This journey, in fact, never took place; what is more, it was not a journey toward any defined place, but toward a host of possible places. It nonetheless deserves a brief introduction.
Some twenty years ago, a student in modern literature came to my Philosophy department and wanted to enroll under me to prepare a thesis on the following subject: le personnage juif dans le roman français de Stendhal à nos jours (the Jewish character in the French novel from Stendhal to the present day). I was interested, all the more so because the student seemed intelligent, hardworking, cultivated. So as not to depart from the habits of our guild, I first suggested that she narrow her corpus, as the saying goes. From Balzac to Anatole France (or something of the sort) seemed to me quite broad enough; then, realizing that she knew nothing of Judaism, I gave her a rough bibliography of five or six books, telling myself privately that they could have been five hundred or six hundred. Weeks passed, and she came back as learned as if she had just emerged from the local yeshiva. But nothing new on the problem of the Jewish character in the novel. To sound “learned,” again as in our guild, I then proposed a working hypothesis; it would be up to her to say whether, in the course of her research, she could confirm or refute it.
It was a matter, in some sense, before asking whether the novelist was judeophile or judeophobe, of inquiring into what, for the author, distinguished the Jewish character from the other characters in his novels. That he eats kosher, that he has his sons circumcised, that he “kippurizes,” celebrates Rosh Hashanah or Purim, or does not work on Saturdays—in short, that he outwardly displays his Jewishness—all of that, to be sure, defines him as Jewish, but within society it remains the simple expression of his individual freedom, and refers only to himself. Now it seems to me that the hard core of the research was to know what, in a given novel—that is, in a given social milieu—a character (or several) was doing whose Jewishness marked a difference, not of religion or culture, or of “ethnicity” as we now say, but a difference of social role. To put it another way: why, in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish society, why does the novelist need Jewish characters? One can also frame “my” question this way: why is a given character “Jewish” in the novelist’s head? What are his characteristics and above all his functions that make him “Jewish” in the eyes of his creator, since after all he will have been born only of the author’s imagination? In sum, a piece of research in which, instead of starting from the one who is created, one starts from the one who creates. We shall see.
See what? We shall see—I suppose—that the novelist obeys a sort of law of novelistic composition, at least in nineteenth-century France, which consists in heaping onto a single character traits that in reality may belong to several persons. This is, for example, what Balzac does for “the journalist” or “the rentier,” and so on. He even explained himself on the matter, and called these “types”: something situated between the individual and the “genus,” a kind of pre-concept; not a generalization, but already a sociological tool that ought to allow one to begin to understand the workings of the society evoked in the novel.
Having at my disposal only memories of the readings of classic novels I had done like everyone else nearly half a century earlier, I could not manage to put precise names to the novelist, the novel, or the Jewish characters, and I had only a rather vague impression, which the student would have to consolidate or eliminate. The idea sprang from that rather hazy recollection in my head that the “Jewish” character was at once admirable and formidable.
Admirable, because in the midst of a society in the making, such as French society was after the Revolution—in the making, that is to say also in search of itself—the Jewish character knows, or at least senses, what is happening. He has, so to speak, understood or sensed which new values are beginning to give way before the old. To put it more brutally, he knows that the “landed” values of the ancien régime, and all the fantasies that go with them, are beginning to give way before the “rising” values of money, of investment and its profitability, of profit; the prudent “average profit” that Marx will speak of, quite the opposite of today’s maximal and immediate profit.
Let us suppose so. But then the question arises: why is the character who bears this knowledge, or this aptitude for knowing, “Jewish”? The answer seems to lie in the question: the Jew appears to the novelist as descended from generations, and therefore from a culture, in which the trades of the land, of the soil that clings to your soles, were reserved for the goys, the non-Jews. Of course, this “explanation” of the Jews’ supposed particular aptitude for understanding what is happening in the new society is only a stereotype circulating in that society, but novelists feel it as an undeniable fact. Yet it is a historical fact that the fantasy was powerful, one of those things that, all in all, go so much without saying that the writer need not even speak of them or legitimize them. We may pile up sociological, historical, demographic references, and so on, to prove that there are more Jews who are artisans, physicians, intellectuals, soldiers, civil servants, artists, than Jews who are merchants or bankers—it will still remain, in the heads of the goys and even of Jews, that this last qualification is synonymous with “specialist in money matters”! What can be done about it? That is not our subject here, which is a problem of method: in order to explain the subjectivity that the novelist attributes to these characters, one must take into account the novelist’s own subjectivity.
