French Global: A New Approach to Literary History

From the Saracens in La chanson de Roland (The Song of Roland, ca. 1140) to Montesquieu’s Persians, from Montaigne’s cannibal to Graffigny’s péruvienne, French literature has long defined what it means to be French in relation to an exotic other. The nineteenth century, however, found its phantasmatic foil closer to home. With the advent of modernity, the Jew came to offer French writers a way to process the era’s historical, social, economic, and cultural transformations. Just as actual French Jews moved from the margins to the center of French society during this period, fictional Jews came to embody a set of anxieties related to phenomena as diverse as the rise of industrial capitalism, revolution, and mass culture. In the first part of this essay, I explore representations of Jews by non-Jewish writers in nineteenth-century France. In the second part, I examine how the first Jewish writers in French also used fiction to come to terms with the dilemmas of modernity, offering a view of Jewish difference from within.

The modern period in France began with an unprecedented gesture of generosity toward the Jews. In 1790, the revolutionary Constituent Assembly granted citizenship to the community of several thousand Sephardim (Jews from Spain and Portugal) living in southwestern France, whose ancestors had fled the Inquisition. The following year, the same body made the more numerous Ashkenazim (Jews from German-speaking lands) in Alsace and Lorraine citizens as well. The first time a modern nation had explicitly granted the Jews full civil rights, this revolutionary emancipation seemed to follow logically from the principles of universal equality enshrined in the Déclaration des droits de l ’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 1789). And yet, the exceptional nature of Jewish emancipation in France should not go unnoticed, for the revolutionaries delayed abolishing slavery until 1794 and never gave women the right to vote.

By making the Jews citizens, the revolutionary authorities aimed to eradicate a problematic “nation within the nation” and to “regenerate” what they perceived as a backward population. For at the time of the Revolution, the French Jews, especially the Ashkenazim of Alsace and Lorraine, appeared to Enlightenment reformers as the most unmodern of peoples. The more than thirty thousand Jews in these Eastern provinces, confined by law to rural areas and restricted from entering guilds and most professions, eked out a meager living through petty trade and money lending. They spoke Western Yiddish and lived much as they had since the Middle Ages, in insular communities with their own institutions and governance structures. For liberal reformers, the Jews offered a test case for Enlightenment: if even this group could be transformed into productive citizens through the granting of equality, then anyone could.

Thanks to emancipation, the situation of the French Jews did indeed change dramatically in the first third of the nineteenth century, especially for those who took advantage of the relaxation of residency restrictions to move to large towns and cities. Although a large portion of French Jews remained in poverty well into the nineteenth century, individual Israélites, as the newly enfranchised Jews preferred to be called, achieved remarkable success. French Jews obtained high positions not only in banking, business, and the arts—as they had in neighboring countries—but also in the liberal professions, the army, and government. By the 1840s, three Jews had been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, and after the Revolution of 1848, Jews held two of the eight ministerial positions in the provisional government. In no other country did Jews attain such integration without converting. This trend would accelerate during the Third Republic (1870–1940), as French Jews gravitated toward public service in increasing numbers. The Enlightenment experiment seemed to have worked.

But if the modern Jewish citizen was born in France, so too was modern anti-Semitism. This new form of Jew hatred originated in France on the left. Drawing on the legacy of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, pamphleteers in the 1840s began to denounce what they saw as immoral appropriation of the nation’s resources by Jewish bankers. In Les Juifs, rois de l’époque (The Jews, Kings of the Era, 1845), the Fourierist journalist Alphonse Toussenel attacked the Rothschilds and other Jewish financiers for turning the nation into their “feudal” domain. As the heads of one of France’s largest banks, as well as the developers of one of the nation’s major railway lines, the Rothschilds became lightning rods for critiques of France’s incipient economic modernization. Moreover, as immigrants from Germany, with branches of their banking house in various European capitals, they incarnated the dangerous cosmopolitanism of modern global capitalism. Following a deadly accident on their railway line in 1846, a score of pamphlets, as well as articles in the Fourierist newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique, assailed the Rothschilds and other “loup cerviers d’Israël” (lynxes of Israel) for pillaging France.

