The Jewish Decadence: Jews and the Aesthetics of Modernity
Jonathan Freedman
Abstract
As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals of the fin-de-siècle made their way into and through metropolitan places of cultural production and exchange, and Paris in particular, they engaged with a culture obsessed with decadence in its widest manifestations, literary, philosophical, medical, and political. The results helped define Jewish cultural life of the era, and well beyond. From Caesare Lombroso or Max Nordau through Sigmund Freud; from Marcel Proust to Isaac Bashevis Singer, from Italo Svevo through Saul Bellow; from S. An-Sky through A. B. Yehoshua, from Claude Cahun through Patri ... More
As Jewish writers, artists, and intellectuals of the fin-de-siècle made their way into and through metropolitan places of cultural production and exchange, and Paris in particular, they engaged with a culture obsessed with decadence in its widest manifestations, literary, philosophical, medical, and political. The results helped define Jewish cultural life of the era, and well beyond. From Caesare Lombroso or Max Nordau through Sigmund Freud; from Marcel 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, concerns, and obsessions of decadence were powerfully expressed, contested, and reworked by Jews, transformed but essential to their cultural production. Entrepreneurs and idealists directly and indirectly nurtured or guided this aestheticist avant-garde into an embodiment of the modern – individuals like Murray Marks and Oscar Wilde; groups of Jewish intellectuals, such as those associated with La revue blanche, and Jewish patrons and art dealers who sustained the multiform and various movements that defined Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. This book is an exploration of how Jews drew the topoi of aestheticism and decadence into their imaginative constructions and created something genuinely new and definitive of modernity.
Keywords:
aestheticism,
modernity,
decadence,
Paris,
Jewishness,
art,
literature,
fin-de-siècle
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2021 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780226580920 |
| Published to Chicago Scholarship Online: January 2022 |
DOI:10.7208/chicago/9780226581118.001.0001 |