The Jewish character—or if one prefers, the Jew-of-the-novel—is thus a bearer of modernity; in a changing society, not only does he know that it is changing, but instead of being astonished by it, or lamenting it as the conservatives do, he adheres in his own way to this evolution, he contributes to it, and so facilitates it. The unwitting heir of long generations who said no, for example, to the dominant religions, heir too of the persecutions that punctuate the history of Judaism in the West, he knows more or less clearly that the French Revolution began to give the Jews of France the foundations of citizenship and of the rights and duties that go with it, and this character who embodies modernity also prefigures, on this point, the future of the social whole. It goes without saying that a legitimist novelist like Balzac, or a “progressive” one like Zola, will surround their Jew-of-the-novel with implicit judgments, favorable or unfavorable depending on their opinion: those who are for or against social evolution. Let us not forget that in historical reality (not in the novel), the all-powerful François Guizot had called upon all the French to make use of the social and political rights won by the Revolution. “Make use of these rights,” he said on March 1, 1843, reprinted in Le Moniteur the following day. “Improve the moral and material condition of our France… that is what will satisfy… this need for progress that characterizes this nation.” We know that this appeal was heard, and not only by the country’s Jewish minority! But in novelistic thought, in the practice of writing, the imaginary-Jew accumulated within himself, at least in the classes that believed themselves “enlightened,” nearly all the traits of the politics advocated by Guizot. Including in matters of money, of currency: for beneath the reforms of the Revolution one of the traits of the aristocracy had continued on its way—the contempt for money. The nobleman, from the height of his horse, tosses the commoner a bag of pistoles. And the commoner stuffs it into his woolen sock. The social forces for which Guizot is the spokesman want to rehabilitate this currency that still has a poor reputation, and the Jew-of-the-novel is not only reputed to “know” how to use money, but is reputed to feel no contempt for it. In sum, one could almost say that, in the circumstances evoked here, the novelists needed Jewish characters, and that they invented and described them not according to (their) reality, but according to the roles they would have to play.
Formidable, too, the Jewish character becomes, since he “knows” what is happening and, of course, makes use of it in the process of social ascent of which Guizot’s famous “enrichissez-vous” (“get rich”) became the watchword. Note in passing that Guizot was not Jewish. Later, around the Second Empire, when various scandals broke out concerning one bank or another, people spoke above all of the Jewish banks, whereas “Catholic” or “Protestant” banks were just as numerous in provoking indignation. In fact, the word juif (Jew) has all too often become synonymous with skinflint, with banker, and it was not so long ago that the Petit Larousse illustré was compelled by law to pulp an edition in which one found, under the entry “Jew,” all these inadmissible idiocies.
So: admirable and formidable. Formidable because admirable. Here we rejoin another fantasy, another stereotype: the Jews are intelligent. And what is more, they are so in a hidden, discreet if not secret way. No wonder they succeed! One would think that the diplomas they “land” are accessible or given to them from the cradle. This intelligence stems from some Jewish “essence”; not from work, not from the sole possible way out for an oppressed minority, not from the tradition of study. This trait too appears in the French novel of the period under consideration.
I had gotten roughly that far, waiting, hoping that a gifted young researcher would put my hypotheses to the test of the texts. Alas, catastrophe! A happiness for her, a misfortune for me: she “fell,” as the saying goes, in love and got married. I never heard of her again, nor of her research project. I can here only send her, wherever she may be, a distant mazel tov!—if she knows what that means.
The question of what this or that writer’s position was with respect to Judaism obviously arises, but it seems to me secondary in relation to the idea that this writer forms of his Jewish character—more precisely, the reason why he decides, for in the end it is he who decides, that so-and-so will be Jewish, can only be Jewish. A journey into literature that opens onto a journey among the stereotypes and fantasies of one or several centuries, of one or several societies.
Of course, it has often happened to me, after the “defection” of that student, to propose this most attractive subject to other future doctoral candidates, but without any success. Perhaps I should cast a bottle into the sea here? Thus my missed journey might become an invitation to the voyage.