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“Jewish Taste?” in Paris and Berlin
that is described in the now distant world of World War II, will empathize with
these reactions. That confidence in the communicative capacity of things comes
from the shared modernity of Kofman and Stein and their readers. However distant
the Holocaust now is, it and we are products of modernity, living with the
conceptions of self and identity – and the understanding of things – shaped by our
inhabiting polities based on representation and economies governed by capitalism.
The simultaneity of the seeming naturalness of taste and the reality of its
constructedness make it a rich site from which to grasp how people conceived their
place in the world. Through an investigation of the taste Parisian and Berlin Jews
expressed in the things by which they chose to be surrounded in the intimacy of
their homes, I hope to shed further light on what it meant to be a Jew in the third
and fourth decades of the twentieth century. This question of Jewish identity, of
how fully Jews were integrated into their national cultures, of the existence or not
of a sense of Jewishness that transcended national boundaries, of assimilation and
acculturation, has generated a vast literature. There have been three dominant
directions in this investigation. Much of that research has focused on Jews’
engagement in public life – in elected and appointed political office, in social
movements and political parties, the civil service, the army, universities. 11 Other
scholars have looked rather to what is more usually thought of as the domain of
private life – conversion and intermarriage rates, patterns of charitable giving,
where children were schooled, and what names they were given. 12 Still others have
looked to Jews’ role as the producers and patrons of the fine arts, particularly to
their participation in modernist movements. 13 My work melds this research agenda
with that of those concerned with private life.
Scholars have suggested that European Jews tended to express their Jewishness
in the “private” rather more than the “public” sphere. Historian Marion Kaplan
has argued, for example, that in the Imperial period (from 1871 to 1918), women
in Jewish households in Germany created a distinctively Jewish mode of being
German in everyday life. 14 The women Kaplan studied worked at inculcating
bourgeois German norms in their children, but at the same were a force against
complete assimilation. The work of Paula Hyman on France tells a similar story.
But even Kaplan and Hyman, because of the scope of their projects, could not
detail the small choices of everyday life. It is clear that bourgeois Jews in Paris
and Berlin adhered to bourgeois norms of dress, decor, entertainment, cleanliness,
and manners. But given that there was great variation in this period in those norms
– particularly in styles of interior decoration and art, ranging from the most
traditionally historicist to the most avant-garde – to know that bourgeois Jews lived
in a bourgeois manner, is to grasp only part of the story. An analysis of taste, with
a particular focus on domestic taste including its juxtaposition with an expression
of taste necessarily very public – that of architecture – is therefore particularly
productive in grasping who Jews understood themselves to be.
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