This case against the Jews as agents of a nefarious modernity found its way into the era’s literary discourse. Honoré de Balzac, for example, borrows the term “loup cervier” (lynx) from contemporaneous socialist pamphleteers to describe the Jewish banker, Baron Nucingen, in his novel Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (A Harlot High and Low), the sequel to Illusions perdues (Lost Illusions, 1837–43). The chapter in which Nucingen encounters the beautiful prostitute Esther, who seduces him on sight, is entitled “Comment un loup-cervier rencontra le rat, et ce qui en advint [How a lynx met the rat and what happened after that].” Balzac worked on Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes between 1838 and 1847, at precisely the time that the new economic French anti-Semitism was taking shape—and also at the time that Karl Marx, exiled from Germany in Paris, was writing “On the Jewish Question” (1844), which accuses the Jews of corrupting Christians with their religion of money. Like Marx, Balzac views the economic transformation of the era through the figure of the Jew.

Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes describes the efforts of the master criminal Vautrin to use Esther to defraud the Jewish banker Nucingen in order to finance the social ascent of his protégé, the poet Lucien de Rubempré. Vautrin justifies his plot against Nucingen in terms that come straight out of Toussenel: “That man is a great Stock Exchange swindler,” Vautrin tells Esther; “He has shown pity to no one, he has grown rich off the fortunes of widows and orphans. You will be their Vengeance!” Although Balzac’s narrator never explicitly moves from an attack on Nucingen to an attack on Jews in general, the obvious invocation of Fourierist theory and rhetoric in the novel makes such a move implicit. Describing how little most people know of “les combinaisons des Nucingen [the schemes of the Nucingens]”—and here the plural designation of the banker is significant—Balzac’s narrator slips from fiction to reality, from the individual to the general, and from this particular Jew to other Jews like him.¹

Both in this novel and others in La comédie humaine (The Human Comedy), such as Le père Goriot (Old Goriot, 1834) and La Maison Nucingen (The Firm of Nucingen, 1838), Balzac represents the Jewish banker as at once French and foreign. Indeed, Nucingen’s indeterminate national origin fluctuates between Balzac novels, and sometimes within a single novel, from Alsace to Germany to points farther east, reflecting stereotypes of the rootless wandering Jew. Like the new forces of capital he represents, Nucingen has almost no physical presence: in uncharacteristic fashion, Balzac never provides a visual description of the banker. He renders his difference as a linguistic rather than a corporeal sign. Nucingen speaks with a comic accent that the narrator calls his “awful Polish Jew’s jargon” and that he takes pains to reproduce phonetically. When Nucingen says, “I geev you my vord of ohneer” [Je fus tonne ma barole d’honner],”² the reader can only think how dishonorable are the Jew’s tortured syllables. But Nucingen’s humorous verbal ineptitude signals a deep threat. His phonetic substitutions—f for v, t for d, b for p—indicate a slippage of the sign, a breakdown of stable systems of value that uphold social distinctions of all sorts and that seem to have given way in Balzac’s vision of modernity. We laugh at the Jew at our peril, for his cosmopolitan promiscuity with money, as with language, threatens the integrity of what it means to speak, as to be, French.

Mid-nineteenth-century French novelists from Stendhal to Henri Murger depict Jewish bankers, moneylenders, stockbrokers, and art dealers with varying degrees of suspicion and scorn. But what makes Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes so interesting is the way it represents the agent of anticapitalist vengeance as another Jew. For the prostitute Esther, Vautrin’s weapon, whose dangerous beauty earns her the nickname “the Torpedo” (La Torpille), is none other than the niece of Gobseck, the Dutch Jewish usurer found in other novels in La Comédie Humaine. And whereas Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes depicts the Jewish Nucingen as the emblem of all that is negative about capitalism, it presents Esther’s Jewishness in a much more positive light—as the source of her seductive charm. “Esther came from the homeland of the human race, the land of beauty: her mother was Jewish,”³ the narrator informs us, dwelling on the “oriental” shape of her eyes and her “Arabic” nose.

Balzac was hardly the first writer to divide his images of the Jew along gender lines. From Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (1598) to Walter Scott’s bestselling Ivanhoe (1819), Jewish moneylenders often seem to have a beautiful daughter free from the Semitic sin of greed. Scott’s historical novel, set in twelfth-century England, did much to shape the nineteenth-century’s double image of the scheming male Jew and the beautiful Jewess, but it displaced its racialized representations onto the past. Balzac updates this topos for the present, situating his Jews in the midst of a modernizing economy that inspires contradictory feelings. If Jewishness names the economic flux of the modern era in Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, this signifier is itself unstable: endowed with both positive and negative connotations, it becomes the sign of the novel’s conflicted attitude toward the culture of capitalism it simultaneously criticizes and covets. By associating his beautiful prostitute and his repellent banker through their Jewishness, by showing them to be two sides of the same coin, Balzac expresses the fundamental ambivalence inspired by the capitalist system they both represent.

