The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity

By Jonathan Freedman

As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into Western European and Anglo-American cultural centers, they encountered a society obsessed with decadence. An avant-garde movement characterized by self-consciously artificial art and literature, philosophic pessimism, and an interest in nonnormative sexualities, decadence was also a smear, whereby Jews were viewed as the source of social and cultural decline. In The Jewish Decadence, Jonathan Freedman argues that Jewish engagement with decadence played a major role in the emergence of modernism and the making of Jewish culture from the 1870s to the present.
 
The first to tell this sweeping story, Freedman demonstrates the centrality of decadence to the aesthetics of modernity and its inextricability from Jewishness. Freedman recounts a series of diverse and surprising episodes that he insists do not belong solely to the past, but instead reveal that the identification of Jewishness with decadence persists today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226581118

Book preview

The Jewish Decadence

The Jewish Decadence

Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity

Jonathan Freedman

The University of Chicago Press     CHICAGO & LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58092-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58108-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-58111-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226581118.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Freedman, Jonathan, 1954– author.

Title: The Jewish decadence : Jews and the aesthetics of modernity / Jonathan Freedman.

Description: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020053635 | ISBN 9780226580920 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226581088 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226581118 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Decadence (Literary movement) | Civilization, Modern—Jewish influences.

Classification: LCC PN56.D45 F74 2021 | DDC 809/.911—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020053635

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my family and all who’ve cared for me,

with thanks to the friends who helped this book come to life

Contents

Preface, Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford

Introduction: Our Two-Step Is the Modern Decadence!

1   Qu’est-ce que c’est la décadence? And What Does It Have to Do with Jews?

2   Oscar Wilde among the Jews

3   Salomania and the Remaking of the Jewish Female Body from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop

4   Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust

5   Pessimism, Jewish Style: Jews Reading Schopenhauer from Freud to Bellow

6   Walter Benjamin’s Paris, Capital of Jewish Aesthetic Modernity

7   Dybbuks, Vampires, and Other Fin-de-Siècle Jewish Phantasms

Conclusion: The Deca-danse; or, The Afterlife of the Jewish Decadent

Notes

Index

Preface

The book in your hands is a labor of love. For upward of thirty years, Jonathan Freedman has brought news of the vital, resurgent, brilliant presence ofJewish life and thought in literature of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. In four monographs and multiple edited volumes, he has ranged across genres high and low—from the novels of Henry James and the films of Alfred Hitchcock to klezmer bands and French cabarets. A keen interpreter and historian of criticism, he has shown how Jewish intellectuals shaped their times and the institutions we still inhabit today, despite the forces arrayed against their presence and their points of view. His uncontainable gift for language brings art, culture, and a vast cast of characters to life on the page. As few critics can, he connects his readers to his ideas and subjects with the appeal of a friend, by turns gossipy, argumentative, erudite, and lyrical.

We are delighted to welcome The Jewish Decadence into the world alongside Jonathan Freedman’s previous monographs: Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture; The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America; and Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity. Returning here to his enduring interest in aestheticism, Freedman identifies and constellates traces in the archives of cultural history to show how Jewish creativity and Jewish experience flowed into and reshaped the mainstream of Anglo-American and French culture at the dawn of the twentieth century. Ranging widely, he tracks the ways Jewish thinkers, writers, performers, and their familiars, from Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt to Marcel Proust and the creators of Betty Boop, found rich materials for self-making in fin-de-siècle European decadence. Freedman renders them with an incomparably humane imagination, interpreting their struggles and glories as defiant responses to an aesthetic movement that saw decay and decline in their very ways of being.

To preface this joyful book is also to acknowledge a loss. Just after the manuscript of The Jewish Decadence was sent to editors at the University of Chicago Press, Jonathan Freedman suffered a catastrophic stroke. It left him unable to bring the book through the publication process himself, and though we can celebrate its publication with him, he cannot be the full participant in its reception that he would surely have been.

