How to Be a French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant
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City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2016 How to Be a French Jew: Proust, Lazare, Glissant Paul J. Fadoul The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1603 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] HOW TO BE A FRENCH JEW: PROUST, LAZARE, GLISSANT by Paul Joseph Fadoul A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in French in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in French, The City University of New York 2016 ii Copyright 2016 Paul Joseph Fadoul All Rights Reserved iii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in French to satisfy the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Evelyne Ender 9 Sept. 2016 _____________________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Julia Przybos 9 Sept. 2016 _____________________________________ Date Executive Officer ___________________________________ Antoinette Blum ___________________________________ Marlene Barsoum ___________________________________ Supervisory Committee The City University of New York iv Abstract HOW TO BE A FRENCH JEW: PROUST, LAZARE, GLISSANT by Paul Joseph Fadoul Adviser: Evelyne Ender In my dissertation I use Auerbach's insights developed in his Mimesis to demonstrate that in A la recherche, Proust captures the political and racial concerns of his times, proposing as a solution a heterogeneous French society where cultural, ethnic, and religious groups live together in mutual respect and understanding. In his novel, Proust echoes ideas developed by Bernard Lazare in Le Nationalisme Juif (1897) as well as in the literary output of the first French Jewish Renaissance (early1900‟s to the mid1930‟s). These authors responded to the portentous mix of Nationalist and anti-Semitic politics by urging the creation of a separate French Jewish identity. This identity construction project was in contradiction with the policy of assimilation that French Jews had adhered to since their emancipation in 1791. I argue that Proust experiments with three models of Jewishness, illustrating in his fiction that these models are not stable but fluid. Through his representation of the actress Rachel, Albert Bloch, and Charles Swann, who becomes a Dreyfusard and a leader of the Jewish community, Proust anticipates the notions of difference and relation that have been developed by the Martiniquais Edouard Glissant, a major thinker of difference. Proust's portrayal of a Jewish community in making whose consciousness enables its being in relation with all other groups in France adumbrates the works of contemporary French Jewish writers. Similarly, in their writings about the Jewish experience, Albert Memmi, Helene Cixous and Jacques Derrida portray Jews aware of their Jewishness who desire to know other communities and, in Glissant‟s terms, "to live Relation". v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I truly enjoyed writing my dissertation because of Dr. Evelyne Ender, my professor for the first semester, who has directed this work for the last eight years. I owe her many thanks for sharing her scholarship, for expertly directing the work, for reading and correcting numerous drafts but, most of all, for realizing the potential of what I thought was a topic but was only the embryo of one. Dr. Ender immediately grasped all that could be done with my simple idea, all its possibilities in all its ramifications. She helped me make the dissertation into a tribute to Edouard Glissant because words cannot do him credit. I am also indebted to Dr. Antoinette Blum for bringing me into the program, providing me with the means to succeed, and for contributing her time and knowledge. And many thanks to Dr. Marlene Barsoum who, I am confident, noticed the number of ideas in the dissertation that come from her teaching. In addition, her suggestions and annotations proved crucial during the last revision. Special words for our current Executive Officer, Dr. Julia Przybos, whose advice, encouragement and availability are above and beyond the call of duty and the same can be applied to our former E.O., Dr. Peter Consenstein. To Dr. Sautman, thank you for all that you have brought and continue to bring to all of us through all that you do for the Department and the Henry Peyre Institute. Dr. Anny Bakalian, and the Middle Eastern Center, provided me much support and assistance throughout my time at the Graduate Center as did Dr. Andrew Jones, Dr. Karen Sullivan and Dr. Joseph Sungolowsky who led me to consider Proust and his „Jewish community‟. The list is incomplete unless I mention Dr. Domna Stanton and André Aciman. Of course, my most heartfelt gratitude goes to my father, who would have been very proud of this achievement, to my mother Abilia Fadoul, my sister Nadia, her husband Spyros, Lea, for their support and patience throughout the years, especially my nephew Ari who helped clarify sentences, and to my brother Peter and his family. