The Sublimity of the Jewish Type: Balzac’s Belle Juive as Virgin Magdalene aux Camélias

Abstract

This chapter studies the Jewish female character in French literature. The Jewish woman's difference from feminized Jewish men and marriageable Christian women is not enough to delineate her specificity and hence her function as a fictional character. She is also seen through the lens of orientalism, because of the constructed image of her roots in the Middle East as a member of the ‘Hebraic’ or ‘Israelite’ race. The French Romantic writer Chateaubriand suggested that the treatment of Jews by Christian society varied according to their gender and physical appeal. He argued that Jewish women were exempted from perpetual misery and persecution by the grace Jesus accorded to Mary Magdalene, and that this was the root of Christian men's attraction to and sexual associations with Jewish women. The chapter then presents specific examples of representations of Jewish women: in this case the Jewish woman in Paris of the 1830s and 1840s as she appears in Honoré de Balzac, one of the nineteenth century's most popular and influential European writers. While Balzac had limited contact with actual Jewish women in Paris, the figures he created had a tremendous influence on the rhetoric of representing what has come to be known as la belle Juive.