In addition to celebrating this book, our task and our privilege is to thank the many people whose hands touched it as we carried the manuscript, together, to publication. First among them is Sara Blair, who, along with Jonathan himself, gave us permission to take on the project of manuscript preparation. Sara’s intellectual companionship, as conversation- and life-partner to Jonathan, marks many of these pages, even as her advocacy and care for Jonathan in the last three years have ensured that he, and the book, survive.

Rona Johnston was our copyeditor extraordinaire. Her passion for precision, devoted bibliographic legwork, and eye for translation ensured that the book’s underpinnings were documented and strong. Her work on the early chapters streamlined the introductions of the book’s main protagonists so that the critical narrative could develop smoothly. What we came to call, lovingly, Jonathan’s fire-hose sentences, remain, their wonders only slightly tweaked so that we can all keep up with him.

Hayley O’Malley gathered images and permissions with diligence, ingenuity, and good cheer. Ethan Goldstein expertly provided some needed omnibus notes and adjustments in the discussions of Proust, responding to the comments of one of the press’s generous readers, Maurice Samuels, who connected us with Ethan and helped ensure we were on the right track in revisions related to the French materials. Anita Norich checked Yiddish sources and details. The University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Department of English Language and Literature provided generous financial support, with Jane Johnson working her bureaucratic magic to help make that happen. Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford together coordinated the work and reviewed the manuscript at each stage, working both with this group of collaborators and with the press. Finally, Alan Thomas and James Toftness at the University of Chicago Press were open to this unorthodox process of manuscript preparation, trusting us to respond to readers’ reports and making it possible for Jonathan’s years of research and writing to bear fruit in publication.

The Jewish Decadence is Jonathan Freedman’s scholarly gift to readers, and to the literature and culture he has loved, studied, taught, and kibitzed about throughout his brilliant career. Its publication will make it possible for us to keep listening and responding to his illuminations and provocations for years to come.

Daniel Hack and Amy Hungerford

Introduction

Our Two-Step Is the Modern Decadence!

I can best account for the origins of this book by taking us back in time. In 1908 a Yiddish periodical called Der kibitser, published on New York’s famed Lower East Side, printed a little poem. Parodying the group of earnest poets and writers who called themselves di yunge—the youth—the lyric, speaking in their voice, cheerfully enumerates as it embraces the charges that were leveled against them. Here is Ruth Wisse’s translation:

Call us Yunge,

Call us goyim

As you will.

Write reviews, write criticism,

To your fill.

No! We’ll not perform

Tradition’s dance.

Our two-step is the modern

Decadence!

From the void

From aery nothing

From the abyss

Lacking form, without much grace

Or artifice,

Our verse, too proud perhaps,

And happenstance

Will tunefully accompany our

Decadence!¹

As a student of the fin-de-siècle imagination—the subject of my first book—and of the response of Jews to high and popular culture—the subject of the next two—I was struck as perhaps no other critic would be by the Kibitser’s conflation of Jews and decadent art. And it was not just the fact of that conflation that caught my eye. I was impressed by the sophistication of the response, for the poem not only references decadence in a general sense, but also invokes a crucial piece of decadent imagery, the dance. As Frank Kermode reminded us long ago, for the likes of Joris-Karl Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Symons, and early W. B. Yeats, dance—and particularly the dancing woman—serves as a powerful metonym for art, for poetry, for a louche sexuality inflecting both.²

The Kibitser lampoon doesn’t just reflect a high-level knowledge of the commonplaces of soi-disant decadence; it also comments on them. The oxymoronic trope the modern Decadence is no doubt intended as a comic conflation of opposing literary impulses and cultural traditions, yet at the same time it’s enormously perceptive in its understanding of the role of decadence within the fin-de-siècle at large. With its interest in what we would call alternative lifestyles, its fascination with death, its resolute resistance to Whiggish narratives of cultural progress or Enlightenment narratives of the triumph of reason, its formalist understanding of art and adoration of ornament, its conflation of art and life—decadence (and its ancillary cognates aestheticism or fin-de-siècle) may best be thought of as the beachhead of what we call modernity, at least in that guise under which modernity masquerades as modernism.

