1 the Jewish Capital of Europe: Literary Representation from Balzac
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Jewish Capital of Europe: Literary Representation from Balzac to Proust of the Societal Place and Architectural Space of Jews in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Belle Époque Christina Leah Sztajnkrycer A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2016 Reading Committee: Meredith Clausen, Chair Richard Watts Galya Diment Program Authorized to Offer Degree: French and Italian Studies 1 © Copyright 2016 Christina Leah Sztajnkrycer 2 University of Washington Abstract The Jewish Capital of Europe: Literary Representation from Balzac to Proust of the Societal Place and Architectural Space of Jews in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Belle Époque Christina Leah Sztajnkrycer Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Meredith Clausen Architectural History Nineteenth-century France experienced a literary phenomenon of Jewish characters. Represented in greater proportion than their actual population, they were situated within the modernizing city, sometimes as agents of modernity. Creating a palimpsest of literature, history, society, and architecture, this dissertation analyzes the changing representation of Jewish characters within the transforming urban context. The Jewish figures portrayed by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Proust evolve between 1830 and 1914, from the stereotypical Shylock type to highly modern, elite aesthetes. Becoming ever more modern, the Jewish characters are presented as participating in the modernization of the urban space, of industry and banking, of arts and society. While the city metamorphosed into a capital of modernity, the discourse concerning Jews became increasingly negative, developing from an ancient cultural aversion to the Jewish religion to the modern expression of racial antipathy, i.e. anti-Semitism. The places in Paris in which these characters are found correspond to the rapid assimilation of the Jewish population in the city and reveal an adverse reaction of non-Jewish Parisians to the transformation of the capital and to the presence of a select but powerful Jewish elite. In this dissertation, I pursue an interdisciplinary layering of texts on literary, social, and architectural history. In the literary scholarship, I look at Jewish characters in French fiction. In the historical and sociological studies of 3 the Parisian Jewish population I focus on the representation, expression, and existence of Jews in Paris. I use texts on the architectural history of the city to follow the urban transformation across the nineteenth century. How Balzac, Baudelaire, the Goncourts, Zola, Maupassant, and Proust portray Jewish characters functions to varying degrees of success as an indicator of urban transformation. While urban and architectural texts give no indication of the Jewish involvement in the factual metamorphosis of the city, nineteenth-century French fiction reveals the presence and participation of Jews in Paris in the massive remaking of the city to becoming a pole of attraction for European Jewry. 4 The Jewish Capital of Europe: Literary Representation from Balzac to Proust of the Societal Place and Architectural Space of Jews in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Belle Époque1 I. Dissertation Introduction: Over approximately the last decade, the field of Jewish studies has evolved to include new and innovative explorations of the place and the role of Jews in the development of modern society. Paul Lerner, a cultural historian of German Jews, reveals this new trend in Jewish studies, “in recent years the taboos have fallen away, and scholars have been vigorously exploring the role of economic activities in a range of areas, including Jewish emancipation, Jewish-gentile relations, and Jewish cultural expressions… Parallel to the reemergence of Jewish economic history, a new subfield of Jewish cultural history has recently arisen, consisting of works that assay the meaning and operation of “Jewishness” in particular cultural contexts” (Lerner 16). In Europe in particular, scholarship of the social and cultural history of developing metropolitan settings has shed light on the Jewish presence and participation in the movement towards social, economic, industrial and architectural modernity. Although Lerner focuses on German Jewry, his comments on Jewishness and modernity are also pertinent to French Jewry, “Werner Sombart, one of the period’s most prominent economic thinkers, argued that Jews demonstrated a unique, historically and racially determined aptitude for commercial capitalism and were thus the bearers of economic modernity” (Lerner 5). In this dissertation, I argue that the evolution in the representation of Jewish identity in nineteenth-century French literature, written in and about Paris, from the beginning of the July Monarchy to the end of the Belle Époque reveals the participation of Jewish figures in the modernization of the 1 Paris has never been called “The Jewish Capital of Europe” by any scholar; however, in this dissertation, I am proposing this idea as a new way of envisioning nineteenth-century Paris as the city in which the Jews of Europe enjoyed the most phenomenal rate of financial, social, and political success. The 1790 and 1791 decisions to grant citizenship and full and equal rights to the Jews of France allowed French Jews to become an integral part of French society. This aspect of France attracted Jewish families and individuals from across Europe all seeking the greater freedom and improved lifestyle that emancipation afforded French Jews. The nature of this historical situation has led me to the conclusion that Paris, pre-Dreyfus Affair, was the ideal location for a thriving and diverse Jewish population. 5 French capital. This dissertation fits into the growing field of interdisciplinary Jewish Studies by uniting literature, literary scholarship, social and historical studies, and architectural and urban texts to analyze the involvement of the Jewish population in Paris in the rapidly changing political, social, industrial, and architectural environment. The use of Jewish characters was not a new occurrence in nineteenth-century French fiction. The way in which authors came to employ Jewish characters was, however, entirely novel. Jewish characters had previously been restricted to two clichés, the avaricious and hideous Jewish moneylender of an advanced and uncertain age and his beautiful Jewish daughter, finding their most finalized realization in Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, published in 1820. Motivated by the surrounding culture of change, nineteenth-century French authors did not allow themselves to be pigeonholed by age-old stereotypes. The new Jewish characters of nineteenth-century French fiction no longer corresponded to the two limited typecasts. Instead, they were greatly inspired by the increasingly visible Jewish population following the 1791 revolutionary decision to emancipate the Jews of France by granting them French citizenship and allowing them to benefit from all the same rights as their French neighbors of Catholic or Protestant religious identity. Jewish characters had thus evolved into a reflection of real changes occurring in France, with Paris as the epicenter. Taking into consideration questions concerning the actual urban presence of the Parisian Jewish community—where they lived, how they lived, how their Jewish identity was expressed, how this identity evolved with the changing urban and social context, where they moved within the city, in what type of housing they lived, which styles of architecture did they prefer—this dissertation seeks to reveal how the underlying cultural discontent and social unrest experienced by Parisians in the midst of the rapidly changing political, social, economic, cultural, and architectural context that defined Paris over the long nineteenth century came to be expressed in the representation of Jewish characters in novels and poetry. Both the accuracy and inaccuracy of literary representations of Jewish characters uncovers shifts in appreciation of the French public for the Jewish population, itself increasing and transforming with the evolution of the city 6 and society. The literary representation of the place and space of Jews in the city became a favored but increasingly fraught subject in French literature from the 1830s to the 1890s. The more rapidly and intensely Paris changed on an architectural, industrial, societal, and political level, the more negative the representations of Jewish characters became. The involvement of Jewish individuals and institutions in the modernization and urban metamorphosis of Paris, beginning with the first railway in 1837 and continuing with the architectural renovation and expansion of the city during the Second Empire, gave Jews in Paris a vital and very visible role in the transformation of the French capital. The role of Jewish individuals in the transformation of Paris greatly influenced how society considered the presence and participation in everyday Parisian life, culture, and traditions of the Jewish population. By the Third Republic, anti-Semitism had flourished and popular dissatisfaction over the excessive expenditures of the Second Empire, encouraged by rampant financial speculation, rapid industrial advances, and rising architectural extravagance, led the Parisian population to become suspicious of the ambitions of their Jewish neighbors. As the Jewish figure came to be