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20A - Antisemitism in Modern Literature and Theater

French Literature

from Part III - The Modern Era

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2022

By
Maurice Samuels
Edited by
Steven Katz
Steven Katz
Affiliation:
Boston University
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Summary

This chapter traces the way that Jews have been depicted in French literature from the 18th century to the present, including writers such as Voltaire, Balzac, Céline, and Proust. It examines both negative (antisemitic) and positive (philosemitic) representations of Jews, arguing that the ambivalence surrounding the figure of the Jew reflects a larger ambivalence toward the various ideas that Jews represent.

Keywords

French stereotypesJewish self-hatredJews in cinema
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Antisemitism , pp. 358 - 366
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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References

Further Reading

Avni, O., “Patrick Modiano: A French Jew?,” Yale French Studies 85 (1994), 227–247. This short article treats the subject of Jewishness in Modiano’s La place de l’étoile.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Birnbaum, P., The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898 (Chicago, IL, 1998). This book provides a historical overview of French antisemitism at the time of the Dreyfus Affair and devotes attention to writers, including Drumont.Google Scholar
Carroll, D., French Literary Fascism: Nationalism, Anti-Semitism, and the Ideology of Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1995). An analysis of the link between fascism and aesthetics, with analysis of French antisemitic writers from the late 19th century through World War II, including Drumont and Céline.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freedman, J., “Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” in Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, ed. Boyarin, Daniel, Itzkovitz, Daniel, and Pellegrini, Ann (New York, 2003), 334–364. This essay interrogates the complexity of Jewish identity in the work of Marcel Proust.Google Scholar
Hertzberg, A., The French Enlightenment and the Jews (New York, 1968). A classic exploration of the place of antisemitism in the work of Enlightment philosophers such as Voltaire.Google Scholar
Judaken, J., John-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-Antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Lincoln, NE, 2009). A thorough study of Sartre’s approach to Jews and Jewishness, including his controversial Antisemite and Jew.Google Scholar
Kaplan, A., Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, MN, 1986). One of the first works to explore how fascist ideology was manifested in mid-20th-century French culture.Google Scholar
Rousso, H., The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France since 1944 (Cambridge, MA, 1994). This book investigates the postwar French obsession with the period of the Nazi Occupation and the attempt to come to terms with the legacy of French complicity in the deportation of the Jews by writers and filmmakers.Google Scholar
Samuels, M., “Metaphors of Modernity: Prostitutes, Bankers, and Other Jews in Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes,” Romanic Review 97.2 (March 2006), 169–184. An analysis of Balzac’s ambivalent treatment of Jews as an expression of his ambivalence toward the culture of capitalism more generally.Google Scholar
Samuels, M., The Right to Difference: French Universalism and the Jews (Chicago, IL, 2016). A study of the way that French writers from the Revolution to the present have used the Jews to explore the question of universalism, with sections on Zola, Renoir, Sartre, and Modiano.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Suleiman, S. R., “The Jew in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive: An Exercise in Historical Reading,” in The Jew in the Text: Modernity and the Construction of Identity, ed. Nochlin, Linda and Garb, Tamar (New York, 1995), 201–218. This essay was one of the first to point to the troubling antisemitic residue in Sartre’s supposedly anti-antisemitic defense of Jews after World War II.Google Scholar
Suleiman, S. R., The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France (New Haven, CT, 2016). A judicious treatment of Némirovsky’s complex relation to her Jewish identity.Google Scholar

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