But whence, I wondered, came the familiarity shown by these Lower East Siders—shoemakers or factory workers by day, poets and polemicists by night—with the highest of high cultural figures like Oscar Wilde, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and Ernest Dowson, and with a literary and cultural movement alien to, if not seemingly contemptuous of, their lives and experiences? Was this sophisticated and wide-ranging knowledge a significant cultural indicator or just a matter of a few Lower East Side cultureniks showing off? More generally, was their response part of a greater and more meaningful movement in Jewish culture at large, extending beyond New York or even America to the established and establishing centers of Jewish thought and cultural practice? And if so, did it have a broad effect in the gentile world in which many Jews were moving, and to which many of them fully assimilated?

The more I have worked on these issues, the more I have come to answer these last questions in the affirmative and (more importantly) to see how rich with implication all these questions prove to be. The conjunction of decadence, aestheticism, and their cognate and correlative cultural movements was indeed also apparent in other centers of Jewish cultural production and dissemination—in London, Vienna, Warsaw, Paris, Berlin, Odessa. This makes intuitive sense. As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals made their way into metropolitan places of cultural production and exchange, they engaged fully with a culture obsessed with decadence in its widest set of manifestations, literary, philosophical, medical, and political. What surprised me as I worked on the subject was just how fruitful that response was in the making of Jewish cultural life—and beyond. From Caesare Lombroso or Max Nordau through Sigmund Freud and his circle, from Proust to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Italo Svevo through Saul Bellow, from S. An-Sky through A. B. Yehoshua, from Claude Cahun through Patrick Modiano, the tropes, figurations, imaginative structures, concerns, obsessions, and topoi that defined this cultural formation were powerfully expressed, contested, and reworked by Jews at every stage of cultural and social articulation, and Jewish artists, writers, and intellectuals emerged from this encounter with vivid and consequential work of their own. And more: cultural entrepreneurs and idealists from Jewish backgrounds, working at the same time and often in tandem with these figures, helped to create institutions that guided, nurtured, and supported the aestheticist avant-garde and helped steer the transformation to a culture that saw itself as the embodiment of the modern—whether individuals like Murray Marks, the Dutch-born importer who kicked off the blue-and-white china craze that was so important to Pre-Raphaelitism, the career of Wilde, and the aesthetic of Whistler; or groups of Jewish intellectuals who clustered in little magazines like La revue blanche in Paris, which mixed poems by Verlaine and criticism by the young Marcel Proust with avid pro-Dreyfus commentary; or the Jewish patrons and art dealers and houses in Paris and Berlin and Vienna that sustained the multiform and various movements that defined Impressionist and Postimpressionist art.

