Unveiling the synagogue beyond proust's cathedral

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Notes

André Benhaïm is an assistant Professor of French at Princeton University. He specializes in 20th-century French Literature, with a strong interest in Francophone Literature, especially from North Africa and the Mediterranean. His main research areas include questions of identity, memory, and aesthetics, with a particular focus on judeity. He has published articles on Marcel Proust (many of them comparative), Albert Cohen, and Emile Zola. Benhaïm was the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Revue des Sciences Humaines entitled “Petits coins. Lieux de Memoire” (2001), and has recently completed the co-edition of Ecrivains de la Préhistoire (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, Nov. 2004), a book on the presence of prehistory in modern French literature, culture and thought. He has recently written a book on Proust's aesthetical and ethical rapport with the human face to be published by the Presses Univérsitaires du Septentrion.

 See Denis Saurat who speaks of “Le style du rabbin commentant les Ecritures.” The other analogies are made most importantly by Juliette Hassine (Esotérisme et Ecriture) and also Stéphane Zagdanski who reminds us that Proust did know the name of the Zohar which he writes in one of his notebooks saying: “Occulted, it is the place for all blessings” (21).

 I will subsequently refer to Proust's masterpiece as La Recherche, and to his English translation title: Remembrance of Things Past.

 In Le Figaro, on August 16, 1904, Proust publishes “La Mort des cathédrales” where he fears that “France has changed into a beach where giant chiseled shells seem lost, drained of their former life” (my translation). In this article, published well before La Recherche, he expresses his concern that the Briant law on the separation of Church and State, the project of a strongly anticlerical government, abandons the cathedrals. Proust comes to their defense and makes himself the champion of their survival. Under the title, “En mémoire des églises assassinées” [“In Memory of Assassinated Churches”] Proust reprinted in Pastiches et Mélanges all of his essays on cathedrals and churches, including his long preface to Ruskin's The Bible of Amiens.

 In a letter to J. de Gaigneron dated August 1, 1919 Proust writes, “And when you tell me about cathedrals, I cannot help but feel moved by an intuition that makes you guess what I have never told anyone, and that I write here for the first time: that I intended to give to each part of my book the title: Porch I, Apse Windows, etc., so to respond in advance to the stupid criticism that my books lack structure, whereas I will show you that their only merits lie in the solidity of the tiniest parts” (Correspondance 18: 359).

 Fraisse goes on: this “somewhat disappointing end of sentence … at least fully justifies the recent studies on female fashion in the world of Remembrance. Perhaps substituting a dress for a cathedral is due to the fact that the metaphors of fabrics, sewing, and fashion came last in the writing of the novelist, whereas the image of the cathedral is the oldest … But, in continuity, the work will chiefly remain a cathedral … The cathedral will be the model of the finished book” (115).

 I mean the uncanny as Freud's Unheimlichkeit, the unexpected emergence of strangeness within the familiar.

 Mâle quotes a sentence of Saint-Augustine's Cities of God that would serve “as a motto for all [his] exegesis: ‘The Old Testament is nothing but the New covered with a veil, and the New is nothing but the Old unveiled’” (136).

 See Dahan.

 See Seiferth.

 The author explains that the Balbec church is comprised of at least four sources: the church of Vezelay for its “almost Persian” side, the legendary church of Is as well as the Amiens cathedral for the underwater aspect; and especially Notre-Dame de Paris for its Sainte-Anne portal, model for the porch at Balbec (227–228). Fraisse mentions Notre-Dame especially to say that Proust uses it as inspiration “to create in the novel the sculptures of the Virgin, announced as the most famous part of the church [in Balbec].” Yet of the four edifices mentioned, Notre-Dame de Paris is the only one where the allegory of the blind Synagogue appears (left of the South door, called “Sainte-Anne”). We can therefore add that Proust must have also used the Parisian cathedral to translate the Synagogue – a part no doubt less famous than the Virgin of Balbec, but as evocative and spectacular.

 Using “Synagogue” in this sense is, besides, an abuse of language done by analogy with “Church” that can designate the community of Christian believers. Judaism traditionally understands “synagogue” only as the physical space (the very building) of the assembly of Jewish people for liturgical, religious purposes – “assembly” being the literal sense of the word which comes from the Greek sunagogê translating the Hebrew knesset.

 What he knows about the synagogue rites seems to come only from external sources, as shows the pun he makes, in a ca. Jan. 10, 1908 letter to Mme Straus, about the shofar when complaining about his noisy neighbors, the Sauphars: “Monsieur Straus told me that in olden days the Sauphars were the noisy trumpets that awakened the dead for the Judgment. There is no real difference with those of today” (Correspondance 8: 28, my translation). With this pun we could see Proust revealing his ignorance both of the usage (shofars were still in use in his time, not just “in olden days”) and of the actual name of the ritual object.

 See Maurice-Ruben Hayoun and Dominique Jarrassé.

 For more on a marrano Proust, see in particular the wonderful reading of Juliette Hassine's Marranisme et Hébraisme.

 As he wrote to his mother on Sept. 22, 1899, about a certain M. Galard who had said to him, “You're M. Weil's nephew, with an air of unmasking me,” adds Proust, “that I didn't like at all” (Selected letters, 206).

 My translation. The author goes on to quote Peguy for whom Proust represents “the transplant of Jewish anxiety onto the strongest trunk of French force.” These words recall many others, such as those of Albert Thibaudet for whom Proust, as for Montaigne and Bergson, is “a drop of Jewish blood in our literary history,” where they install the “Franco-Semitic doublet.”

 My translation. “Une adoration un peu exclusive des symboles … chez lui tout était amour et l'iconographie, telle qu'il l'entendait, se serait mieux appellée iconolâtrie.” (Proust, Pastiches et Mélanges 117–119)

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André Benhaïm

André Benhaïm is an assistant Professor of French at Princeton University. He specializes in 20th-century French Literature, with a strong interest in Francophone Literature, especially from North Africa and the Mediterranean. His main research areas include questions of identity, memory, and aesthetics, with a particular focus on judeity. He has published articles on Marcel Proust (many of them comparative), Albert Cohen, and Emile Zola. Benhaïm was the co-editor of a special issue of the journal Revue des Sciences Humaines entitled “Petits coins. Lieux de Memoire” (2001), and has recently completed the co-edition of Ecrivains de la Préhistoire (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, Nov. 2004), a book on the presence of prehistory in modern French literature, culture and thought. He has recently written a book on Proust's aesthetical and ethical rapport with the human face to be published by the Presses Univérsitaires du Septentrion.