Summary
The Rome Group, the Paris-based branch of HADETU formed by some twenty to thirty Egyptian Jewish communists gathered under Henri Curiel’s leadership after his 1950 deportation, dissolved by the united Egyptian communist movement in October 1957 as a condition of unity that included excluding Jews from party leadership — the central subject of Chapter 6 of The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2652-2730).
Details
- Functioning as a branch of HADETU was a clear statement that its members considered themselves Egyptians in exile: Curiel remained on HADETU’s Central Committee, sending reports back to Egypt in invisible ink. Its members included Henri and Rosette Curiel, Raymond Biriotti, Joyce Blau, Alfred Cohen, Ralph Costi, Jacques Hassoun, Yusuf Hazan, Didar Rossano-Fawzy, Armand Setton and Raymond Stambouli (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2652-2675).
- The group rejected both Zionist solutions to its predicament and Bundism, admired French republican rationalism, secularism and democratic values, and insisted on its Egyptianity as the identity form most consistent with its members’ commitments — the more developments suggested they could not be accepted as Egyptians, the more they asserted their commitment to Egypt. Gilles Perrault’s authorized biography reports that Curiel felt himself more Egyptian in Paris than in Cairo: “Perceived in Cairo as a foreigner and accepting it, Henri Curiel discovered in his physical uprooting the impossibility of being anything else but Egyptian. Exile Egyptianized him” (Chapter 6, note 18) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2652-2675).
- The chapter reads the group through Deleuze and Guattari’s Reterritorialization: the group itself stood for the lost territory, functioning as a family, a personality cult and an immigrant support group much like the pre-war landsmanshaften. From February 1951 it published bulletins on Egypt and the Sudan, represented HADETU at international communist popular-front meetings, and, after the 1955 fusion into the Unified Egyptian Communist Party, published that party’s French and Arabic bulletins while protesting Curiel’s suspension through internal channels only (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2660-2704).
- Members objected from Egypt when the group used those meetings to contact the Communist Party of Israel, and again when it enthusiastically promoted Yusuf Hilmi’s 1955 Bandung-based peace initiative, some demanding the group be expelled for sympathy to Israel. The chapter’s judgment on the group’s place after the communist movement’s acceptance of pan-Arabism: the Egyptian national identity form adopted by the Nasserist project situated the Jewish communists “just beyond the perimeter of what nationalism constructs as the nation, at the frontier separating ‘us’ from what is alien” in “the perilous territory of not-belonging” (Chapter 6, note 28, quoting Edward Said) (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2685-2730).
- After the July 1957 fusion of al-Raya with the UECP, whose conditions were that Jews be excluded from the new party’s leadership and the Rome Group dissolved, the Political Bureau informed the group in October 1957 that it was dissolved. The group regarded the decisions as submission to racism; when the united Communist Party of Egypt was established on January 8, 1958, its Central Committee included no Jews, and the Paris emigres were excluded from membership while being told their financial contributions would still be welcome (The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, lines 2705-2730).
Related pages
The Dispersion of Egyptian Jewry: Culture, Politics, and the Formation of a Modern Diaspora, Henri Curiel, HADETU, Reterritorialization