PROUST

An iconic novelist’s religious heritage.

Literary scholar Compagnon offers an authoritative examination of the reception of Proust (1871-1922) by the French Jewish community following the author’s death. Because Proust’s mother came from a family of assimilated Jews, many critics were inspired to ask about the author’s sense of religious or cultural identity. “Am I not more Jewish than European?” That is the question, Compagnon asserts, posed to Proust retrospectively by a host of erudite readers, spurred by an obituary of Proust written by Zionist André Spire in 1923. In the decades that followed, “some responded for him in a decidedly positive way, emphasizing his Jewish heredity, even his rabbinical style,” Compagnon has found, “while others proved more prudent, and even more reticent.” Mining an extensive bibliography, Compagnon offers detailed readings of articles and books by more than a dozen prominent critics, focusing especially on the 1920s, when Proust was discussed in the pages of Zionist journals by critics known as the “French Israelites,” and continuing into the 1930s. Critics in the 1920s often compared Proust to Montaigne and Henri Bergson—both of Jewish ancestry—noting stylistic evidence of Proust’s “maternal heritage” in his “Talmudic sentences” and his representation of Jewish characters “who could not be reduced to conventional types.” In the second half of the 1930s, however, a “noticeable change” occurred, spurred by Siegfried van Praag, an influential critic who proposed “anti-Semitism as the explanation for certain character traits that Proust gives his creations.” Taken up by Hannah Arendt, in her Origins of Totalitarianism,” this view created “long-lasting repercussions” in the debate over Proust’s connection to Judaism. It is a view, bolstered by close reading and biographical discoveries, that Compagnon persuasively challenges.

A meticulously detailed analysis.