Having studied the family in Combray, we now turn to another perplexity that the candid reader may feel: Swann's Jewishness and the opposition between the Jewish and Catholic sides of the novel, which takes us back to both sides of the family.
Several signs of Swann's Jewishness are given in this first volume. From his very first appearance, he is introduced with his "busted nose"(RTP, I, 14); his father is a stockbroker; he is familiar with the Count of Paris, the Prince of Wales; he frequents statesmen of the July monarchy. The Orléanism of the assimilated Jewish bourgeoisie is well known, loyal to the regime that made Jews, as the Yiddish proverb goes, "happy as God in France".
During Bloch's introduction, it is said of the grandfather: "even his friend Swann was of Jewish origin"(RTP, I, 90). In the second part of the novel, we find an incongruous conversation about the Swann family's conversion(RTP, I, 329). This is a late addition, dating from 1911-1912, about the improbability of Jews converting to Catholicism. This nineteenth-century commonplace is Abstracted in the words of Abbé de Longuerue: "To baptize a Jew is to lose water. A Jew will remain a Jew until the tenth generation.
In "Le nom de pays: le nom", we learn that Swann "suffers from ethnic eczema and the constipation of the Prophets"(RTP, I, 395). How did readers in 1913 interpret this passage? Did they immediately suspect that this was a novel of assimilation? The first reception gives us no clue. It was only after the writer's death that he was confused with the narrator, from an anti-Semitic angle, as were Urbain Gohier and Céline.
On the question of whether Proust considered himself Jewish, the evidence is contradictory(Corr., II, 341, V, 180-181; JS, 651). On this subject, he wrote to Montesquiou in May 1896: "If I am Catholic like my father and brother, on the other hand, my mother is Jewish"(Corr., II, 66). It is therefore necessary to question both sides, Catholic and Jewish.
