Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France Lawrence R. Schehr Maurice Samuels , Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. In this brilliantly researched and wonderfully written book, Maurice Samuels helps us rediscover a by-and-large forgotten chapter in French (literary) history, which is that of narratives written by Jewish authors in the nineteenth century. While all readers of nineteenth-century French narrative are familiar with Jewish characters in the works of Balzac, Stendhal, Zola, the Goncourts, Sand, and others, the narratives focused on here are generally by authors who would be unknown to [End Page 142] the majority of modern readers. There are several important reasons for rediscovering these narratives, Samuels argues effectively. In a general sense, the French nineteenth century is the time in which republican identity is forged and religion (or atheism) plays a role in the determination of the fabric or language of that identity. If that is the case, then religions cannot be seen as independent monoliths, but must be seen in relation to one another, as well as having a temporal nature. Specifically, it becomes important to see the ways in which Jews described themselves with the fabric and grammar available to them, both religious and secular in nature. And in the invention of this modern bourgeois identity in which many Jews gradually became integrated, there were modifications of behaviors—a kind of integration into "Frenchness" and perceptions of the Jews were changed as well, both from within the group and from the outside. Each of the authors studied in this volume engages specific aspects of these questions. M. Samuels makes a strong case for the application of the notion of the "French exception" to the history of Jewish narrative, in part because of the historical situation of France during that time, in part because of the special situation of Paris as "the world's center of consumer culture" (18), as it became, arguably, the first modern city. Samuels points out that "French Jews found themselves at the forefront of these changes" (19). And among them were the Rothschild family who established French branches of the family bank after the defeat of Napoleon and the Péreire brothers who founded the Crédit Mobilier. Samuels discusses the development of railroads thanks to funding from these families, as well as changes in urban culture, not the least aspect of which was the establishment of high-circulation newspapers, the importance of which any reader of Balzac recognizes. All of these elements contribute to the "invention" of the "Israelite" in nineteenth-century France Chapter One starts with a brief but important discussion of Walter Scott's 1819 novel, Ivanhoe, from which the "beautiful Jewess," Rebecca, who is the daughter of a money-lender, made her entry on the world literary stage. Given her father's profession, as Samuels notes, there is a "fundamental ambivalence" about the figure as it is taken and reused in French Romanticism. The remainder of the first chapter is devoted to a study of the fiction of Eugénie Foa, a Sephardic Jew [End Page 143] from Bordeaux who published narratives in the 1830s and 1840s. In detailed study of these narratives, Samuels demonstrates this continued ambivalence about Jewish characters, compounded in this case by Foa's conversion to Christianity. In focused readings of Le Kidouchim, and La Juive, the author analyzes the plight and ambiguity of the Jewish heroine as she is represented in this early work, and he deftly shows the lingering influence of Scott on these figures. In the next chapter, Samuels offers a stunning reading of the works of the pseudonymous Ben-Lévi, who was one of the authors writing for the Reform Jewish newspaper, Archives Israélites. Ben-Lévi was not writing about the past (or the present as a figure of the past), as Foa did—one story, "Billette," was set in 1290—, but was writing about the present as a figure of the future, the most important figure of which, it would seem, is the assimilation of the middle-class Jewish population in cities. And while the past is not forgotten—there is...