Proust’s Jewish Side, Brought to Light

In Proust, a Jewish Way, Antoine Compagnon, Blanche W. Knopf Professor of French and Comparative Literature, offers new insight into the author’s under-appreciated Jewish side. Compagnon traces Proust’s ties to the French Jewish community, examining his relations with his mother’s successful and assimilated family, the Weils. He explores how French Jews read and responded to Proust’s masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Challenging contemporary critics who perceive self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s work, Compagnon shows that many Jewish intellectuals and young Zionists admired and vigorously debated the novel, some seeing it as a source of pride in their Jewish identity. Compagnon also considers Proust’s portrayal of homosexuality, and how it relates to notions of Jewishness. Proust, a Jewish Way brings to light the world of Proust’s first Jewish readers, and how this can illuminate our reading of the novelist today.

Compagnon talks about his book with Columbia News, as well as his membership in the Académie française and his friendship with Roland Barthes.

Why did you decide to write this book?

Some readers perceive Jewish self-hatred or even antisemitism in Proust’s novel, In Search of Lost Time. To refute this anachronism, I considered: 1. The way the novel was first read in the Jewish community in the 1920s and 1930s, both within the mainstream Franco-Israelite organization and among the younger Zionist faction; 2. Proust’s relations with the highly successful family of his mother, the Weils, assimilated but respectful of the traditions.

My inquiry starts with a sentence that is interpreted diversely: “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.” The origin of that pronouncement was unknown. The book is a quest for its identity, with unexpected developments, even after its publication in France. In the end, we will learn that the sentence was inscribed by Proust in May or June of 1908, just when he was beginning to work on the Recherche, in the dedication to his friend Daniel Halévy of an article that can be considered a founding stone of the novel. That sentence summarizes Proust’s Jewish side.

Can you provide some examples from the book of how Jews and Zionists debated In Search of Lost Time, with some seeing it as a source of pride in their Jewish identity?

In 1922, the two main Jewish weeklies in Paris, Les Archives israélites and L’Univers israélite, ignored the passing of Proust, whose mother was Jewish, but who was raised a Catholic. On the other hand, several Zionist periodicals—Menorah in Paris, later Palestine, the voice of the Zionist Organization, and The Jewish Chronicle in London—published long obituaries praising the Jewish influence in Proust’s novel.

Young Zionists such as the novelist Albert Cohen and the poet André Spire asserted that Proust’s Jewish sensibility had allowed him to renew the tradition of the French analytical novel. They compared his relativism and his mobilist outlook to the style of Montaigne, also supposedly half-Jewish, and to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who was married to a cousin of Proust. Proust is omnipresent in the Revue juive, an ambitious cultural journal that was funded by the Zionist Organization in 1925.

What books have you read lately that you would recommend, and why?

I spent a good part of the summer reading, or rather re-reading, Kafka: The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, The Trial, The Castle, the Letters to Milena, etc., books that I read when I was a teenager, but very little since that time. It is only now that I feel I can understand them. There are benefits to aging; one reads better, more slowly. Of course, reading Kafka after having written on the Jewish side of Proust was a plus. When I first read Kafka, I had no idea that his Jewishness mattered.

What's next on your reading list?

A long syllabus of French books published in 2024, fiction and non-fiction. I am a member of the Académie française. We give more than 50 prizes each year for novels, poetry, philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, and so on. That entails a lot of reading in the fall and winter. The vote on the Grand Prix du Roman, a literary award, will take place in November. We now have a short list of a dozen titles. It is a great way of staying informed about the most important new books.

What's the most interesting thing you learned from a book recently?

That’s a tough question. Do I read books to learn things? I read newspapers, and I listen to podcasts to learn things. I read books to live other experiences, to reconfigure my understanding of the world, my insights into life. I recently re-read The Red and the Black by Stendhal, because I had mentioned in a book that it was the novel that had made the strongest impression on me, and I was questioned about that. I responded that I learned two things in that book when I read it at the age of 14, and these are the two most important things in life: What love is, and what power is. Since then, reading has only been stumbling on variations of both themes.

Are you teaching this semester?

I am on leave and miss teaching.

What else are you working on now?

I am working on a book about the year 1966, which I consider a turning point in modern France. After the end of the war in Algeria and decolonization, the baby-boomers invaded the universities. Major demographic, political, sociological, and cultural upheavals took place.

This was the year when 50% of French households owned a TV, the year the French started to have fewer children and work less, the year Godard filmed Masculin féminin, Foucault published The Order of Things, Lacan published his Écrits, and married women could buy and sell stock without the authorization of their husbands. I gave a course on 1966 a dozen years ago at the Collège de France. The time has come to write about it while I still have a modicum of energy.

Which three academics/writers, dead or alive, would you invite to a dinner party, and why?

I would certainly invite Roland Barthes, with whom I studied, who became a close friend, and who died young. Our conversations were interrupted too soon. I hope that, in my work of the last 40 years, I have been faithful to what I learned from him.

Then, from Columbia, Robert Merton, whom I met a couple of times after I joined this University in 1985. But it is only recently that I realized how great a thinker he was, and a poet, given the number of beautiful notions he promoted—unintended consequences, serendipity, the Matthew effect.

Finally, the three French writers that I studied most are Montaigne, Baudelaire, and Proust. Among them, Baudelaire is the one I would have liked to meet, because he was a dandy, a provocateur, and would spoil the party.