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ……………………………………………………………………………… iv Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………… v Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………….. vi Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….. 1 1. Chapter One: Bernard Lazare and Marcel Proust and the French Jews in History 9 2. Chapter Two: Rachel, the Transgressor of Race in A la recherche…………….. 61 3. Chapter Three: The Silencing of the „Other‟ or Albert Bloch in A la recherche … 122 4. Chapter Four: Charles Swann or the Journey from Inclusion to Relation ………. 184 Conclusion: The Different Literary Groups of France in „Relation‟………………… 232 Appendix: Pictures of hysteric patients at „la Salpêtrière‟ Hospital …………………. 255 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………... 257 Introduction On August 10, 2007, a family filled the benches arranged in rows, on either side of a casket set in the open air on the Ile Saint-Louis, the historic heart of Paris. Among the party, in a yarmulke and well-cut suit, a solemn adolescent holds the bag of soil that was brought in from the Holy Land, from the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. The young man carefully proceeds to pour the whitish dust into the bowl that was placed on the coffin. Once he is done, members of the assistance arise and gather about their departed friend and relative to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. The oration over, in all solemnity, the body is carried across the parvis to the Temple, to the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris that soars against an unseasonably gloomy Parisian sky. In step with the great organ, the pallbearers make their way into the Church where the President of France, former first lady Bernadette Chirac, French and foreign dignitaries, seventy bishops, five-hundred priests, representatives of the Orthodox Church, of Islam, of Judaism and countless guests and faithful have assembled to await the remains of Jean- Marie Aaron Lustiger, his Eminence, the Cardinal, the Prince of the Church, the Archbishop of Paris, the Bishop of Orleans, the parish priest, the convert, the Jew. As can be expected, it was not long before Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger‟s unusual career and life inspired a movie. In 2013, the French-German TV station produced the Lustiger biopic that coined his popular pseudonyms for French and English speakers. Lustiger is now also known by the title of the biographical movie “The Jewish Cardinal” in the English translation but “Le Métis de Dieu”, or “God‟s Hybrid”, in the original version. The film‟s English name apposes „Jewish‟ and „Cardinal‟ to render the two different spiritual aspects of Lustiger who maintained that he was a Jew and a French prelate. The French title, however, makes the man more universal since it captures his duality and insists on a mixed, unspecified, ethnic heritage to 1 transcend the Judaic/Catholic or „Aryan/Semite‟ oppositions. While „Jewish Cardinal‟ underlines the religious for an AmeFrican audience, „Métis de Dieu‟ targets a secularized French public with a substantial portion that belongs to non-European or African, Asian and Middle- Eastern ethnicities. “Métis” traditionally means someone of mixed racial heritage but it also means one who has two cultures, two identities in modern parlance. The French title communicates that Cardinal Lustiger had both French and Jewish cultures, identities, ethnicities. Referencing the presence of a Jewish culture, ethnicity and consciousness in France gauges the country‟s progress toward or regression from racial tolerance. It was in relation to Jews that France passionately debated cultural, ethnic and identity notions to decide the place or non-place of the „non-European‟ within the nation at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth- century. In spite of the impassioned debate, or because of it, aside of Cardinal Lustiger, there is but one other famous account of the French Church and State coming together to reward an embodiment of métissage or „hybridity‟, an acknowledged symbol of difference. This one is fictional, and takes the form of an anecdote located in A la recherche du temps perdu, Marcel Proust‟s seven-volume novel that recreates the France of the 1880s to the early-1920s. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was indeed among those who considered how the „racially‟ different could achieve full inclusion in French society at the dawn of the twentieth-century and the scene of Charles Swann‟s burial in, Sodome et Gomorrhe, attests to this vision. Marcel Proust situates the scene around the case of Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1894- 1906) who had been unjustly convicted of being a traitor. His use of the Dreyfus tragedy demonstrates his interest and awareness of the situation of France‟s „non-Europeans‟. In the book, Charles Swann is a leader of the movement that eventually obliges the aligned forces of the French military, government and Church to revise Dreyfus‟ wrongful trial and conviction.