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The Portrait of the Jew in French Writings
Sr. Marie Benrdicte

In this article it is possible to sketch only a few of the characteristics of the image of the Jew portrayed by some 20th century French writers. A fuller study would require an analysis of the political and social background of the books referred to. Banal though this statement may be, it is of special importance because no other group has ever suffered so many upheavals as the Jews, no other group has had such a singular and consistent place in Western and Christian consciousness.

Heritage of the 19th century - or the genesis of an image.
The Dreyfus Affair. In 1894, A. Dreyfus, an Alsatian Jew, was arrested for high treason (to Germany), was condemned and deported on the frailest evidence. In 1906, the "traitor" was reinstated and his innocence proclaimed. The "affair", as it came to be called, had agitated France for over twelve years. Writers such as E. Zola, Ch. Peguy, A. France, G. Courteline, Roger Martin du Gard, M. Prevost, A. Gide, members of university faculties such as G. Paris, G. Duruy, Seignobos, had thrown themselves into the conflict, militating in favour of a re-examination of the case.
The Jew "Man of money", "Master of the world". This "affair- was the result of a very rapid advancement of French Jews in all fields, particularly in that of finance. It was symptomatic also of the political and moral crisis which was stirring French society. It suffices to choose some titles from an impressive list of pamphlets of the second half of the century to give an idea of the climate: Les Juifs, rois de l'epoque (Touvenal, 1894), Histoire des grandes operations Iinancieres (Capefigue, 1858), La France Juive (Drumont, 1886). The image of the Jew, manof money, trouble-raiser (already described by Balzac) aspiring to world domination, became more clearly outlined in a whole literature which continued as late as the middle of the 20th century, especially in the works of Leon de Poncins: Les Juifs, maitres du monde (1932), La mysierieuse Internationale juke (1933); G. St. Bonnet: L'Internationale du parasitisme (1933); L. F. Celine and the verbal outbursts in L'Ecole des Cadavres, in which the author demonstrates that 'Jewish domination indisputably leads the goy to definitive degradation..."! He proceeds by means of renewed affirmations, untiringly repeated, without ever bothering about proofs; the style and tone. for the most part, are of a type which serves to debase those one fears, and by whom one imagines oneself menaced.
The revolutionary Jew - disturber of social order. The Jewish international society, which, so it was said, was endangering French economy, was accused also of disturbing the social order: the image of the revolutionary stateless Jew haunted peoples' minds. In the 19th century, Capefigue wrote (op. quoted t. 3, p. 111):
Why deny it? We are in the flood period of a Saint-Simonian society, and Jews... Family life is going, landed properties are crumbling; people are leaving the country for the town, the small towns for the larger ones, machines are creating a miserable slavery...
That is to say that the irrevocable transformations of the modern world prophetically foreseen by Saint-Simon and his followers, are simply qualified as Jewish!
Paul Bourget, half a century later, tracing his "Portrait de l'intellectuel juif: Cremieu-Dax", wrote about his nervous laugh:
In it one reads the memory of persecutions and the intellectual daring of a race, which, having already suffered so much, and having known the extremes of misfortune, does not flinch before the perspective of upheavals less terrible than former calamities. (L'Etape, 1912)
The Jew, "stranger" to our "race". In the crisis of nationalism which shook Europe in the 19th century, the Zionist movement, sparked off by '"the affair', contributed to awaken nationalist and traditionalist susceptibility in France. So there was the somewhat romantic questioning of "Who are we?" Celts, Latins, Germans...? And who are these Jews who call themselves `French"? A whole literature was to spring up over this theme, in which Baron Gobineau became famous. We know just where these questions were to lead the great theorists of Nazism, and all this literature was to take on new life in the 20th century with the research of Dr. Georges Montaudon on: Comment reconnaitre et expliluer le Jail? (1940).
Right at the beginning of the 20th century, the novelist Maurice Bark, who had read Gobineau, was hostile to the Jews; he assisted at the first re-hearing of the Dreyfus trial, but, the latter was for him no more than "a vague nonentity in a debate in which he saw France herself, her unity and her strength at stake". He noisily professed a nationalism of blood and race (Science et doctrine du nationalisme, 1902). However, ten years later, this man who was a visionary and not a party man took a new look at his nationalism, which became transformed, widened and spiritualized in his work Les families spirttuelles de la France (1914). In this work he took upon himself the mission of spreading knowledge of these spiritual families, and the Jew was included.
The Jew, Mediator of "Salvation" - or the mystical vision of Leon Bloy (Le Salut par les Juifs). To the vision of the international Jew — man of money, fervent revolutionary — that
La France Juive of Drumont, and all the anti-Jewish literature of the beginning of the century had imposed on the French, Leon Bloy opposed a very debatable "mystical" vision, which, nevertheless, was not without a measure of greatness. His Le Salut par le Julies which appeared in 1904, is a complicated and violent work, written, as he explains in the first pages, in reaction to La France Juive. He reproaches Drumont with "the way in which he had approached the burning question of Israel, which he glories in having reduced to the mental level of the most empty-headed bourgeoisie".
Ile lets himself go in a lyrical exegesis of the apostle Paul, which sometimes reaches a point of delirium; he magnifies the future role of Israel, and insists, at the same time, on the "providential'. abjection in which he sees "the Jewish people as the outcast of all outcasts"... "and the image of the Spirit rejected by men". In this connection he takes up again — whether it be a question of the -separation of Israel" (which he considers necessary) or even of money (he vituperates against the financial power of the Jews) — vilely antisemitic themes, for which he attempts to find "providential' or "symbolical" interpretations of distressing ambiguity (Le Salut par les PO, Ch. 9). In the absence of a coherent theology on the present mission of the Jewish people in the plan of salvation, the quasi-metaphysical anger of L. Bloy is not far removed from the enraged invectives of some of the "Fathers of the Church".
However, in Le Sang des Pauvres (Ch. 18), Leon Bloy expresses his prophetic thought: "The history of the Jews is a barrier in the history of the human race, just as a dam is a barrier to a river, in order to raise it to a higher level". In this work he sketches the portrait of Morris (Moire-Jacob) Rosenfeld, a Yiddish poet born in Russian Poland, "a lamenting Jew who can weep only for his brothers and not for himself: he is the poet of the proletariat':

