The controversy over whether Proust was in any sense a Jewish writer or, on the contrary, in some way essentially a Jewish writer, began in France only weeks after he was buried. It still persists there. But before we dip into these muddied waters, some clarifications are in order about the contradictory milieu from which he sprang. Proust, who was born in 1871 in Auteuil near Paris, was, of course, a half-Jew, though that is not how he defined himself to others. His mother, Jeanne Weil, was the daughter of a wealthy Jewish stockbroker. Her son remained deeply attached to her all his life, and her image is affectionately inscribed in In Search of Lost Time in the figure of the Narrator’s mother and to some degree in that of his grandmother as well, together with his actual maternal grandmother. Jeanne’s marriage with Adrien Proust, a perfunctory Catholic, was undertaken for social reasons on her part and for economic reasons on his. He was a highly ambitious physician who would attain considerable professional success, and the substantial dowry that Jeanne Weil brought to the union helped launch him on his career. The son of a grocer, he could not offer her lofty social standing through his background, but his identity as a Catholic gave her and the two sons she would bear him the necessary entrée into French society. A stipulation of their marriage contract was that any children of their union would be baptized as Catholics. Jeanne, however, never contemplated conversion, nor did her husband attempt to persuade her to convert, as far as we know. There appears to have been no great romantic element in the marriage, and as was very common in haute bourgeois circles at the time, he had mistresses, including, it seems, one that he shared with his wife’s uncle, Louis Weil. Proust himself was by no means a pious Catholic, though for a brief period around the age of twenty he actually thought about a vocation as a priest. The abiding appeal of Catholicism for him was aesthetic, as well as serving as a marker of identity. In 1896, in an often quoted letter to his friend Robert de Montesquiou, he states flatly that “I am Catholic like my father and my brother; on the other hand, my mother is a Jew.” Why this attenuated connection with Jewish origins of a self-affirmed Catholic should enter into his enterprise as a writer is by no means evident, but the connection cannot simply be dismissed. To address this question, one must understand something of the ambiguous — or perhaps one should say, amphibian — nature of the Parisian Jewish milieu of which the Weil family was a part. A recent book by James McAuley, The House of Fragile Things: Jewish Art Collectors and the Fall of France, happily offers a vivid and detailed account of this milieu. During the nineteenth century, a concentration of vastly wealthy Jewish families gathered in Paris. Many of them came from Germany or from Alsace-Lorraine (Balzac’s Jewish banker speaks with a heavy German accent), though one prominent family, the Camondos, were Sephardic, their origins in Istanbul. To get some idea of the wealth these families possessed, the family patriarch Salomon Camondo was said to be the richest man in the Ottoman Empire. Many of these people remained for a time self-identified Jews, supporting synagogues and communal institutions, marrying and burying as Jews, and mostly wedding within their own social circles. The list of the affluent Jewish families is long: the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis (chronicled by their descendant Edmund de Waal in The Hare with Amber Eyes), the Reinachs, the Cahen d’Anvers, the Weils. Everyone in this milieu aspired to enter the highest echelons of French society. Given that aspiration, it is hardly surprising that many of them intermarried, like Jeanne Weil, or converted to Catholicism, as she did not, and sought to put entirely behind them any traces of their Jewish origins, as she also did not. Alas, in the early 1940s the descendants of these families, including those who thought their Catholicism and their high social standing would protect them, were deported and murdered in the Nazi death camps. One must, of course, resist the temptation to say haughtily, “Little did they know…,” an attitude against which Michael André Bernstein argued vigorously in Foregone Conclusions, his indispensable book on thinking about past lives after historical catastrophe. But for a time — and certainly in Proust’s lifetime — it seemed as though the offspring of these wealthy Jewish immigrants to France would continue to flourish splendidly, shining at the heights of French society and culture, whether as Jews or otherwise. As McAuley’s fine book richly illustrates, a principal avenue for this flourishing was aesthetic, and this aspect of upper-class French Jewish life has obvious relevance to Proust. Many of these families became great collectors of art. McAuley shows that their tastes tended to focus on paintings, furnishings, and objets d’art from the ancien régime, evidently out of a desire to identify with the traditional and aristocratic elements of French culture. There is an approximate analogy in this drive to collect with the wealthy New York families of the Gilded Age — one thinks of the Fricks, who left a legacy in the museum that bears their name — a group that was mainly nouveau riche. But the aestheticism of their French counterparts was more pronounced. In due course, they would leave their collections to national museums or turn their own grand mansions into museums. To get some notion of the sheer opulence of these collections, one has only to visit the Musée de Camondo, once the family’s Paris residence. All this ostentation of wealth in the collections elicited contradictory responses from those who considered themselves Français de souche, authentic native French. As the great Jewish collectors became public benefactors, they were appreciated by some for contributing to French culture. Others, predictably,
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