Although, appropriately enough given the decadent tendency toward ornament and arabesque, there will be many twists and turns along the way, it’s this multiform and complex process I try to trace in the argument that follows. Let me sketch its general shape and implications here. As I’ve given talks drawn from this work, and talked with colleagues, friends, students, and even book editors about it, questions have arisen that complicate further my understanding of this phenomenon. Why, for example, use the term decadence? Indeed, the very term (like the period) is a conceptual mishmash. If you asked a cultivated observer in America, England, Western Europe, Italy, or the Russian Empire what the term decadence meant, they would have both a very specific and a very general nest of concepts in mind. Specifically, they would probably tell you it refers to a group of poets, writers, artists, and critics whose self-consciously artificial work was obsessed with sex, death, decline, or decay. Decadent art and literature, the more daring would admit, celebrated (sometimes in coded terms) male homosexuality (Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray), lesbianism (Catulle Mendès’s Méphistophéla), and cross-dressing (Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin), not to mention necrophilia (Edgar Allan Poe), sadism (Gustave Moreau, Wilde), fetishism (the Pre-Raphaelites, and for that matter just about everyone), and so on. More cerebral types would have noted that this sex and gender play was just the tip of the cultural iceberg, that decadence in the local or general sense included among its adherents a bewildering set of literary, artistic, and philosophical movements, cliques, and cabals, most of them written in capital letters: Symbolism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Impressionism (literary, artistic, both at the same time), Aestheticism, Parnassianism, Acmeism, Secessionism, and so on. More generally still, they would have connected decadence with a number of larger notions and forms—not just social decline à la Max Nordau, but also philosophic pessimism à la Arthur Schopenhauer, chromatic and sensual music à la Frédéric Chopin and Richard Wagner (especially the lush passages in Tannhäuser, which no less a critic than Baudelaire instanced as prime examples of emerging decadence), or enigmatic, fantastical symbolic art à la Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon and Gustav Klimt. As Charles Bernheimer points out, even Naturalism à la Zola and George Moore, with its emphasis on human degradation, genetically inherited degeneration, and graphic sexuality, bears more than a passing resemblance to Nineties decadence.³ Given this multiple set of injunctions and imperatives, imaginative experiments, and conflicting group dynamics, why not write, as I did in an earlier book, about this movement under the heading aestheticism, or perhaps the general term fin-de-siècle—especially given the loaded and frequently misleading senses in which decadence was used by shocked, if fascinated, contemporaries?

While aestheticism, aesthetics, and art-making are very much at the center of my concerns, and while, like that culture itself, I will be thinking of decadence in the context of the fin-de-siècle at large, invoking these other terms, I have come to feel, distracts from the dynamics of the moment I’m trying to describe. As Jews entered European and Anglo-American cultures in the long fin-de-siècle, they faced a vexing dilemma. When they confronted decadence the cultural movement, they also encountered decadence the cultural smear: the claim that Jews were themselves exemplars, if not bearers, of cultural and social decline. With roots in German philosophy and support from the burgeoning eugenics movement, with an impetus from reactionary political movements and from established medical authorities, the identification of Jews as decadent took two opposing forms. On the one hand, they were seen as decayed representatives of a declining race, atavistically clinging to their outmoded rituals and superseded faith. On the other, they were identified as citified, hystericized, sexually dysfunctional avatars of a degenerate futurity.

The moment presented acculturating Jews with a discursive double whammy—and they responded with a multiplicity all their own. Some denounced their denouncers—Max Nordau’s popular screed Degeneration, for example, discovered degeneracy in just about every cultural production of non-Jewish Europe, with the implicit agenda of clearing Jews of the charge of racialized degeneracy, if also with the effect of adding to the notoriety of the movement it set out to denounce. Others internalized this imaginative tendency. Philosopher and cultural critic Otto Weininger took the decadent image of the androgyne and used it to define the Jewish male as a man/woman (and led the way for partly Jewish Proust, witty and profound here as ever, to use the man/woman topos to interrogate the structure of desire in the non-Jewish social order at large). Still others adopted the topoi of the fin-de-siècle to other ends, like Freud, who transformed arch-anti-Semite Schopenhauer’s spectacularly pessimistic worldview of universal decline into his own notions of the drive, the power of Thanatos, and the elaboration of a pessimism that is as metaphysical as it is temperamental. Some used this conjunction as a way to slough off their Jewishness, to craft a new identity as an aesthete, a man or woman of letters, a person of the highest culture and taste irrespective of ethnic or religious origin or identity. Others took it as an occasion to argue for a new form of Jewish identity altogether, reanimating their art with their connection to Jewishness or building new cultural institutions in which they could simultaneously argue for boundary-challenging art and Jewish identity politics, whether Zionist or Dreyfusard in orientation.