A similar ambivalence toward Jewishness, and hence toward the modernity the Jew metaphorizes, can be found in the large number of Jewish courtesans or prostitutes filling the bordellos of nineteenth-century French literature. Josépha in Balzac’s Cousine Bette (Cousin Bette, 1846), Rachel in Maupassant’s Mademoiselle Fifi (1882), Vanda in Huysmans’s A rebours (Against Nature, 1884), along with the cadaverous whore in Baudelaire’s poem, “Une nuit que j’étais près d’une affreuse juive [One night as I lay with a frightful Jewess]” (1857), all inspire lust as well loathing. Avatars of actual Jewish demi-mondaines of the mid-nineteenth century—such as Sarah Bernhardt’s mother Julie; Esther “Thérèse” Lachmann, aka La Païva; and Sara “La Louchette,” Baudelaire’s mistress—who capitalized on their Jewishness to seduce men in a complex racial and religious masquerade, these fictional female figures expose the libidinal investments of nineteenth-century French subjects in the deeply threatening social processes of modernity.

Nineteenth-century male writers evidence both intense fear and hatred of the Jew as well as something like the opposite, a longing or attraction. The era’s leading woman writer, George Sand, displays a similar ambivalence toward the Jew and the capitalist modernity the Jew represents, but without the prurient overtones. In her novel Valvèdre (1861), the young male narrator encounters a Jew named Moserwald who embodies in a single figure the contradictory qualities Scott and Balzac split between the genders. Along with the physical markers that identify him immediately as a Jew, Moserwald displays the bifurcated moral qualities of both Esther and Nucingen:

I found myself alone with a stranger, a man in his mid-thirties, rather handsome, and whom, at first sight, I identified as an Israelite. This man seemed to me to be halfway between the extreme distinction and the loathsome vulgarity that characterize among Jews two markedly distinct races or types. He belonged to an intermediary or mixed type. He spoke French rather purely, with an unpleasant German accent, and was by turns slow- and quick-witted. At first, I did not like him. Little by little I found him rather amusing. His originality consisted in physical indolence and an extraordinarily active mind. Soft and fat, he had people wait on him as if he were a prince; curious and gossipy, he asked about everything and did not allow a moment of silence in the conversation.⁴

An impossible combination of antitheses, Moserwald is both attractive and repulsive, brilliant and dull, active and lazy, amusing and disagreeable, attentive and imperious. His combination of two “races” or “types” of Jewishness reflects the novel’s deep ambivalence toward the qualities the Jew embodies, especially extreme materialism. Over the course of the narrative, Moserwald will lose out to the narrator in a competition for a beautiful married woman. But the end of Valvèdre has the Jew bankrolling the illicit passion of the two Christian protagonists. Like Marx and Balzac, Sand shows how the capitalist values associated with Jewishness mediate all social relations in the modern world, even when actual Jews remain on the sidelines.

To be sure, Sand depicts certain of her Christian characters as more corrupt, more obsessed with money, than the Jews. And a respect and even admiration for the Jew’s capacities underlie the very stereotypical representation of the Jew’s overly economic worldview. What defines the French representation of the Jew in the mid-nineteenth century is this duality, a curious mixture of anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism. Note that the two are not opposites: philo-Semitism, particularly when it takes the form of lust for a “belle juive,” often has sadistic overtones in French culture of this period. In the enormously popular opera La Juive (1835), with words by Eugène Scribe and music by the Jewish composer Fromental Halévy, the beautiful Jewess of the title is thrown into a vat of boiling oil to punish her for loving a Christian. Only after her death do we learn that she was not Jewish at all, but the illegitimate daughter of the priest who ordered her execution. Here, as in Balzac’s representation of Esther, who kills herself after granting Nucingen a night of passion, the suffering of the beautiful Jewish woman compensates for the financial successes of her male counterparts. Behind French philo-Semitism we find the same fears of modernity that motivated anti-Semitism.

In Guy de Maupassant’s Mont-Oriol (1886), the narrator seems unsure whether to admire or deplore the Jew’s modernity. “Well, well, that’s very clever, very ingenious, very new, very modern,” exclaims the Jewish capitalist William Andermatt in praise of a doctor’s newfangled methods. “‘Very modern,’ from his lips, was the height of admiration,” Maupassant’s narrator comments sardonically, while recounting how Andermatt transforms a provincial French backwater into a fashionable spa.⁵ But if the narrator doesn’t quite condemn the Jew’s energetic vision for the future, the novel shows how Andermatt’s single-minded love of money drives his aristocratic wife into the arms of a Christian lover. Published the same year as Édouard Drumont’s bestselling screed La France juive (1886), which drew on Toussenel to denounce the takeover of France by Jewish capitalists, Maupassant’s novel heralded an era in which more overt expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment became the norm.

