The Jew as Model: Anti-Semitism, Aesthetics, and Epistemology in the Goncourt Brothers’ Manette Salomon

It is often expeditious to assume that the anti-Semitic depictions so commonplace in nineteenth-century French literature simply echoed prevailing French notions about Jews. This paper seeks to complicate that assumption, drawing on the work of Edmond and Jules de Goncourt to ask whether a certain segment of French literature, for reasons immanent to its evolving poetics and fixations, might have proven especially conducive to anti-Semitic discourse. The literary specificity of this discourse, the paper concludes, is important to understanding not only the development of French anti-Semitism, but also the trajectory of the literary naturalism the Goncourt brothers helped invent.