Whatever path these Jewish critics and artists pursued, it will be my suggestion that responding to a body of thought that saw them as the cause or linchpin of decline and degeneracy generated much of the energy that fueled Jews’ cultural projects and granted them entrée into the zones of high, middle, and low culture between 1870 and 1925. At the same time, however, this ascription enhanced their notoriety in the eyes of reactionaries, traditionalists, and, ultimately, fascists, for whom the combination of decadence and Jewishness was manifested in an all-purpose attack on degeneracy that notoriously was directed at Jews and at avant-gardes across the board, and especially at gay men and lesbians. The give-and-take shaped the complex battles fought in this period over such questions as the nature and provenance of art; of populations, eugenically understood or not; of sexuality and its vicissitudes.

Another complication to the seemingly straightforward narrative is that it might prove to be dismayingly teleological—the objection being that my implicit narrative (Jews came, they imbibed, they transformed the cultural productions of decadence) is deeply opposed to the spirit of decadence itself. The imaginative vision of decadence reminds us to distrust a Whiggish view of a history that has not necessarily moved in the direction of enlightenment, much less Enlightenment. At its core is a sense of the profound loss of a cultural and artistic glory that expressed redeemed human, and hence social, relations, as in John Ruskin’s vision of the Middle Ages or Walter Pater’s of the Renaissance, both of which were so influential for Proust. And works of this dispensation remind us that the cult of progress obscures the byways and hidden nooks of history. Hence artists and dramatists like Moreau and Wilde focused on the court of Herod rather than the Second Temple; influential shapers of the decadent ideology hymned the decline of Rome rather than the glory of Empire—or they turned away from the classical tradition altogether, to Hellenistic Greece or medieval Picardy or the Levant or, as evidenced in Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, to the must-be-destroyed Carthage (and, to continue with my Jews-in-culture theme, the operatic version of Flaubert’s novel was composed by Jewish composer Ernest Reyer and performed by Jewish-born soprano Lucienne Bréval). Moreover, the process I am describing was a diverse and contradictory one, sustained across emerging and transforming national barriers and linguistic systems, accomplished in so-called marginal languages like Hebrew and Yiddish as well as established ones like French and English; and undertaken across developing and porous cultural hierarchies that were in this period reticulating into zones we might call high-, middle-, and low-brow. As Matthew Potolsky has argued, decadence is perhaps the first transnational, cosmopolitan literary/cultural formation in the West and its adjacent precincts that understood itself as such.⁴ Narrativizing, in any case, involves simplifying this process, smoothing it out to just one or two national or cultural contexts, rather than encountering these broad and contradictory imaginative productions in their full complexity.

I do acknowledge these two difficulties. I want to respond methodologically to the first, the critique of a premature teleology, and in terms of my subject matter to the second, the issue of cultural hierarchies. With respect to the former, I try to cleave to the decadent example by stressing—by dwelling on, even—the rich idiosyncrasies of individual texts in whatever cultural venue in which they might be lodged. I do so not only because the idea of detaching the practices of close reading from the Protestant framework in which they originated (Ruskin and Pater) and applying them as well to the social and the psyche (Proust and Freud) is a product of the time and milieu I am focusing on here, but also because the texts in question themselves participate in this protocol by embedding complexities of interpretation in their own modes of articulation. That is to say that even if I can’t tame my own yen for narrative, the texts I am dealing with—involuted, detail-obsessed, spatially oriented, formally extravagant—may serve to keep it in check, and although what I offer here is something of a series of episodes in a cultural history that has not to my knowledge been previously told, my narrative will not hesitate to pause over specific moments in specific texts—visual as well as verbal—as a way of making the arguments as richly studded with the beauty of the specific occasion as are those occasions themselves.