You see, in their possession
the treasure of the world is to be found, their Torah.
How can it be said that such a nation is poor?...

The wandering Jew of romance. The 19th century gave to literature the romantic figure of the 'wandering" Jew, relentlessly pursued by misfortune. Incurable agitation and dissatisfaction are his distinctive characteristics. But the tormented remains greater than the tormenter and serves as a worthy example to the most unfortunate. "Stello was seeking an anchorage in immensity by which to steady his ever wandering thoughts... He began to think of the people who had most understood the misfortunes of life: the Jews".

The unhappy Jew - or the impossible "assimilation".
The story of the young hero Silbermann by J. de Lacretelle (1922) is the epitome of the whole Jewish question in France. After almost half a century, it is still basically, strangely, and sadly real. To be convinced of this, it suffices to compare it with the classically expressed analyses taken from the work of J. de Lacretelle, of the Bordeaux bourgeois milieux, where Sarah RosenElsinfor grew up (Elsinfor, Pierre-Henri Simon, 1956).
The high-school student, Silbermann, interprets French writers to his friend with such fineness of touch, that he reveals to him not only the eternal value of their works, but also their impact on life. The friend indignantly exclaims: "What! he who could read all this from the tradition of France as from an open book was treated as an outsider!" All the attacks, all the evils imputed to the Jews are taken up by Silbermann, situated and denounced, in an objective and penetrating analysis.
Antisemitism is not a "religious" movement - come now! You no longer believe
that!... (p. 129 and following).
Your great grievance is against the Jewish spirit, the well-known Jewish spirit, the dangerous instinct of immediate enjoyment which corrupts all genius, prevents anything eternal from being created, and enslaves the mind... Now don't you think that a little of this practical seed would do good to your soil?

Silbermann, rejected, leaves for America and becomes a wanderer like his forebears...
Of what nationality will my children be?... I don't know: wherever we settle will always be a foreign land for us. But what I am sure of is that they will be Jews, and I will make them into good Jews too. I will teach them the greatness of our race, respect for our beliefs... they will be upheld by... the enduring hope which, for centuries, has made us repeat: 'Next year in Jerusalem".

Is there a specifically French antlsemitism? If the answer is positive, we must relate French antisemirism to a love of that security which seems to be a French characteristic, and which is also sometimes called the taste for reassuring intellectual syntheses, political and social conservatism. All anxiety about change of any kind is projected by the middle class Frenchman into aggressiveness towards the -foreigner", particularly the Jew.
But, at the same time, all that in the French mentality refuses "establishment", all that is generous and open to brotherhood, that understands genuine deep-rootedness and true tradition, goes out to Judaism.