This new anti-Semitism added to the old orientalist clichés about the Jewish “race” an overlay of pseudoscientific theorizing. At a time when native French Jews had become virtually indistinguishable from the general population in their manners of dress, speech, and comportment, the new racism cast their difference as biological and hence intractable. The hysteria surrounding the Dreyfus Affair, in which a Jewish army captain was wrongly accused of treason, divided the nation during the late 1890s, leading to anti-Semitic riots both in metropolitan France and in colonial Algeria, where the large community of Jews faced the hostility of both European colonizers and the local Arab population.

Even at the height of this fin-de-siècle anti-Semitic frenzy, however, the Jews had their defenders in France. Émile Zola’s courageous publication of an open letter, under the banner headline “J’accuse,” attacking the army for framing Dreyfus and covering-up evidence of a real crime committed by a Christian officer named Esterhazy, ultimately led to the writer’s exile and Dreyfus’s exoneration. The Dreyfus Affair pointed to deep wells of anti-Jewish sentiment in the French population but at the same time vindicated the French Republican claim to uphold the universal values of truth and justice. Here, once again, the French struggled to define their identity through the figure of the Jew.

And here once again, the results prove highly ambiguous. For despite his courageous defense of Dreyfus, Zola came close to espousing what some would consider anti-Semitic views. Before the Dreyfus Affair, his writings on Jews reflect the same kind of ambivalence found in Balzac, Sand, and Maupassant. In an essay entitled “Pour les Juifs” (A Plea for the Jews), published in May 1896, a year and a half before his involvement in the Dreyfus Affair, Zola acknowledges that certain Jews may in fact have appropriated an undue share of the nation’s resources through sharp business practices, but he also argues that Christians should study their example and strive to compete with them. “If they [the Jews] have had centuries in which to love money and learn how to make it, then all you need do is follow them on their own ground and, there, learn to take on their own qualities and fight them with their own weapons.”⁶ Whereas Balzac, Sand, and Maupassant lament the Jewish corruption of France, Zola suggests that Christians should beat Jews at their own game. His novel L’argent (Money, 1890), set during the Second Empire (1842–70), is even more equivocal in its presentation of the effects of capitalist modernity. Here, the protagonist Aristide Saccard, a ruthless capitalist in his own right, fights a losing battle to compete with the Jewish banker Gundermann, a stand-in for Rothschild.

Throughout L’argent, Saccard voices vicious attacks against the Jews: “The empire is sold to the Jews, to the dirty Jews,” he rants in one typical passage; “All our money is condemned to fall into their crooked claws.”⁷ Zola’s narrator retains what seems at first a neutral stance, refusing either to sanction Saccard’s diatribes or denounce them. Upon closer inspection, however, the novel subtly reinforces the anti-Semitism of its chief protagonist. Consider, for example, this passage in which the narrator, not Saccard, describes the wealth of the Jewish banker Gundermann:

In less than a century, the monstrous fortune of a billion was born, grew, overflowed in that family. . . . It was almost predestined, aided by a quick intelligence, hard work, a prudent and invincible effort, continually directed toward the same goal . . . it was a pouring of public wealth into the pocket of a single man, always growing; and Gundermann was the true master, the all-powerful king, feared and obeyed in Paris and the world.⁸

We recognize in the narrator’s economics lesson the same obsessions, as well as the same vocabulary, that animated Toussenel in the 1840s and that continued to inspire Drumont in the 1880s: the Jews have appropriated the nation’s resources for their personal gain and have become the new “kings” of the age. Although the narrator claims a certain admiration for the Jew’s hard work and cunning, the use of natural imagery—the Jew’s billion is “born,” pushes forth, multiplies like a poisonous mushroom or a cancer—as well as unnatural imagery—his description of the Jewish fortune as “monstrous”—combine to render the Jew as less than human. Even the excessive feeling of Gundermann for his “innumerable” family smacks of a rat’s protecting its litter.