As for the latter concern, with the question of major versus minor literatures and languages posed so urgently by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,⁵ I have done what I can to supplement my (Western-) Eurocentrism, since I too believe that Jewish responses to decadence occur not just among the Westernizing intellectuals but also among Yiddish- and Hebrew-speaking poets, novelists, and intellectuals responding to European culture and then, later, devoting themselves to the making of a new culture in Palestine and Israel. In their work decadence frequently has a different feel than in Western European contexts, not only because it responds to literary and cultural formations emanating from St. Petersburg or the Pale of Settlement, as well as from Paris and Vienna, but also because it responds so immediately to a set of agendas that are different in nature and tonality. Michael Stanislawski has influentially suggested that the matrix of fin-de-siècle aestheticism and cosmopolitanism shaped the major figures of early Zionism—Max Nordau and Ze’ev Jabotinsky in particular, and one can add the founder of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, to the list, not least because he famously invented the concept of Zionism while attending in Paris a performance of Tannhäuser.⁶ Similarly, Hamutal Bar-Yosef has traced the links between European decadent poetry and criticism and Hebrew poetry—including with the first great national poet of Israel, Hayim Nahman Bialik—and then suggests Israeli literature’s reengagement with decadent tropes in the 1950s without its authors’ or critics’ being full conscious of the original context of these elements.⁷

Important as these critical interventions are, they only begin to scratch the surface of the connections between the Jewish cultural project and the aesthetic and cultural avant-gardes of the 1890s. I’ll argue in what follows, for example, that there are elements in S. An-Sky’s famous play The Dybbuk that don’t make sense unless one reads them in the context of the fin-de-siècle culture An-Sky experienced in Paris, where he lived at the apogee of the Decadent movement, between 1892 and 1898. Isaac Bashevis Singer returns repeatedly to Schopenhauer in order to understand the incomprehensibly cruel events of the preceding decades, particularly in his great (and oddly neglected) philosophical novel Shadows on the Hudson. Similarly, the great contemporary Israeli writer A. B. Yehoshua turns in one of his finest novels, The Liberated Bride (2001), to the thematics of the last fin-de-siècle (especially its fascination with incest and exogamy) and, more crucially, to An-Sky’s The Dybbuk, a central text of the Jewish decadence, to explore the dynamics of race and desire that course through Israel a hundred years later.

In surveying these disparate cultural sites, it’s important to stress not their independence but rather the ways that they were produced by shifting networks of cultural exchange in the wake of the massive transfers of people and intellectual energies that accompanied Jewish emancipation, emigration, and aliyah-fication. These shifts define new patterns of culture-making but also repurpose older ones. Try as one might, for example, it’s impossible to escape the centrality of Paris to the conjunction I am tracing—Pascale Casanova’s nomination of Paris as the focal point of the worldwide twentieth-century Republic of Letters is at times ludicrously self-validating, but with respect to the fin-de-siècle it has an undeniable logic.⁸ That being said, when considered under the sign of Jewish decadence, Paris doesn’t just function as a cultural beacon; rather, its own culture is revealed as being actively transformed by the waves of Jewish immigration, external or internal—whether temporary (like An-Sky) or permanent (like the Polish-born Natanson family, the sons of which created the crucial avant-garde and Dreyfusard periodical La revue blanche). Similarly, Berlin, Vienna, and even Bayreuth take on new symbolic and actual valences when they meet lines of contact that stretch from the Pale to Jerusalem rather than from the Pale to Paris. So while I hope to honor my commitment to the so-called periphery (hardly peripheral from its own point of view, of course), my chief focus will be on the metropole, morphing and transforming along with farther-flung places.

The question of mass culture I raise is, I think, one of the more unexpected issues that arises from the Jewish/decadent conflation. The late years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth were those in which popular theater metastasized into mass entertainment; when the film industry grew out of nothing to become a commanding force across nations and cultures; when new technologies and enlarged readerships created a mass market for periodicals and fiction; when the invention of the phonograph made Tin Pan Alley a cultural power. Decadence was, to be sure, largely a high-cultural phenomenon; indeed, its promotion of art to a near-cultish status may be said to have served as a powerful reaction-formation to the rise of mass culture. But the cultural distinctions here are pretty hard to draw. Decadence itself became an object of mass-cultural fascination, as figures like Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley systematically crossed over the line between high-art affectation and low-culture titillation and as visual artists like Moreau and Redon in France and the Pre-Raphaelites in England used their experimental styles and shocking subject matter to make a name for themselves outside the traditional avenues of patronage and exhibition, and as—on the other side of the cultural coin—filmmakers and tunesmiths played with the tropes of decadence in works serious (Alla Nazimova’s extravagant 1923 film version of Salomé) and not-so-much (Irving Berlin’s 1909 song hit Sadie Salome (Go Home)).

