Belated Jewish Modernism in France: Georges Perec's Cult of Memory

Abstract

Belated Jewish Modernism in France:Georges Perec’s Cult of Memory Derek Schilling (bio) I. Unlike other European nations to have embraced the cult of the new in the first decades of the twentieth century, France appears to have failed to produce a significant strain of Jewish literary modernism. Excepting the admittedly complicated cases of Proust, caught between two religions and two centuries,1 and of proto-surrealist Max Jacob (Le Cornet à dés, 1917), himself a vocal convert to Roman Catholicism, it may not even have produced a single Jewish modernist writer of stature, if "modernism" is taken narrowly as an aesthetic of rupture whose proper moment falls between the turn of the century and the second postwar. On first appraisal, this failure may appear as an historical accident, a missed rendez-vous that to all intents and purposes should have taken place. Given the sizable population of autochtonous Jews in metropolitan France during the second half of the nineteenth century, given too the momentous waves of westward immigration that from 1881 to 1925 brought more than one hundred thousand Ashkenazi to the bustling urban centers of Paris, Lyons, Marseilles, and Strasbourg (French from 1919),2 one might surmise that the country was ripe for a literary culture that was both distinctively Jewish and modernist. In the domain of painting, this promise had materialized around Amedeo Modigliani, Jacques Lipschitz, Marc Chagall, and Chaïm Soutine, who arrived between 1905 and 1912 and found themselves grouped under the banner of "l'École juive";3 a generation later, German Jewish intellectuals fleeing fascism and committed to ideology critique, among them Walter Benjamin, [End Page 729] would too take up residence in the City of Light, if only en route for the Americas. But the case of Jewish writers in France was, for political and linguistic reasons, fraught with particular ambiguity. To presume on demographic grounds alone that a Jewish literary modernism should have emerged as France spawned such bold iterations of the new as cubism, fauvism, simultaneism, or Surrealism, is to forget the extent to which Republican ideology dictated what it meant to be French and Jewish in the first place. As historians like Michael Marrus, Pierre Birnbaum, and Esther Benbassa have shown, during the nineteenth century a confessional model of Franco-Judaism took hold in France that fostered cultural integration by relegating ritual (other than Catholic) to the furthest reaches of the private sphere. In a climate where strictly observant Jews were suspected of allegiance to a Nation and a Law other than those of the one and indivisible Republic, only those who accepted Judaism as a localized structure of belief in a larger secular context were in position to placate the Gentile majority. The embrace of state-run secular education and a de-emphasis on religious study and prayer could be parlayed into symbolic and, by extension, economic capital, and if conversion was by no means expected of young Jewish males wishing to join the ranks of the national administration, army, or university, it was not always the least desirable course of action given the disaffection from the sacred many already felt. For spiritual leaders, the question was at root one of assuring pacific coexistence from a weak minority position. Members of the Consistoire, created by Napoleon I in 1808 to mediate between French Jews and the state, had long believed their constituents' interests to be congruent with, if not identical to, those of the Republic, namely the promotion of equality before the law, tolerance with respect to creed, and freedom of the press.4 This community of interest was thrown into sharp relief by the resurgence of rural and urban anti-Semitism in the 1880s and 1890s and especially the protracted Dreyfus Affair of 1894–1906, the effect of which was to divide France into two camps and to fuel anti-Semitic sentiment even as justice was rendered.5 In a show of political realism, French rabbis greeted the principle of laïcité or state secularism, written into law in 1905, as the best available guarantee of minority religious rights. After all, under three earlier political regimes since the 1789 Revolution and the 1791 emancipation of French Jews...