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Leora Auslander
It is not, however, only the fact that people made choices that makes this terrain
revealing, but the status of those choices. Choices of occupation, of conversion,
even of marriage partner are directly subject to realities, or perceptions, of
discrimination. People may hit the barriers of exclusion, or in their attempt to
navigate around them (for themselves or their children) make different decisions
than they might otherwise. Particular aesthetic choices about the appearance of
one’s own home often do not address perceptions of discrimination as consciously
as do other choices.
This chapter, thus, seeks to tackle the question of Jewish identity through an
analysis of the choices Jews made about their everyday habitat. Did Jews living
in Berlin and Paris acquire furnishings and other everyday goods marked by a
specific aesthetic? Did they tend to make the same choices among the various
forms of domestic and foreign, historicist and modernist, new and antique, furniture,
china, and silverware available to them? Did they tend to worship in
synagogues and dwell in houses or apartments more in one style than another?
And, when they had the means and desire to hang original artwork on their walls,
which schools of painting did they favor? Finally, did French and Germans share
a taste in these goods that furnished their everyday? Researching the everyday life
practices of Jews living in two different countries should enable me to shed light
on what may be attributed to particular national contexts and what was common
to Jewish taste and/or processes of acculturation in this period.
The juxtaposition of the aesthetic practices of German and French Jews is
particularly productive for an inquiry into the question of Jewish identity as a result
of the complex configuration of likeness, difference, and interaction between the
two communities. A series of parallels between French and German Jews seem, at
least at first, to make it likely that similar dynamics of identification would exist
in both groups. German and French Jews shared long histories from the medieval
through the early modern period of oscillation between persecution and toleration,
but were consistently excluded from full participation in social and political life.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, by contrast, Jews on both side
of the Rhine experienced increasing prosperity, accompanied by massive rural–
urban migration, and the establishment of a substantial bourgeoisie. Both groups
faced the common challenge of absorbing a considerable migration of poor Jews
from Eastern Europe starting in the 1880s. In both France and Germany, Jews
of longer standing were anxious about the impact that foreign, poor, and more
often visibly religious Jews would have on how they themselves were perceived.
Finally, both groups although tiny minorities nationally were relatively important
presences in their nations’ capital cities (although more so in Berlin than in Paris).
I have reinforced the parallels between the two groups by choosing to focus on
Berlin and Paris, rather than attempting a national-level study. Both Parisian and
Berlin Jews shared the experience of living in, and shaping, thriving, growing
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