Jews were involved in this process up and down the line, and in a number of contradictory ways. With respect to traditional high culture, for example, Jewish art patrons in London and Paris cultivated Impressionist and decadent art rather than that of more established artists, just as they were soon to do with the Postimpressionists. As I shall suggest in greater detail below, Jewish art dealers in London and Paris helped create new patterns of patronage and payment that sustained an artistic avant-garde in both capitals and was soon imitated in Berlin and Vienna. At the same time Jews, who had long found success in the increasingly popular theater in France, merged decadent stylings and artistic genius to create a new role of actress-cum-celebrity—I am thinking here obviously of Sarah Bernhardt, at once idol of the aesthetes and adopter of their styles, but I could cite a whole slew of Jewish actors and actresses who functioned as much as the muse of the newspaper, to quote Henry James’s dismissive putdown of Bernhardt.⁹ Jewish actresses and stars like Alla Nazimova, Ida Rubinstein, and Theda Bara (née Theodosia Goodman, in Cincinnati, Ohio) all also played the role of Salome or its variants (the vamp), with important consequences in theater and movies as well as in the (Jewish-dominated) fashion industry.

That being said, one reason to give in to my own innate desire for narrative and teleology is that, to give the argument one last turn of the screw, the encounter between the discourses of decadence in their broadest manifestations and the imaginative productions of Western Jews doesn’t stop in the 1920s, with the rise of high modernism, on the one hand, or campy cinematic extravaganzas, on the other. Rather, it continues to ramify throughout the twentieth century, even as the rise of Nazism gave hideous new expression to the Jew/decadent equation, the death camps inscribed a horrific model of what the death-drive could look like, and Zionism and the birth of Israel gave rise to new, explicitly anti-decadent possibilities of Jewish self-expression. The imaginative constructions wrought in this three-way encounter between Jews, the culture of decadence, and a putative modernity are remarkably persistent over time, although put to radical new uses in the post-Holocaust era. I’ll make the argument for this more fully below with respect not only to Singer but to French chanteur, poet, and roustabout Serge Gainsbourg (properly eulogized by no less a figure than François Mitterrand as a successor to Verlaine and Baudelaire) and conclude with a Nobel Prize winner haunted by Jewish dandyism and collaborationism, Patrick Modiano.

In asserting the centrality of Jewish decadence for an understanding of modern Jewish culture, and modernity itself, I am certainly not suggesting that the interaction of Jews and Jewishness with mainstream European culture originated in the fin-de-siècle. Through the whole history of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment culture, Jews have been active in cultural production and prominent among objects of aesthetic interest on the part of non-Jews. In the nineteenth century, fiction by writers like Eugénie Foa in France and Berthold Auerbach in Germany was a veritable laboratory for the articulation of Jewish modernity, representing Jewishness in a language and literary style familiar to a non-Jewish reading public while also thematizing the social, economic, and erotic dimensions of Jewish acculturation.¹⁰ And as European writers like Honoré de Balzac faced what Richard Terdiman has characterized as the semiotic disquiet of the rapidly changing nineteenth-century cityscape (when the sign, like Baudelaire’s swan, had escaped from its cage¹¹), Jewishness became a figure for the increasing dominance of spectacle and artifice.¹² The two most common roles for Jewish characters in nineteenth-century French literature are prostitute and banker, both semiotic professions par excellence that traffic in the creeping commodification of Parisian life.¹³ Over the course of the nineteenth century, the belle juive, which from Walter Scott onward had been exoticized as the sublime type of Oriental beauty, metamorphosed into Baudelaire’s affreuse juive, whose mortifying eroticism indexed and engendered modernity’s decay.¹⁴ Jewish writers, seeking to maintain sociocultural affinities with both Jewish and European society, confronted these tropes in their fiction and criticism alike, making art into a potent arena for self-fashioning and self-assertion.¹⁵

