Beyond the Pletzl: Jewish urban histories in interwar France (original) (raw)
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2016
The Jewish Capital of Europe: Literary Representation from Balzac to Proust of the Societal Place and Architectural Space of Jews in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Belle Époque Christina Leah Sztajnkrycer Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Dr. Meredith Clausen Architectural History Nineteenth-century France experienced a literary phenomenon of Jewish characters. Represented in greater proportion than their actual population, they were situated within the modernizing city, sometimes as agents of modernity. Creating a palimpsest of literature, history, society, and architecture, this dissertation analyzes the changing representation of Jewish characters within the transforming urban context. The Jewish figures portrayed by Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, and Marcel Proust evolve between 1830 and 1914, from the stereotypical Shylock type to highly modern, elite aesthetes. Becoming ever more modern, the Jewish char...
Urban History, 2016
This paper examines the writing of a little-known, but prolific interwar immigrant Eastern European Parisian Yiddish writer, Aron Beckerman, to demonstrate how Yiddish journalism played a pivotal role in defining Paris as a simultaneously French and Jewish space to immigrant Jews living in the city. Engaging urban historical theory on the communal-building effect that public space can have, this article argues that within Beckerman’s writings on Paris-its history and specific places within the city-we see a Paris emerge that details a universalist Republican identity, which, when read through a Jewish lens, leads simultaneously to a particular immigrant, Yiddish-speaking, leftist Jewish understanding of what it means to be "French."
Orientalism and the Construction of Jewish Identity in France, 1900–1932
Jewish culture and history, 1999
This paper explores the image of the Jew as Oriental in French Jewish literature and political discourse in the fin-de-siecle and inter-war years. During the nineteenth century, French Jews sought to distance themselves from their alleged 'Oriental' origins in order to facilitate their integration into the larger society. Beginning in the early twentieth century, by contrast, certain French Jews began to describe their imagined connection to the Orient as an aspect of the Jewish personality of which to be proud. This reinvention of the Jew as Oriental, however, was often linked to feelings of loss and alienation, a theme which many Jewish authors emphasised in their novels, plays and poetry. For many of these same figures, embracing Zionism provided a way to overcome this sense of alienation. By linking Zionism to the kind of 'humanist orientalism' prominent in French progressive circles during this period, they were able to give validity to their sense of 'feeling different' while at the same time expressing their complete devotion to France and to a universalist world perspective. The dichotomy between East and West, between Orient and Occident, has played a critical role in the European cultural imagination since the early modem period. Romantic writers and poets in the nineteenth century often invoked the emotivity and exoticism of the East as a contrast to the dry, soulless, sterile West. In his now classic study, Orienta/ism, Edward Said has linked this 'Orientalist' mode of thinking with colonialism.' By creating a dichotomy between a stagnant, essentialised, 'feminine' Orient and a dynamic, modem, 'masculine' West, he argues, Europeans legitimated their own political hegemony in the lands they had colonised. The Orient has always occupied a special place in the Jewish imagination as well, bearing particular significance as the land of the origins of the Jewish people. Long Nadia Malinovich is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan working on a thesis entitled 'Le reveil d'Israel: Jewish Identity and Culture in France 1900-1932'. This article is based on a paper given at the 1997 Association for Jewish Studies conference in Boston. The author would like to thank
Anti-Semitism and Urban Development in France in the Second World War: The Case ofÎlot16 in Paris
Contemporary European History, 2014
Examining an ordinary town-planning decision made during an extraordinary period, this article highlights the interaction between the local urban redevelopment policy and the state policy of racial persecution in 1941. However, it argues that this interaction was far more complex than the implementation of an anti-Semitic ideology by two separate administrations to which it is usually reduced. Instead of trying to assess the ‘reality’ of the ‘representation’ of the housing area (îlot) as a ‘Jewish quarter’ the article takes as fact the notion that representations are realities, and vice versa, and attempts to understand if, and by what mechanisms, an ethno-religious characterisation of the îlot played a role in the redevelopment operations under consideration here.In 1921 a memo from the Seine prefecture had been presented to the city council, identifying seventeen insanitary îlots in Paris as having above-average mortality rates from tuberculosis. These îlots were to be razed to th...
This paper explores the image of the Jew as Oriental in French Jewish literature and political discourse in the fin-de-siècle and inter-war years. During the nineteenth century, French Jews sought to distance themselves from their alleged ‘Oriental’ origins in order to facilitate their integration into the larger society. Beginning in the early twentieth century, by contrast, certain French Jews began to describe their imagined connection to the Orient as an aspect of the Jewish personality of which to be proud. This reinvention of the Jew as Oriental, however, was often linked to feelings of loss and alienation, a theme which many Jewish authors emphasised in their novels, plays and poetry. For many of these same figures, embracing Zionism provided a way to overcome this sense of alienation. By linking Zionism to the kind of ‘humanist orientalism’ prominent in French progressive circles during this period, they were able to give validity to their sense of ‘feeling different’ while at the same time expressing their complete devotion to France and to a universalist world perspective.