But this, once again, is not the full story. In L’argent, Zola opposes the predatory practices of Gundermann and his ilk with the activities of another Jewish character, Sigismond Busch, who writes Marxist tracts while wasting away from tuberculosis, as his brother, another grasping Jewish moneylender, looks on tenderly: “despite his hard love of money, his deadly cupidity that saw in the acquisition of wealth the only reason to live, he smiled indulgently at the theories of the revolutionary.”⁹ Here we find the ambivalence toward the Jew that structured the oddly bifurcated representations of Balzac and Sand transformed into the dialectic of historical materialism. The Jew’s obsession with money gives rise to its opposite, the revolution that will bring about the end of capitalism. Revolutionary communism, in this telling, is thus every bit as Jewish as its contrary. Zola’s vision of the Jew is thus once again double, but the banker’s antithesis has changed from a beautiful prostitute into an emaciated intellectual with a hacking cough. Gone is the affective complication of Balzacian realism, the desire for capitalism that dare not speak its name. In its place, Zola’s naturalism provides a theoretical alternative that proves just as threatening and just as foreign—note the German name of Busch mirroring that of Gundermann—as the Jewish bankers who have turned France into their feudal domain.

Representations of the Jew by non-Jewish writers in nineteenth-century France, it should now be clear, tell us more about these writers, and the culture they represent, than about the Jews themselves. Jewish figures in nineteenth-century French literature provide access into the fears and fantasies of a period in the throes of radical social, political, economic, and cultural change. No group experienced these upheavals more intensely, however, than France’s Jews. And here I mean actual Jews, not their phantasmatic doubles. Transformed in a single generation from traditionally orthodox, rural peddlers into urban subjects engaged, in relatively much greater numbers than the general population, in new forms of economic and cultural activity, nineteenth-century French Jews found themselves on modernity’s front lines. Moreover, their status as emblems of modernity, and as test cases for the power of Enlightenment, made them especially self-conscious about the changes they were undergoing. The fiction nineteenth-century French Jews wrote about their experience, long overlooked by scholars of both French and Jewish literature, provides important insights into the mentality of this community as it modernized as well as into the modernization process itself.

To my knowledge, the first French Jew to write fiction about the Jewish experience was a woman named Eugénie Foa (née Rodrigues Henriques, 1796–1853). Descended from two of the most prominent Sephardic families of Bordeaux, Foa was abandoned by her husband and turned to writing to support herself and her two children. Beginning with the publication of her first novel, Le Kidouschim (1830), about the struggle of a young Jewish man to break free of a binding engagement to a cousin he does not love, Foa exploited Jewish manners and mores to carve out a niche for herself in a crowded literary marketplace. Both her sentimental and her historical fictions—destined, in part, for non-Jewish readers—center on obscure Jewish customs and view Jewish life through an exoticizing lens. At the same time, she uses her fiction to frame dilemmas faced by nineteenth-century French Jews, especially those in her elite milieu. In her historical novel La Juive (The Jewess, 1835), the eponymous heroine rebels against her orthodox father by running off with a handsome Christian nobleman. She dies a horrible death but the novel ends with a plea for Jewish assimilation and advocates intermarriage as a way to resolve the problem of Jewish difference.

Dozens of Jewish writers followed Foa’s lead by using fiction to depict Jewish life, and to confront Jewish social dilemmas, in mid-nineteenth-century France. While some of these writers, like Alexandre Weill (1811–99) and Daniel Stauben (pseud. Auguste Widal, 1822–75), attempted to reach a mainstream public, others wrote in specifically Jewish venues and tended to portray their Jewish characters in a less exoticizing manner. Two long-running, rival monthly newspapers, begun in the 1840s—Les archives israélites de France, which advocated Jewish religious reform, and L’univers israélite, which took an orthodox stance—each published a great deal of fiction, all of it confronting specifically Jewish issues and concerns. In these works, fictional narrative serves as a kind of laboratory for experimenting with solutions to the problems of Jewish modernity.

One such writer was Godchaux Weil (1806–78), the author of a dozen short stories published in the 1840s under the pseudonym Ben-Lévi in the Archives israélites. Written entirely in French, with only occasional traces of Hebrew or Yiddish (almost all of which were translated), the articles in the Archives israélites targeted an acculturated, elite readership, eager to modify Jewish religious practice and tradition in order more fully to embrace the opportunities offered to them by France’s revolutionary granting of citizenship. Ben-Lévi’s fiction theorizes the nature of this transition, extolling the advantages of emancipation while exhorting readers to remain loyal to a newly modernized Judaism. His stories stand out from the other articles in the newspaper, which tend to flatter the ethnic pride of the community, by asking his readers to contemplate what they have left behind in their social ascent.