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Romanticism was a particularly intensive site of entanglement between Jewish cultural production and gentile tropes of Jewishness.¹⁶ The composer Fromental Halévy’s iconic 1835 opera La Juive was a major success, a staple of the tradition of French grand opera that was performed over six hundred times in the first century after its debut.¹⁷ Along with other Jewish composers like Giacomo Meyerbeer, Halévy pioneered and popularized the genre of French grand opera, and in the mid-nineteenth century the comic operettas of Jewish composer Jacques Offenbach would contribute to the formation of a myth of the Parisian boulevards as a site of cultural modernity.¹⁸

Halévy’s example inspired another Jewish artist in her navigation of the French cultural mainstream: Elisa Félix, a performer of neoclassical theater, who, in an explicit homage to the titular character of La Juive, adopted Rachel as her stage name.¹⁹ The effect, precisely as Rachel had intended, was to make her career into both a symbol of and a referendum on the Jewish appropriation of the most treasured artifacts of French culture. The example of Rachel demonstrates how the participation of Jewish-identified artists in popular and high artistic forms was an aesthetic flashpoint for debates about Jewish acculturation and European universalism at a moment when Romantic philosophers sought to articulate a unified national Geist. Jewish art, in other words, was never only about Jews or Jewishness, but always also about European culture writ large.²⁰

From the late eighteenth century onward, then, Jews not only participated in European culture but also helped to define its parameters and central myths. But I argue in this book that something distinctive is happening with the discourse of decadence, something definitive for the social and aesthetic crises of modernity. By the 1880s, with the massive movement of impoverished Jews from the Russian Pale into the cities of Western Europe and the rise of political anti-Semitism across Europe, the tensions in the desired bourgeois Judeo-European synthesis had become apparent.²¹ At the same time, the material and cultural transformations that writers like Balzac and Baudelaire had chronicled in real time (recall that much of Baudelaire’s Le cygne is written in the present tense: Paris change!) had been largely accomplished with the rise of mass society, rendering the commodifying drive seemingly irresistible in art and life. The flâneur, for instance, who for midcentury writers was an emblem of creative possibility, becomes an alienated figure of mass society’s anomie.²² The discourse of decadence, then, is an attempt to grapple with the nineteenth century after what were seen as its worst drives had been realized.

For Jewish artists, the desire to synthesize Jewish and European identities that runs through the work of writers like Grace Aguilar or Moses Mendelssohn no longer seemed attainable amid the fin-de-siècle’s racialist political turn. Though ineluctably identified with Jewishness, many of the artists discussed in this book lacked a strong foundation of Jewish culture upon which to draw. If their predecessors sought to invent strong Jewish identities, the Jewishness written about and lived by my subjects here operates in many cases on a more tropological or figural level. As with much else in this book, their complicated relationship to Jewishness is best illustrated through an example: an 1841 short story by Godchaux Baruch Weil, who wrote under the pen name Ben-Lévi, entitled, appropriately, Grandeur et décadence d’un taleth polonais (Rise and Fall of a Polish Prayer Shawl).²³ Barely two pages long, Ben-Lévi’s story chronicles shifts in Jewish identification by following the transgenerational itinerary of a tallit (a fringed shawl worn by observant Jews during prayer) as it passes from the pious Père Jacob to his non-observant but reverent son Jacobi (perhaps an oblique reference to Meyerbeer, who, like Jacobi, italianized his name from Jakob to Giacomo), and finally to Jacobi’s own son, Jacoubé. For the elder Jacob, the tallit is a precious talisman, marking sacred moments of birth, marriage, and death "like a veil placed between this