lost paws:

Whenever I read a work of fiction written before the 1960s or so, I can normally be confident, unless the author in question is a particularly sensitive soul, that given an opportunity to address the question of difference (cultural or otherwise), the author will doubtless express an opinion that I’ll find unsettling or at the worst irredeemably prejudiced. Such is the case with Proust, and after reading a number of passages concerning Marcel’s impression in regards to his Jewish friend Bloch and the Dreyfus Affair, I thought it wise to get out the critical magnifying glass and figure out just what was going on.

The contemporary discourse on culture looks something like this to me: if you grew up in a cosmopolitan sort of environment in the last thirty years or so, you probably learned that when speaking in a group composed of people of different cultural traditions, there were certain rules that should be recognized around touchy issues like race, religion, etc... On the surface it’s not much more than propriety (that’s assuming that more than one person from this group will go home and start vomiting the most loathsome language that their discretion prevented them from uttering in a group setting), but it’s also meta-discursive, a way for people who are interested in intelligently discussing the problems of race, religion and culture to address the question of “limits of polite speech” and so on and so forth.

So I’m assuming, that a person of Proust’s sensibility and intellect, were he writing today, would have no problem understanding this manner of speaking – specifically, that one need not profess to be “anti-Semitic” in order to be labeled as such. Alas, society was much less sensitive back then. The scandal that was the Dreyfus Affair split France in two - Dreyfusards, and Anti-Dreyfusards. Consequently, in certain (royalist) circles anti-Semitism came into fashion like the chrysanthemum or the style of Louis XV, and those anti-Semites who might not have vocalized their opinions in the past (or simply had no opinion to vocalize), started crawling out of the woodwork like cockroaches.

That said, it seems to me that the word “anti-Semite” in fin-de-siecle Paris, in the manner that Proust used it at least, applied to the class of anti-Dreyfusards who believed that the evidence of Dreyfus’ guilt lay in the fact that he was Jewish. So that leads me, still hungry for answers, back to the beginning -- how do we deal with Proust’s identity and his portrayal of Jews? I did some reading from secondary-sources on anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair in relation to Proust and instead of unpacking anything for me, they just made my head hurt… A short biography is in order: Proust’s mother, Jeanne Clemence Weil, was Jewish, so by matrilineal descent Proust, too, but he was raised Catholic, and ultimately given a catholic burial, though he retained extremely strong ties to his mother and her family throughout his whole of his life and never denied his Jewish heritage. Politically, he was a (somewhat) vocal supporter of Alfred Dreyfus during the trial (he convinced Anatole Frank to come out publicly in support of Dreyfus), but still moved in aristocratic circles and had more than one friend who was of the extremely anti-Semitic variety.

Though, I don’t feel capable of answering the question of Proust’s feelings about his Jewish Identity, I found a good passage by Ruth Wisse in The Modern Jewish Canon:

“Some critics consider Proust a Jewish writer despite the fact that he was baptized a Catholic… Proust believed that a work of art is not the creation of a single artist but is drawn from the accumulation of memories that reach far back beyond his own life… Proust’s Jewish ancestors assuredly formed part of that accumulated past, but ancestry is quite different from animate life. And though Proust derives from the Jews and shows sympathy with their condition, he is at pains in his writing to show that he does not share their fate… it is surely not the harshness of description that excludes Proust from a Jewish canon, for one can find much harsher characterizations… in Yiddish and Hebrew literature, but simply that his first person narrator emphasizes his own exclusion…”

So that’s a start… there’s also the issue of Swann, who Beckett described as Proust’s double, but that’s for another day.