Whereas Foa had employed the Romantic genres of the sentimental and historical novel to make her case for the necessity of Jewish social integration, Ben-Lévi borrows the new literary codes of Balzac that critics at the time were beginning to label “realist” to present his very different vision of Jewish modernity. These codes include detailed attention to material and physical description, plots situated in relation to historical events, and a tendency to view character through an economic lens. In one story from 1841 entitled “Grandeur et décadence d’un taleth polonais” (The Rise and Fall of a Polish Taleth), with what is perhaps a nod to Balzac’s 1837 novel Grandeur et décadence de César Birotteau (The Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau), Ben-Lévi narrates the adventures of a prayer shawl as it gets handed down through three generations of a Parisian Jewish family. The story opens in the 1780s, in the decade preceding emancipation, as the very orthodox Père Jacob, an iron dealer, imports the taleth from Poland for his wedding. Upon his death, the prayer shawl passes to his son Jacobi, an officer in Napoleon’s army, who italianizes his name “as much to give him a Corsican air as to erase any Biblical trace.”¹⁰ Much less religious than his father, Jacobi nevertheless venerates the taleth as a link to family tradition, carrying it with him even into battle.

His son continues the process of assimilation the father has begun: “Today Jacobi is dead, and his son, a handsome young man of twenty, has inherited his fortune and his taleth. This son calls himself Jacoubé in order to dissimulate entirely his Israelite origin.” Jacoubé works as a stockbroker, an agent de change, an appropriate designation for this figure of protean modernity. “He . . . wears polished boots, long hair, a necklace shaped like the paths of the Trianon, an eyepiece that holds itself in place between the brow and the eye.” Jacoubé is of an entirely new species from his father and grandfather. Indeed, he is not a Jew at all, but a lion, as chic young men at the time were known: “No need to add that Jacoubé is only a Jew by birth; that he knows nothing of the Israelite religion, and that he would blush to be seen at the synagogue. If asked about Old Jacob, he responds carelessly ‘What is that?’”¹¹ And what has become of the old prayer shawl in the hands of this fashion plate? The narrator reports having seen just yesterday, at a costume ball at the Opera, a loose woman (une grisette) disguised as a stevedore, wearing an exotic piece of old wool adorned with blue stripes.

Like many of Ben-Lévi’s fictions, the taleth story functions as a kind of modern parable. Unlike Biblical parables, however, the taleth does not have a supernatural significance, but rather stands for the fate of the Jewish religious tradition in modern France. This tradition is shown to be able to survive acculturation (the stage represented by the generation of Jacobi), but not assimilation (the stage of Jacoubé). Also unlike more traditional Jewish tales, but like Balzac, Ben-Lévi describes a disenchanted world, a post-sacred era in which faith and superstition have been evacuated—or rather, like the Polish prayer shawl that winds up on the shoulders of the grisette, recuperated for distinctly non-sacred ends. Both Balzac and Ben-Lévi see modernity as the encroachment of capitalism into realms of experience formerly held in reserve, and both associate this process with Jewishness.

Balzac, as we have seen, imagines the antidote to his Jewish banker as a seductive Jewish prostitute, who tempers his greed with her sensuality. So too does Ben-Lévi show the solution to the problems of modernity to come from within the Jewish tradition. For Ben-Lévi, however, compensation for the materialism of modernity lies in a return to Judaism, to the religion itself, but to a version of it reformed and reimagined for a modern world. In one story, entitled “Les Poissons et les miettes de pain” (The Fish and the Breadcrumbs), a character named Gustave, another assimilated Parisian fop, takes the narrator on a boat trip down the Seine on the eve of Yom Kippur. They see some Jews on the riverbank throwing bits of bread into the water, performing the traditional Jewish custom of tachlich—symbolically emptying their pockets of sin in preparation for the Day of Atonement. Gustave scoffs at the ritual as a useless superstition, pretending that the fish he has caught have become peevish, snobbish, and vulgar by ingesting the bread of the Jews. Just then, however, he sees a widow on the far bank comfort her young son by throwing bread into the water. The cynical Gustave is chastened by this vision, coming to acknowledge the power of ritual to express deep human longings and to recognize the value of religion as a comfort for human misery. Old rituals take on new significance in this story, which shows the potential of a reformed Judaism to reenchant modernity.

