Reviewed by: The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity by Jonathan Freedman Beth Newman (bio) The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, by Jonathan Freedman; pp. ix + 297. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2021, $95.00, $30.00 paper, $29.99 ebook. What do Jewishness and late-nineteenth-century decadence have to do with one another? Depending on one’s conceptions of “Jews” and of “decadence,” the answer could seem to be not much—or quite a lot, none of it good. Influential late-nineteenth-century anti-Semites used the word decadent and its cousin “degenerate” as slurs with which to vilify Jewish people and foment hatred of Jews, a theme taken up as policy during the years of Nazi ascendancy. In The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity, Jonathan Freedman folds this fact into his rich, complex celebration of the decadent movement and its long afterlife, and the Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals who participated in both. [End Page 698] A prolific scholar of English and American literature, Jewish studies, and modernism, Freedman shows that Jewish people both adopted decadent themes and topoi to establish themselves as fully modern participants in the culture of major Western societies, and adapted them to specifically Jewish interests and preoccupations. He demonstrates compellingly that in doing so, they contributed to the shaping of an emergent modernism. Freedman makes this argument in seven chapters that are by turns erudite, gossipy, nuanced, funny, and moving. He stretches his canvas across the half-century or so that he calls the long fin de siècle from 1870 to 1920, extending it geographically from urban America to European centers of culture. Victorianists will be immediately interested in his first three chapters, which in different ways focus on the fin de siècle they know, surveyed from an unfamiliar angle of vision. The first chapter argues that the history of Jewish persecution, together with the Torah’s narratives of catastrophe and decline from Eden forward, created a receptive audience for decadent themes. Here, Freedman also constructs a network of Jewish critics, patrons, art historians, dealers, gallery owners, editors, and other taste-makers who provided a crucial infrastructure for the production and circulation of fin-de-siècle decadence. A chapter titled “Oscar Wilde among the Jews” explores the work of Jewish writers and artists whom Wilde championed as well as of those who championed him. These include Amy Levy, Ada Leverson, Julia Frankau, Marc-André Raffalovich, William Rothenstein, and Jacob Epstein, the designer of Wilde’s gravesite monument. Perhaps even more interesting is what Freedman discovers about Wilde’s popularity among Yiddish-speaking immigrants in London and New York who flocked to performances of his plays in the Yiddish theater, and purchased translations of his works in Hebrew and Yiddish. He shows that Yiddish-speaking revolutionaries treated “The Soul of Man under Socialism” (1891) as required reading at a time when Wilde was scorned by the mainstream reading public and press. A chapter uncovering the phenomenon of “Jewish Salomania” traces the enthusiastic adoption of Salomé by Jewish artists, dancers, and film actors (including Alla Nazimova of Charles Bryant’s 1923 silent film), embraced by them even before Wilde’s play added to the title character’s appeal. This chapter is lavishly illustrated, and Freedman pauses to provide compelling, often brilliant readings of the images, including of the 1897 Alphonse Mucha poster of Sarah Bernhardt that graces the book’s cover. In these chapters, as in the conclusion, Freedman serves as collector culling materials from a wide array of sources, arranging them into an often dizzying but unfailingly interesting and almost always entirely persuasive account that supports his thesis, each time from a different direction. Gender and sexuality, recurrent themes throughout, are central to one of the two chapters that crown the book: bravura readings of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–27) and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–40). Freedman observes that although Proust identified as Catholic, his mother was Jewish, making him Jewish in the eyes of rabbinic law. Even readers unfamiliar with Proust or the body of commentary on his vexed relationship to Jewishness...