Translation by Ann Goldstein
In 1896, at the age of twenty-five, Proust sent this letter to Count Robert de Montesquiou:
Yesterday I did not answer the question you put to me about the Jews. For this very simple reason: though I am a Catholic like my father and my brother, my mother is Jewish. Ifm sure you understand that this is reason enough for me to refrain from such discussions. I thought it more respectful to write this to you than to answer in the presence of a third person. But I welcome this occasion that allows me to say something to you that I would perhaps never have dreamed of saying. For if our ideas differ, or rather if I do not have the freedom to have on the subject those ideas which perhaps I would, you might, without meaning to, have wounded me in a discussion. I do not of course speak for any discussion which could take place between the two of us, since I will always be interested in your ideas on social policy, if you expound them to me, even if a most fitting/appropriate reason keeps me from sharing them.
Yours
Marcel Proust
What a strange letter. The careful reader of Remembrance of Things Past hurries immediately to the side of that tumultuous, histrionic anti-Semite M. de Charlus. Immediately it occurs to us that the long anti-Semitic digressions with which the Baron entertains his young friend Marcel (and which are met with the pure indifference of an occasional spectator) are the novelized rendering of discussions that really took place between Proust and the Count de Montesquiou. Hence we are authorized to think that that monument of fin-de-sie`cle dandyism, wearing the very elegant garments in which Boldini and Whistler painted him, entertained with his hyperbolic eloquence the salons of the Belle ELpoque, scourging the Jews with confidently extravagant words. We can also imagine the young Proust\by temperament unsuited to any vulgar quarrel\inclining his head, struggling to hide his embarrassment, and then writing a letter rich in ambiguity and yet of an exemplary honesty, already preparing for the torment of truth that is the founding inspiration of Remembrance. Compared with his habitual epistolary sophistication, Proust seems, in these lines, particularly concise; at the same time, he is in no way concerned with refuting the Countfs ideas, which we can imagine as carriers of an aristocratic, Catholic, reactionary anti-Semitism. Instead, Proust, at least apparently, apologizes for a failing of his own. He has been interrogated by the Count, who has perhaps pretended not to remember his young friendfs origins, on the Jewish question then raging on account of the Dreyfus affair. He doesnft answer. A calculated and difficult abstention. We can imagine that he naturally turned the conversation elsewhere. Yet he felt a duty to explain to the Count later that his behavior arose not from cowardice or discourtesy but from a matter of circumstance that didnft allow him to reply, or to explore those dangerous arguments.
The involuntary risk?
That he could be wounded in his deepest, most precious affections.
But why didnft Proust explain his motivations to the Count? Why not manifest that eagerness typical of young liberals to make the representative of an opposing, hostile faction understand\even by means of ridiculous violence, if necessary\the indisputable reasons for tolerance? Out of cowardice? Or opportunism?
First of all, we should consider the rigidity of the anti-Semitism that must have been one of the underpinnings of Proustian speculation on the theme. The Countfs anti-Semitism, like everyone elsefs, does not originate (it would be criminal to think the contrary) in rational reasoning, or, on the other hand, in the objective look at reality cast by a man free of cultural conditioning. Anti-Semitism is a vice of the vital organs, an atavistic demand that cannot be disregarded, an inheritance that is impossible to abandon (only in this sense does it merit indulgence). No arguments exist to defeat it, because no arguments exist to affirm it, owing to the simple fact that it is an irrevocable choice of the stomach, the heart, and, naturally, the nerves. Anti-Semitism exists, it lives on itself, it has it own internal rules and does not obey any rational logic. Proust knew this well (a man who, besides, as we have shown, did not believe in the possibility of communication). But the most convincing reason for his unwillingness to enter into the merits is hidden elsewhere, although it derives in some measure from what wefve said. First of all\it must be repeated\Proust shows no respect for the intelligence of others, and so he is incapable of entrusting to the numerous letters he writes his true ideas about art, life, literature. Furthermore\and here we come to the point\the young Proust does not discuss with the Count, and declare that he cannot be reconciled to, the ideas the Count expresses in the salons because, as the devoted son of a Jewish mother, he feels he is an interested party. And, implacably pursuing his own relativist skepticism, he understands that his adherence to the Jewish cause arises not from true comprehension of the world, and the resulting equidistance, but from the simple Chance that he was born part Jewish and that, above all, the individual dearest to him is, in fact, a Jew. And only he\a half-Jew\can understand from both the inside and the outside the Jewish question. Nothing can keep him from believing that if he had been born of a different mother he would probably have clung with the same vehemence to the most irrevocably anti-Semitic ideas. He doesnft have the presumption of those who believe that their idea is unequivocally right. This\pay attention\is not tolerance, which has an ethical origin; rather, itfs an understanding of reality, an emanation of intelligence. And this intelligent intuition of Proustfs, which he demonstrates persuasively in the hidden folds of Remembrance of Things Past, is the more valuable if one takes into account its extraordinary and terrible foresight. Only the Jews can take on the sorrows of the Jews Jews (I generalize for the sake of convenience). And since the Jews are few in number, itfs natural and just that few grieve for the fate of the Jews. This is valid for all human categories, and Proust understood it immediately, from a position that we have no problem calling privileged, considering the historical moment he lived in and the milieu he chose to frequent. The effort he makes is not to give in to the fury of indignation but, rather, to look at reality from a distance sufficient to guarantee him the greatest possible comprehension. He wants to be at all costs intelligent, putting at risk, if necessary, any human compassion, with the same denuding and desolate realism as La Rochefoucauld or Guicciardini.