Sympathetic voices
Peguy - The sense of deep-rootedness and tradition. Pëguy had a practical knowledge of Jewish actuality; he met Jews at the Ecole Nor male Superieure of Lakanal. In the Cahiers de la Quinzaine, he committed himself to the struggle for the rehabilitation of Dreyfus; until his death he constantly frequented Jewish milieux. We quote from a page which deserves to be cited in full:
It will not be said that a Christian has not borne witness for them... For twenty years I have proved their worth, we have proved one another's... I have always found them as trustworthy as anyone at their post... They have all the more merit, all the more virtue in this, that they have to struggle far more than we against constant accusations, against indictments, against the calumnies of antisemitism... But, after all, think of it. It isn't easy to be a Jew; you always make contradictory reproaches against them... When the Jews remain untouched by the appeals of their brothers, to the cries of the persecuted... in the whole world, you say: They are bad Jews. And, if they as much as open their ears to the lamentations which arise from the Danube to the Dnieper, you say they are betraying us; they are bad Frenchmen. (Notre Jeunesse, 1910)

Peguy's thinking about the Jewish world had its source in the religion of Israel's prophets whom he admired, in the election of Israel which he extolled in the now classical pages of Mystere de la Charite de Jeanne d'Arc. "You Jews, Jewish people, people of Jews...' In his eyes the Jews are worthy of esteem by the very fact of being Jews; their vocation lies in being, and remaining, a people which has given birth to a long line of. prophets — the people of "the root'. Thus he remains astonishingly close to our times, and would have heartily applauded the development of relations between the Church and the Synagogue confirmed by Vatican Council II.

Saint Exupery — Respect for the person and the French spirit of brotherhood. The poet of La Citaelelle considers the Jewish position during the years of 1940-1945:
That night I was haunted by the memory of a man of about fifty years of age. He was ill. How could he possibly survive the German terror? By respect for man! That is the touchstone. In respecting only what resembles it, Nazism is respecting only itself. It refuses creative contradictions, undermines all hope of improvement and creates in man's place a destructive robot... We want to lay the foundation for respect due to man. My friend, I need you as a kind of hill-top where there is air. If I go on fighting, I shall be fighting partly for you. I see how weak you are, the danger that threatens, you, as you drag along your fifty years for hours on end, just to be able to live one day more... shivering under the scant protection of a threadbare coat. I feel that you who are so French are doubly in danger of death — because you are French, and because you are a Jew. We all belong to France like branches to a tree, and I will serve your rights as you would have served mine... You must be free in the country where you have the fundamental right to develop... (Lettre à un otage, 1944)

G. Duhamel — For a civilisation of universal brotherhood. Doctor, novelist, poet, the very antithesis of the abstract, music critic — because "music gives hope of peace and concord among men" — 0. Duhamel finished, in 1942, the Chronique des Pasquier. The central figure of Desert de Bievre, which forms part of a cycle, is the Jew, Justin Weill. In a society corrupt with materialism, Justin represents poetry, represents thought. He wants to make the "Desert printing press" succeed; in it his dream of a fraternity becomes a reality. It is he who finds the house of Bievre, does the organizing, and opposes all infringement of rules; he is the "vigilant conscience" of the group. But when the friends, deceived by the failure of this difficult experiment, need a scapegoat, it is Justin who is blamed. It is he who remains behind to face up to the promises made to creditors. In despair, he dreams of returning with "those of my group, until the final pogrom, massacre and expulsion'. However, urged on by his desire to unite men, he is seized by a prophetic impulse, and confides to his friend, Laurent Pasquier: "You people think you understand Jesus! You don't. He was one of us, a little Jew like me; only I have not done anything, I fail in even a small undertaking". And Lament Pasquier-Duhamel concludes: "I began to understand that Justin would never outgrow his dream, and that all his courage had not yet been consumed".