Like Balzac, Ben-Lévi shows how modern capitalism distorts human relations, even between family members or lovers, and leads to a kind of cynicism and materialism antithetical to humanist values. But whereas Balzac’s characters come to this realization through the course of his narratives, losing their illusions in the process, Ben-Lévi traces an opposite itinerary, from cynicism to something resembling faith. “The Fish and the Breadcrumbs,” like many of Ben-Lévi’s stories, might be called “Illusions found.” The spiritual awakening of his characters has little to do with the supernatural or with God as such, but rather with a renewed understanding of the ethical bonds linking human beings in spite of the pressures of capitalist modernity.

Ben-Lévi’s fellow Jewish fiction writers experimented with different solutions to the problem of how to be a Jew in modern France. If Eugénie Foa called for intermarriage, and Ben-Lévi advocated a vision of Reform Judaism purged of its archaic legal restrictions and reduced to a primary humanistic ethics, their contemporaries imagined alternate answers to similar questions. Some insisted on a return to orthodoxy, while others saw the possibility for a secular Jewish identity focused on nostalgia for a lost past. Taken together, these forgotten writers emerge from the archive to shed a new light on the question of minority identity, and minority literature, in nineteenth-century France. They reveal that the assertion of ethnic and religious particularity was not seen as incompatible with the demands of French citizenship. On the contrary, French Jewish writers celebrated their Judaism in the public sphere, even attempting to forge an alternate universalism in the form of the Jewish particular. The first minority or ethnic fiction in French, their writing provides an important model for thinking through the social and cultural dilemmas facing a pluralistic liberal democracy.

These dilemmas come into especially sharp focus in the fiction of Marcel Proust, who, I would suggest by way of conclusion, perpetuates the legacy of the nineteenth-century French Jewish writers I have just described. I use the term “legacy” in part literally because Proust happens to be the great-nephew of Ben-Lévi—the grandson of his half-brother, Nathé Weil. But the link between the writers goes beyond blood. Though only half-Jewish and baptized a Catholic, Proust provides one of the most compelling literary portraits of what it means to be a modern Jew in his multivolume novel A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913–27). Proust sets this exploration of Judaism in a larger philosophical context: along with aristocrats and homosexuals, Jews serve Proust as heuristic tools for examining the nature of identity formation in modern society. But along with these universal lessons, Proust provides particular ones as well, exploring issues of vital import to the French Jewish community, such as the psychic cost of assimilation and the impact of anti-Semitism.

Though Proust’s narrator shares many qualities with the author, Jewishness is not one of them. But the Christian narrator finds himself surrounded by Jews. Some of them reflect nineteenth-century Jewish stereotypes: Rachel, a prostitute and actress, is a late incarnation of the Romantic “belle Juive,” whose name calls to mind the heroine of the opera La Juive. Indeed, in homage to that opera’s most famous aria, the narrator refers to her as “Rachel, when from the Lord [Rachel, quand du seigneur].” Here Proust wittily invokes a stereotype in order to satirize it. When the narrator first encounters Rachel in a brothel, the madam tries to tempt him by describing her as a Jewess: “She’s Jewish [C’est une Juive!]. How about that? (It was doubtless for this reason that she called her Rachel.) And with an inane affectation of excitement which she hoped would prove contagious, and which ended in a hoarse gurgle, almost of sensual satisfaction: ‘Think of that, my boy, a Jewess! Wouldn’t that be thrilling? Rrrr!”¹² While his friend, the aristocratic Robert de Saint-Loup, falls for Rachel’s Jewish masquerade, the narrator does not. His refusal to become aroused signals an end to the long tradition of viewing the Jewess as modernity’s erotic plaything.

Two more central characters—Charles Swann and Albert Bloch—offer Proust an even greater opportunity to examine the nature of Semitic stereotyping, as well as to explore the vicissitudes of Jewish identity. Swann is the extremely cultivated son of the narrator’s grandfather’s close friend, a stockbroker (agent de change), like Ben-Lévi’s Jacoubé. At the start of the novel, Swann has achieved a seemingly effortless assimilation into the very highest realm of French society, becoming “one of the most distinguished members of the Jockey Club, a particular friend of the comte de Paris and the Prince of Wales.”¹³ An art historian, he hides his erudition behind a veil of good taste and impeccable manners. The narrator’s schoolmate Bloch, on the other hand, is a pretentious know-it-all from a family of uncouth Jewish parvenus. The contrast with Swann is explicit.