His failure to respond to Robert de Montesquiou, and the impossibility of his sharing those anti-Semitic ideas, should be understood in this sense: more than a choice of taste, more than the inadequacy of the loser, it is the result\to follow the route traced by his silence\of what is most appropriate. And so of pure form, perhaps because in arguments so deep and so visceral the only thing is to cling to form. It would be fruitless and offensive to enter into the merits. Form gives the young son of a Jewess his due. Form is, ultimately, the corollary of an intelligence that attempts to dominate every other legitimate and natural instinct, that wants in some way to take over.
And yet this small, apparently insignificant episode permits our imagination to go beyond, to learn (with the greatest caution) how the Jewish problem was present in Proustfs soul from the beginning, in an overpowering manner, beyond the occasional contribution to the Affaire, beyond every journey into Biblical mythology, every ritual or sentimental atavism: present in perpetual and obsessive motion, if only considering the milieu he frequented, a milieu absolutely intransigent with regard to Jews. In the ultimate joke, there was his surname, a Catholic surname that did not mark him: hence all those potential anti-Semites, who in the presence of a Jewish surname would hold back, in his case\not realizing his origins\would speak freely, making him monstrously uneasy, forcing him to cowardly behavior, obliging him to a subtle, silent betrayal.
The real Jewish problem is not Judaism but, rather, the converse, anti-Semitism. That is, a Jew realizes that he is one not within the warm walls of his home environment but at the very moment he tries to emerge from it. You are Jewish when others remind you of it, not when they are indifferent or in every way similar to you. A concept that today is dazzling in its banality\but that in Proustfs time was difficult to explain\branded his psychology immediately.
So itfs not easy to understand the fate of a Jew who found himself, by his own will or destinyfs, introduced into noble or reactionary Catholic milieus. A Jewish boy forced to confront all the traps of prejudice, to be silent while the ignorant mother of a companion utters stinging anti-Semitic remarks. He will have to get used to the blush of his friend, who would like to strangle his mother, must content himself with the trembling, awkward, angry excuses of the lady caught in the act. He will have to get used to the aphasia that strikes him, his fear that the words coming out of his mouth will betray (who knows how?) a Jewish accent or that his nose will suddenly hook. The reactions allowed the young Jew are only two: either accept the rules of the game, forget his origins, repudiate his parents, grandparents, household gods, distort his name, convert, to the point of becoming a believer in anti-Semitism.
Or he finds himself glorifying, discovering, promoting, by revealing an irresistible need to declare his genealogy on every occasion, even pointlessly, just out of the pathetic wish to raise his head proudly before his enemy, harboring silent, fanatical malice.
A third way is hard to point to, or to describe, and if it exists it is certainly the one Proust took.
But was Proust a Jew? Can we call him Jewish, given that he was baptized? Can a Jew be baptized? Yet Biblical law elects only the sons of a Jewish mother. In what way was he Jewish? How could he reconcile Jewishness with his worldly ambitions? In the event, did he ever succeed in reconciling it? Was he happy that his Jewishness was not evident in his surname? Did he ever hide his Jewishness in order to approach the society that he was ambitious to belong to? Was he ever spurned by a woman or man because he was Jewish? Did his support of Dreyfusism cost him? Did his Jewishness influence his choice of sides? How did he reconcile it with his anti-Dreyfusard friendships? And of all this what survived in Remembrance of Things Past?
