The Jews of the Diaspora, or the Minority Vocation

Richard Marienstras was born in Warsaw to Jewish parents who divorced when he was a child, leading him toward a nomadic existence with his mother before he settled in Paris, where he studied at the Lycée Janson-de-Sailly. To escape deportation to Germany, he joined the Maquis du Vercors, the resistance force, in 1943. Ever the wanderer, he fought in the war for Israeli independence and later, with his wife, Élise, went to teach in Tunisia and then in America. Returning to France in 1963, Marienstras taught at the Sorbonne, becoming an authority on Shakespeare and the Elizabethans. In 1967, he founded the Cercle Gaston-Crémieux, an affirmation of secular Jewish culture in the diaspora. He devoted much of the 1960s and 1970s to writing about Jews, including Max, pauvre Max (1964) and many journal articles, which were compiled into Être un peuple en diaspora (1975).