De Shylock À Cinoc: Essai Sur Les Judaïsmes Apocryphes by Philippe Zard

Abstract

Reviewed by: De Shylock À Cinoc: Essai Sur Les Judaïsmes Apocryphes by Philippe Zard Valérie Bénéjam (bio) De Shylock À Cinoc: Essai Sur Les Judaïsmes Apocryphes, by Philippe Zard. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2018. 617 pp. $93.00 cloth, £24.99 paper, €44.00 cloth. Has there not been enough consideration of the Jewish question in Ulysses? However fascinating Joyce's choice of a Jew for his modernist embodiment of the canonical European hero at a time when the rest of the continent was progressively engulfed in the morass of anti-Semitism, Joyceans may be wondering whether we need yet another evaluation of Jewishness and of the figure of the Jew in Joyce's masterpiece. So much has already been written on the subject that a non-Joycean could hardly be expected to bring anything new to the debates.1 I believe, however, that Philippe Zard may truly have become a Joycean in the process of writing on Ulysses. His research has been thorough, and his bibliography is impeccable.2 Furthermore, the added value of his contribution to Joyce studies paradoxically lies in the fact that it does not come from a Joyce specialist, but from a "Joycien de rencontre," as Zard terms himself (129 n2),3 and that it concerns only one chapter in his study, albeit—like other striking chapters in other good books we know—it is the longest one, and it is firmly poised in the middle of the book. The central position of the chapter reflects the core position of Ulysses in Zard's argument: its book's subtitle, An Essay on Apocryphal Judaisms, is inspired by Joyce's use of the word "anapocryphal" in "Ithaca" (U 17.720), conveying the relation of continuity and rupture in the Jewish experience that is at the heart of Zard's study as a whole. Zard's project is a wide-ranging exploration of the representation of the Jew in European literature, a both diachronic and comparative study that covers a vast span from William Shakespeare and the Renaissance to contemporary writers like Albert Cohen, Patrick Modiano, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Roth, and Georges Perec, to name but the main courses on the menu.4 The chapter on Joyce, entitled "Ulysse ou l'anatomie du marrane" ("Ulysses or the Anatomy of the Marrano"), is the last stage of a first part on the "[l]es avatars du 'juif charnel'" ("avatars of the 'carnal Jew'"—15), which first examines Shakespeare's Shylock and Lessing's Nathan the Wise.5 Over the background of a Christian society in crisis, the three books are envisaged as attempts to answer the question posed by the Jewish presence in Europe (10). Although I tend to be wary of widely generalizing studies that attempt to trace an elaborate arc of theorization over several centuries based on only a few works, I must admit that I am convinced by Zard's study, supported as it is by extremely well-informed contextualization in all fields (theological, historical, cultural, literary), and by precise and rich close-readings, particularly [End Page 196] of Joyce. Zard argues that Lessing's philo-Semitism first corrected the anti-Semitism of Shakespeare's play and that "le Shylock inhumain," the "inhuman Shylock," was replaced by "le Shylock surhumain" (258). They are, however, but symmetrical examples of cruelty and virtue to which "[Joyce] oppose un Bloom humain, trop humain" ("human, all too human Bloom"—258), in whom the triple crisis of civilization, of the subject, and of literature may be temporarily resolved, since a place for Bloom the outsider must be made in the democratic group of the city (or ecclesia, a word in which Zard reads both the Irish Church and the reason for the choice of Bloom's address on Eccles Street). Joyce "imposer ce drôle de paroissien pour cicérone dans les rues de Dublin" ("imposes this strange parishioner for a cicerone in the streets of Dublin"—258). Bloom is both the one who makes it possible for Joyce to distance himself from his native Ireland, and the one whose acceptance could make his own return possible: "[L]'Irlande redeviendra habitable...