Questions without answers.
J.E. Van Praag provides a good definition. He maintained that Proust is the most marvelous example of the gde-Judaizedh Judaism that dumped too many victims on the altar of Jewish emancipation at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Perhaps it is precisely in this unresolved oxymoron (gde-Judaizedh Judaism) that our difficulties originate. Proust, with superb ambiguity, scattered thousands of contradictory signs. Borrowing the theory of A. Compagnon, we can say that in Remembrance of Things Past Proust cleverly parceled out his Jewishness into many personalities, large and small, in that way covering the entire range of characteristics that he considered peculiarly Jewish. He also believed in the serial nature of the traits that he discerned in his characters from generation to generation. And he believed that all these traits, stubbornly concealed for years, appeared in every personality in old age, at the moment when, together with the immune defenses, the nervous system gave in, and each individual returned to the genetic paradigm contained in a certain shape of the eyes, or the violence of an ideology, or the practice of a particular sexual perversion. He believed so deeply in this stunning and tragic truth that he reintroduced it into the arc of Remembrance of Things Past many times, bitterly ridiculing his marionettes. Saint-Loupfs homosexuality and his maliciousness, which gradually emerge from latency, bearing with them all the coquetries and circumspections that belonged to his uncle Charlus and the other Guermantes. Or the way that Swann as an old man reappropriates his Semitism in the plaintive tone of his voice, in his ceremonious courtesy, in his profile that becomes sharper, like Sabafs goat, in his late support of Dreyfusism, which in other times, times of worldliness and languor, he would surely have judged harshly. Itfs evident in the metamorphosis of the Narratorfs Mother, who in old age displays, whether consciously or not, the facial expressions, the lexical and linguistic habits and literary tastes belonging to the dead Grandmother. Itfs as if a mimetic furor (that endemic desire to conform to the taste and choices of others) were the inevitable harbor of an old person, after the youthful years of freedom. Proust, who had an extraordinary mimetic gift, pointed to mimicry as one of the distinctive peculiarities of the human being, perhaps the saddest. Itfs clear that he was influenced in this by the positivist doctrines of naturalist literature, according to which none can resist the attributes carved into the rock of our genetic patrimony. Here Proust was unmovable and scientific.
And yet with the Jews, a strange and evasive race, things get complicated, because Proust scatters many characters with contradictory attributes. Itfs difficult for us to reconstruct a unified idea of Proustian Judaism. Itfs as if Proust enjoyed scattering enigmas, examining that human species from every angle, to the point of insinuating that over millennia\as in every advanced society\many classes, differing in wealth and culture, were established within this caste, as if Judaism re-created on a small scale the cosmos of an entire society. At a certain point, speaking of Blochfs snobbishness, he says that Bloch belonged to a class of Jews so low that he couldnft ascend within his own race, and was compelled to search elsewhere, to aim his mania for revenge at the hated and fundamentally lazy, indulgent French nobility. Itfs as if he were outlining a Jewish snobbery (of which he himself was a victim), keeping his distance from those petit-bourgeois Jews who, in the wake of his motherfs class consciousness, must have seemed to him repugnant and picturesque, a Jewish shame.
The Jewish characters in Remembrance of Things Past possess undoubted qualities or talents, manifesting equally vices and unsustainable charms, and conserving in their physical features something repellent. They do not resemble one another, but at the same time there is something imperceptible in them that makes them the same: the sense of inadequacy and the differentness, which some try to glorify and others try to hide using every possible trick of dissembling. Itfs not coincidental that one of the most brazen snobs of Remembrance of Things Past is Bloch, while the most sensitive and discreet man is Charles Swann. If we were to plumb the inmost motivations of both we would realize that the spring that pushes the first to the hyperbole of his oratorical style is the same that compels the second to choose a sober and refined key. They do not feel accepted, they live with suspended breath, trembling and suspicious, they have the need to reinvent themselves in a comforting mask. Thus they are different and thus the same. An irreducible dialectic: the broad spaces that divide these characters give us an exact notion of the intricacy of the Jewish problem in the Remembrance of Things Past.