age, attempting to humanize agriculture+mining based civilizations on behalf of the Roman proletariat; but they also played an outsized role in the creation of Marxism, one of the Mode D modalities to react against, on behalf of the global working people. What the diasporic tradition suggests is that perhaps, they may still play an important role in the creation of the Mode D appropriate to the current ‘cognitive’ mode of extraction, i.e. in the creation of global translocal (i.e. cosmo-local) productive networks.