By the 1870s, a handful of Jewish families had emerged as some of Paris’s wealthiest, and amassed splendid art collections. Many members of these families later lost their lives in the Holocaust. Reviewing two recent books about these Jews—one a history, one a work of epistolary fiction—Julian Barnes describes how their material and cultural success could not protect them from anti-Semitism:
If [these] elite Jews were now behaving more Frenchly, it did not in any way reinforce their Frenchness in the eyes of others. While the most overt and toxic expressions of anti-Semitism were Paris-based, anti-Semitism was endemic across the country and in most classes of society. The differing political settlements of the Revolution, Napoleon, and the Third Republic hadn’t solved anything in this regard.
From January to October of [1898]—with legislative elections falling in the middle—a convulsion of anti-Semitism seized France. No major population center was spared (not even those without Jews). There were riots and demonstrations; the journalist Édouard Drumont and Jules Guérin, founder of the Ligue antisémitique, toured the country stirring up hatred. The arms manufacturer Goyot produced, especially for Guérin’s supporters, the “anti-Jewish cane.” an oak staff with a lead or steel head. . . . The Catholic Church disgraced itself [with its sympathies.]
[A]s a Jew, how do you argue for your own authenticity? You say you are French; they say you aren’t. You insist you are a patriot, you fight for your natal country, but your sacrifice is discounted as some weird existential maneuver. . . . You are, you believe, assimilated into French high society: you ride to hounds, you have a yacht and a racing car, you are a member of the Jockey Club, you own racehorses and throw lavish parties, you are un sportsman and a connoisseur, you have affairs with the non-Jewish French, you sometimes leave the faith altogether. This is not enough; it will never be enough (conversely, it will also seem too much). When you hunt in ancient French forests, this is viewed as racial insolence. You are wearing a yellow star before it has been invented (when you are forced to, it will connect you to the color of persecution in medieval and early modern times).
Read more on London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n08/julian-barnes/mon-cher-monsieur