Happy as a Jew in France: Exoticism, Social Justice, and Cultural Activism in Franco-Jewish Literature

• In Event: Parochial No More: Jews and Literary Modernism

Abstract

This presentation explores how and why Franco-Jewish writers of distinct moments and movements might engage exoticism to interrogate aesthetic convention and French national narratives of liberty, fraternity, citizenship, and individual rights. In the tale “Tirtza,” Eugénie Foa (1796-1852) presents the brutal stoning of a Jewish child-bride in ancient Jerusalem. In her “La Kalissa” a young Jewish widow in Algeria, raped by a billeted French soldier, will be judged, condemned, and thrown to the sea, just as in the tale “Rachel,” the portrayal of the eponymous "woman writer" and her "civil servant-rabbi" uncle sounds alterity, as well as emancipatory discourses and the social power of narrative in the 1830s. Foa’s texts do not eschew religious themes, vocabulary, dominant stereotypes, nor the visions for a more perfect world implied in her less than perfect narrative ones.

Once again appealing to the exotic, the tales of Daniel Shornstein (1826-1879) and Vercors (1902-1991, AKA Jean Bruller) interrogate the well-worn and intriguing saying, “Happy as a Jew in France.” In his 1861, “The Marranos, a Spanish chronicle,” Shornstein glorifies the image of an emancipatory France as his characters risk life and limb to cross the border from Spain to France. Nearly a century later, publishing in the clandestine press in 1943, Vercors presents France as the dream destination of his eastern European hero in LA MARCHE À L'ÉTOILE (GUIDING STAR). Here, the happiness of French citizenship and equal rights takes a dramatic turn. The star of belonging that would lead Thomas Muritz to the land of universal liberty is displaced with the yellow star of shame and exclusion. While the hero’s journey ends in a dystopic but real occupied France of WWII, the tale nostalgically idealizes Republican and democratic France as that shining beacon, the beloved land of enlightened liberty.

Leaning on the previous examples, I will demonstrate how post-revolutionary discourses of aesthetic and social transformation (and specifically, Marcel Schwob's writings on terror) might help us to read these exotic tales as adventures in cultural activism that engage with issues of national versus Jewish identity, social justice, and individual and narrative agency.

Author

• Gayle Zachmann, University of Florida