Orientalizing the Jew

Julie Kalman

Description

Orientalizing the Jew shows how French travelers depicted Jews in the Orient and then brought these ideas home to orientalize Jews living in their homeland during the 19th century. Julie Kalman draws on narratives, personal and diplomatic correspondence, novels, and plays to show how the "Jews of the East" featured prominently in the minds of the French and how they challenged ideas of the familiar and the exotic. Portraits of the Jewish community in Jerusalem, romanticized Jewish artists, and the wealthy Sephardi families of Algiers come to life. These accounts incite a necessary conversation about Jewish history, the history of anti-Jewish discourses, French history, and theories of Orientalism in order to broaden understandings about Jews of the day.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Pilgrimage to the Holy Land Within
2. Travel and Intimacy
3. The Kings of Algiers
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes
Index

Sujets

• Jewish
• HISTORY
• Histoire
• Jews
• Jewish studies
• History of Europe
• French Revolution
• France
• Europe

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 16 janvier 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253024343
• Langue: English

Extrait

ORIENTALIZING THE JEW
THE MODERN JEWISH EXPERIENCE
Deborah Dash Moore and Marsha L. Rozenblit, editors Paula Hyman, founding coeditor
ORIENTALIZING THE JEW
Religion, Culture, and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century France
Julie Kalman
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
2017 by Julie Kalman
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-02422-0 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-253-02427-5 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-02434-3 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
To the memory of my father
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Pilgrimage to the Holy Land Within
2 Travel and Intimacy
3 The Kings of Algiers
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
T HIS BOOK OCCUPIED eight busy years of my life, taking in one job and then another, and a move from Sydney down the East Coast of Australia, back home to Melbourne. This book began life when I was at the University of New South Wales, in the hedonistic Eastern Suburbs of Sydney. There, my colleagues Ruth Balint, Stefania Bernini, Zora Simic, Nick Doumanis, and Martyn Lyons helped me see this project through its early stages. In 2012, I moved home to Melbourne, to take up a post at Monash University. Here, Karen Auerbach, Clare Corbould, Daniella Doron, Clare Monagle, Susie Protschky, and Christina Twomey offered insights and encouragements to see the book through to its current state. I wish, also, to thank Ian Coller, Helen Davies, Peter McPhee, Pam Pilbeam, and Maurice Samuels, for their collegiality and generosity. Eitan Bar-Yosef cast a critical, thoughtful eye over chapter 1 . Elizabeth Gralton wrestled with my occasionally indulgent writing, always remaining polite, and Veronica Langberg tracked down long undisturbed documents. Daniella Doron and David Feldman both read a full draft of the manuscript. Daniella s arrival at Monash, and in Australia, has boosted the population of scholars of French-Jewish history by 100 percent, but her presence here brings benefits that cannot be quantified. David Feldman is, quite simply, scholarly generosity personified. The three anonymous readers for the press provided engaged and insightful criticisms at an important late stage. My thanks go, also, to Deborah Dash Moore, Marsha Rozenblit, and Dee Mortensen at Indiana University Press. My work is much the richer for their input. The privilege of claiming responsibility for faults and weaknesses in the text, however, remains all mine.
Being a French historian in Australia makes one heavily reliant on travel funding. Vital support came from several sources, including the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture in New York, and the Australian Research Council.
Over the last eight years, equally vital support has come from Gary Rosengarten, and my thanks go to him. Over that time, our children have grown up, through babyhood, into toddlerdom, to the almost entirely fantastic adolescents that they now are, the world at their feet. I cannot claim that they have provided support in the writing of this book, in which they have consistently demonstrated not one jot of interest, but they are a gift for which I am immeasurably grateful, every day.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Arie Kalman. He survived some of the very worst of what the twentieth century had to offer, yet he never lost his great zest for life and for learning. I am still learning the significance, to me, of his example.
ORIENTALIZING THE JEW
Introduction