In fact, it is only as an aside in the narrator’s description of Bloch’s reception by his family that we learn of Swann’s Jewishness: “It is true that my grandfather made out that, whenever I formed a strong attachment to any one of my friends and brought him home with me, that friend was invariably a Jew; to which he would not have objected on principle—indeed his own friend Swann was of Jewish extraction [même son ami Swann était d’origine juive]—had he not found that the Jews whom I chose as friends were not usually of the best type.”¹⁴ We are made to understand that Swann—merely “of Jewish origin,” elsewhere referred to as the son and grandson of converts, with a Protestant grandmother—is the right kind of Jew. Bloch, on the other hand, whose Jewishness is undiluted, furnishes a constant source of mirth and scorn. This animosity derives not from his religious beliefs, which are never at issue, but from his manners—a curious mixture of over-refinement and vulgarity, which the novel encourages us to see as a product of his Jewishness.

Over the course of the novel, Swann and Bloch change in ways that mark two approaches to Jewish identity seemingly as opposite as the two walks the narrator takes through the village of Combray. Bloch endeavors to distance himself from Judaism by changing his name and modifying his appearance in order to penetrate more completely into aristocratic circles that at first only tolerate him out of a “taste for the oriental.” As Jacques du Rozier, he deploys a sense of “English fashion” to mask his Semitic origins: combing his curly hair straight, and affecting a monocle, he manages to transform his physiognomy. Even his telltale nose assumes less threatening proportions: “And thanks to the way in which he brushed his hair, to the suppression of his moustache, to the elegance of his whole figure—thanks, that is to say, to his determination—his Jewish nose was now scarcely more visible than is the deformity of a hunchbacked woman who skillfully arranges her appearance.” But no amount of costuming can alter his fundamental Jewishness. As numerous scholars have pointed out, even his ill-chosen pseudoaristocratic name calls to mind the rue des Rosiers, the center of Paris’s most Jewish neighborhood. At the end of the novel he appears in an aristocratic salon, nervous as an “old Shylock” preparing to go onstage.

Swann, on the other hand, comes to reidentify as a Jew in response to the anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus Affair and to his own approaching death. “Having come to the premature term of his life, like a weary animal that is being tormented, he cried out against these persecutions and was returning to the spiritual fold of his fathers.” If Bloch represents a later incarnation of Ben-Lévi’s Jacoubé, the dandy who gives his grandfather’s prayer shawl to a grisette, then Swann is Gustave, the fisherman who rediscovers the meaning of Jewish ritual on Yom Kippur. For Proust, however, the vicissitudes of Jewish identity prove more complicated than for his great-uncle. For while there is something noble in Swann’s rediscovery of his Jewishness, precisely because it requires him to reject the attractive aristocratic world, there is also something limiting. Only able to view the world through the optic of Dreyfus and the Jews, Swann at the end of the novel comes to see anti-Semitism everywhere and misjudges others as a result. “Swann’s Dreyfusism had brought out in him an extraordinary naivety,”¹⁵ the narrator comments wistfully.

The narrator presents the rediscovery of Swann’s Semitism not only as a religious or political reawakening but also as a racial reversion. If Bloch’s nose becomes less Jewish with age, Swann’s olfactory organ comes to resemble that of “an old Hebrew.” “How marvellous the power of the race,” Proust’s narrator comments about Bloch’s Jewishness, “which from the depths of the ages thrusts forward even into modern Paris.”¹⁶ Neither Bloch nor Swann can escape his Jewishness. Their seemingly diverse routes converge in Proust’s theory of race, much as the two paths of Combray ultimately come together. But biology is not ultimately destiny for Proust. If Jewishness is inescapable, it is not monolithic. Their nearly opposite attitudes toward their Jewish identity, one comic and the other tragic, reflect the relative autonomy of the individual and the fluidity of identity in spite of determining influences such as heredity and class.

To my knowledge, Proust never acknowledged his literary ancestor, Ben-Lévi, but their fictional projects offer an instructive comparison. Certainly their literary ambitions could not have been more different: Ben-Lévi wrote a series of modest short stories in a Jewish newspaper; Proust’s novel strives for monumentality and universality. And writing seventy years apart, they witness opposite ends of the history of French Jewish assimilation. But like his great-uncle, Proust expresses a deep preoccupation with the effects of new social and economic transformations on Jewish identity. Both writers call the very category of “Jewish identity” into question in their exploration of the diverse ways of being Jewish in modern France, revealing the range of options available to those who choose to identify or who are identified by others as Jews. Both writers, moreover, leave us with a sense that this struggle over Jewishness tells us something vital about what it means to be modern. And in their depiction of the dilemmas faced by Jewish characters as they attempt to enter a society that views them with ambivalence, both writers reveal that Jewishness tells us something equally vital about what it means to be French.