Marcel Proust’s Judaism: Fear of injury on all levels

un the early twentieth century, anti-Semitism was understood to mean something else. It was not yet clear that he would become murderous, and some anti-Semites acted at the time as if the designation were an honorific. In France, one of them was Léon Daudet, writer and close friend of Marcel Proust. Daudet was a key advocate on the jury that awarded the Goncourt Prize to Proust in 1919 and thus ensured the literary breakthrough of the then forty-eight year old, who only had three years to live. Proust, however, was the son of a Jewess and Léon Daudet had been friends with him since youth. The hatred of one of the Jews did not prevent the other from being honored, and the latter was loyal to the former despite all the published anti-Semitic tirades. How was that possible?

An exhibition in Paris, dedicated to Judaism in the life and work of Marcel Proust, explores this question. In the year of the hundredth anniversary of his death, three important Parisian institutions agreed to present aspects that fit their profile one after the other: the Stadtmuseum Carnavalet started with its show on Paris as Proust’s central place of life and work, in October the National Library with an exhibition on his writing practice offer the conclusion, and as a centerpiece of this triad is now “Marcel Proust – Du côté de la mère” to see in the Jewish Museum.

What Remains of Maternal Judaism

The French title quotes the third volume of Proust’s seven-part novel cycle “À la recherche du temps perdu”: “Le côté des Guermantes” (which here means “The circle of the Guermantes”, but in German it was simply titled “Guermantes”) . So it’s about the influence of maternal origin. Jeanne Weil, who married the Catholic physician Adrien Proust in 1870, came from a wealthy Jewish entrepreneurial family with roots in Alsace and Moselle; her father was distantly related to Karl Marx, who was almost the same age. As the married Proust, Jeanne Weil remained true to her religion, which was not very common in interdenominational marriages at the time. Her older son Marcel only experienced a Jewish lifestyle with his maternal grandparents. Like his brother Robert, he was baptized a Catholic.

But Marcel Proust was aware and important of the Jewish inheritance, which can be seen from the fact that he mostly kept it a secret, but in 1896 he approached another close anti-Semitic friend, the Baron de Montesquiou, about a letter with anti-Jewish remarks apparently asking for approval wrote a small note in which he disclosed his family origins – “Otherwise you could have hurt me involuntarily in a dispute”. This folded letter is a particularly moving object in the exhibition, and the word juif (Jew) is the only one in the text capitalized by Proust on the first page, so that it shines like a beacon.

Two years later – France was deeply involved in the Dreyfus affair, in which Proust had unhesitatingly sided with the wrongly convicted Jewish lieutenant – the writer was denounced as a Jew by Édouard Drumont himself, the most prominent French anti-Semite. Proust deliberately did not react to this. But when the death of his mother in 1905 ended all his existing literary plans and triggered work on the narrative material that was then published from 1913 as “À la recherche du temps perdu”, Judaism also came in memory of the dearly departed to great importance in the nascent novel.