T HE AFTERMATH of Jewish emancipation was significant in nineteenth-century France. Jews, emancipated during the French Revolution, became central to questions of nationhood and citizenship raised by the same Revolution. 1 Jewish emancipation required the French to think about France in a radically new way, and this reconceptualization was reinforced by the new presence of Jews in public life. In nineteenth-century France, Jews were enjoying the benefits, as well as the responsibilities, of citizenship. They were moving into all areas of public life and making their way to urban centers, particularly Paris. In the nineteenth century, the Jewish population of Paris grew out of proportion to the growth of the city itself. An 1808 census counted 2,733 Jews living in the city. Thirty years later, this number had increased to 9,000, and this population was to quadruple over the next forty years. 2 The French had to get to know Jews all over again in this new context. They had to incorporate the reality of emancipated Jews into their understanding of what it meant to be French. What was a France that accorded citizenship to Jews? How did that France accord with one s own ideals? Jews could be used to elucidate questions of belonging and exclusion and thus of nationhood. Making sense of the presence of Jews in society was a fundamental part of making sense of the nineteenth century.
Elsewhere, too, could form a backdrop for these questions. Over the busy nineteenth century, punctuated by revolution, war, and regime change, many French looked to further shores to explore questions of identity and belonging. The Orient-for the purposes of this book, comprising North Africa and the Middle East-was a deeply significant elsewhere. French Catholic pilgrims, writers, and artists traveled through North Africa and part of today s Middle East. French bureaucrats were sent to these regions on diplomatic and trade missions. Many of these figures wrote lavishly and evocatively about their experiences.
But Jews were in the Orient, too. There were well-established Jewish communities, a mosaic of long-present Arabic and Berber-speaking Jews, and Jews who had fled the persecutions in Spain and Portugal. 3 These Jewish communities were living in the lands under Ottoman rule during the same period when the French were making forays into these regions. Through their pilgrimage and travel accounts, plays, novels, letters, and paintings, these French pilgrims, writers, and bureaucrats tell us that wherever they traveled in the Orient, they encountered the Jewish communities living there. Orientalizing the Jew brings these elements together: nineteenth-century France, Jewish emancipation, the ongoing discovery and definition of the Orient, and the concomitant discovery of Oriental Jews. Orientalizing the Jew places the Jew in the history of Orientalism.
As the political turmoil of the nineteenth century might suggest, the French did not necessarily agree on a model of nationhood, and this is reflected in the different ways they experienced the Orient. French Catholics went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. In Jerusalem, they visited the Jewish community. The best known of these pilgrims was arguably the celebrated Catholic writer Viscount Fran ois-Ren de Chateaubriand. In 1806, he received a substantial financial gift from the Russian tsarina, which he used to fund his travels around the Mediterranean, including a visit to Palestine. For him, Palestine was the Holy Land, and he traveled there as a pilgrim. When he explored Jerusalem, he discovered that city s Jewish community. Chateaubriand was living in the years immediately following the Revolution. Jews were now his nominal equals in society, yet the Romantic Catholicism to which he adhered taught that Jews should suffer eternal punishment for the deicide. In Jerusalem, Chateaubriand could replace Jews in the space his Catholic teaching told him they should occupy. So he created a fantasy of Jews who were degraded and subjugated, just as he wished they would be. A Catholic, committed to the idea of a Catholic France, Chateaubriand felt nothing but astonishment and contempt at the continued survival of Jerusalem s Jewish community. His 1811 book, Itin raire de Paris J rusalem (Journey from Paris to Jerusalem), was a best seller and compulsory reading for every pilgrim who followed in his footsteps.
Over the nineteenth century, an industry of Oriental travel accounts and artwork grew. Artists and writers traveled to the Orient to observe and depict it, and their guides and their hosts were most often Jews. Travelers painted the Jews they met and wrote about them. One such writer was Th ophile Gautier. In mid-nineteenth century Paris, Gautier sat at the center of a wide social, artistic circle. His closest friends were among the best-known figures in the extraordinary creative world that characterizes this time and place. As a writer, he was part of this world. He also worked as a critic, and in this sense, he stood outside this movement and commented on it. Gautier was extraordinarily prolific and wide ranging in his work. He wrote novels, plays, and librettos. He produced art. He wrote as a critic of art, plays, operas, ballet, and of a wide variety of written works. Through his criticism and his social networks, Gautier lets us into the artistic world of nineteenth-century Paris. Gautier