G. Duhamel looks sympathetically at the development of North African Jews. In a comparison which could throw light on one of the saddest aspects of the Israel—Arab conflict of today, he says:
The spirit of methodical hard work is something to be acquired. What Ishmael has not recognized yet Israel accepted a long time ago...; each day young men from Hara or Mellah go out into the world; like their distant ancestors they are called Cohen or Levy; they cross the sea, and humbly take places on the back benches of classrooms in French schools... by the third generation they are able to take positions of authority anywhere in the metropolis. They demonstrate wonderfully that western knowledge is not a kind of magic, and that it can be mastered. Has Israel's example no lesson for its brother Ishmael? (Consultation au pays d'Islam, 1947)

Among non-Jewish writers the following should also be studied: A. France ("Satire de l'Antisemitisme”, dans Lille aux pingouins), Romain Rolland (Jean-Christophe); Roger Martin du Gard (Jean Barois: dramatic episode in the
Dreyfus Affair, 1912); Francois Mauriac, whose non-conformism applies to the Jews also (Therese Vesqueroux)... Unfortunately, it is impossible to make this study within the limited extent of this article (*).
Paul Claude] — the character of Pensee — L'Evangile d'Isaie. Special attention must be given to the important place which Judaism and the Jews had in Claudel's thoughts and writings. For Claude] the reality of Judaism does not rest on the socio-historical level alone, but, above all, on a spiritual level. The Jewish people is first and foremost "God's eldest son; the ambassador of the House". In this he resembles both Blov and Peguy; but he differs from Bloy in the greater realism of his exposition and from Peguy in his conception of the relation between Judaism and the Church, which remained for a long time closer to the traditional view.
Living through the repercussions of the Dreyfus Affair, Hitlerian genocide and the creation of the State of Israel brought about a striking evolution in his thinking, particularly in connection with Zionism. There is a marked difference between Claudel in his letters to Darius Milhaud (in which he jokes about the Zionists whom he met in Copenhagen), and the Claudel of L'Evangile d'Isaie.

The character of Pensee. We agree with Denise Goiten ("La Figure d'Israèl", Cahier Paul Claude!, No. 7), that it is the character of Pensee, of the "Pere Humilie", which, for Claude], incarnates the true face of the Judaism which received the Revelation. "Throughout the centuries from the beginning of the world, I feel that I am carrying them with me", she says; and without doubt, Pensee gives us the key to the Claudel attitude towards the Jews. Does he not himself say in his Aremoires improvises: "Pensee is an attempt to place on record thoughts which forced themselves upon me later".

But, first of all, there is Sichel, Pensee's mother, symbol of a renegade Israel, ready to sacrifice everything to gain her share in the temporal goods of this world. Pensee, blind, baptized a Christian, is nonetheless a Jew. Like her forefathers, she remains "the faithful and integral depository of the faith, and her role is that of her people". There is no possibility of union for the Jew Pensee with the Christian Orian, nephew of the Pope, "the reason being that Pensee [the Jewish people] is thirsting for justice on this earth". She pronounces a most violent indictment against Christianity; she has no desire for the joy "beyond this life" which Orian offers her. However, at the end of the drama they are united; Orian's love has been humanized, and that of Pensee spiritualized. The two lovers will thus go to death in "the embrace of representatives of the two Testaments.

In the light of this biblical meditation by which Paul Claudel examined the whole of his own life, particularly his last 30 years, is to be seen the resurgence of bourgeois antisernitism, but this must not disconcert us. The image of the Jew which had come down through the centuries had not been totally destroyed, but, generally speaking, as in the case of Leon Bloy, antisemitic themes were accepted as absolute and sublimated evidence — for instance, the subject of money, particularly in L'Evangile d'Isaie.

I have tried to show that this vocation [of the Jewish people for the whole world] had never ceased to be the raison d'ètre of Israel, and that, in fact, it was expressed by its role as specialist in finance.
And no intention of minimizing the spiritual vocation of Israel must be read into this, which elsewhere Claudel calls "eucharistic" (Mêmoires improvises).

For Claudel there can be no doubt that Eretz and the people are one, and towards the end of his life he wrote:
I am irritated by the hypocrites and the idiots who do not give the honour that is due to the young and magnificent Jewish nation... The Jews alone are capable of bringing this country, which is at the world's cross-roads, to life again... With my whole heart I want Israel to possess Palestine, so as to be in a better position to fulfil its role of binding humanity together, its vocation as sons of God, its mission to guard and defend the holy places.

These last words would now appear to be prophetic; constant awareness of happenings, assiduous meditation of the Word, gave to Claudel's understanding of the Jewish people a keenness of perception that was born of love, and made him the inimitable portrayer of the image of Israel.